Most discourses about Israel or Palestine are morality plays of good guys vs bad guys. Egyptian-born Hussein Aboubakr Mansour takes a different approach, seeing the conflict as a self-reproducing system of political and economic extraction where Arab regimes, opposition movements, rival states, Western academics, NGOs, and Gulf monarchies like Qatar all convert Palestinian victimhood into their own forms of power, money, and meaning. Listen as Mansour speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about his childhood in an Egypt organized around the liberation of Palestine and explores why any exit from the system must run not through policy, but rather through the human need for meaning itself.

What is wilderness when seven billion people share the planet and nowhere remains truly untouched? Author and journalist Cal Flyn discusses her book The Savage Landscape with EconTalk host Russ Roberts, weaving together journeys to some of Earth's most remote places, including a live volcanic eruption in Iceland she hiked toward despite the danger. Flyn rejects the myth of pristine, unpeopled wilderness, revealing that the wildest-looking landscapes have been shaped by humans for centuries. She explores spiritual quests at Mount Sinai, the return of predators to Europe, the uncomfortable economics of trophy hunting, and why we secretly crave discomfort in an age of endless comfort.

What happens when a poet who survived prison sits down with the world's oldest war story--and reads it in three sleepless, wandering days? In this second episode of the EconTalk Book Club on the Iliad, Dwayne Betts and EconTalk host Russ Roberts trade their impressions of the Iliad, discovering it's less about war than about fathers, friendship, and the stubborn dignity people find inside fates they can't escape. Betts connects Achilles's rage and grief to his own experience of incarceration and depression, while Roberts marvels at Homer's cinematic style and the strange tenderness between enemies. Together they unpack the shield of Achilles, the ransom of Hector's body, and how an ancient poem about war still cracks readers open today. It's a conversation about reading as communion--and how a 2,800-year-old story became, unexpectedly, a way of connecting to each other.

A nylon stocking filled with sawdust that grows grass for hair launched one of the most successful toy companies in the world. Ronnen Harary, co-founder of Spin Master and co-creator of Paw Patrol, talks about his book No Experience Necessary with EconTalk's Russ Roberts. Harary traces his journey from selling grass-growing novelty heads at 23, through Devil Sticks and Air Hogs, to building Bakugan and Paw Patrol into global franchises touching the lives of millions of children. Along the way, he reflects on the artistry of commercial creation and what it means to build something that outlives its founders. The conversation closes on the eternal magic of toys and our childhoods.

Ego, pride, wrath, fear, gods, superheroes, mortals, and lots of killing. Welcome to Homer's Iliad, which reads at times like a script for a Tarantino film or the latest installment of the Avengers franchise. In the first episode of the EconTalk Book Club on the Iliad, Ido Hevroni of Shalem College speaks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the surprising relevance of a 2800-year-old epic poem. Hevroni also provides useful background for first-time readers and what it's like to read the Iliad with combat veterans.

What if the surgery that fixed your knee did no better than fake surgery? EconTalk host Russ Roberts speaks with Dr. John Mandrola about a striking clinical trial in which patients who received sham knee surgery (a real incision, but no actual repair) did as well or better than those who had the actual procedure--one performed 700,000 times annually in the U.S. The conversation ranges from the power of placebo and nocebo effects (how expectation of harm can cause real suffering) to the broader philosophy of "medical conservatism"--the idea that humility, watchful waiting, and honest counsel often serve patients better than the knife. Mandrola argues that financial incentives, professional identity, and language itself ("bone-on-bone," "the widowmaker") conspire to push patients toward interventions that can do more harm than good.

Can a phone be a cow? It could in 1990s Bangladesh. This was the insight of a small number of mobile phone market pioneers who helped catalyze the spread of the greatest technological revolution in human history. Listen as George Mason University economist Philip Auerswald speaks to EconTalk's Russ Roberts about how the extension of connectivity to traditionally excluded populations led to wide-scale transformations in productivity. They discuss the role of little-known entrepreneurs such as Iqbal Quadir and innovators like Claude Shannon in bringing the mobile phone to the entire world. Other topics include William Nordhaus's paper on the cost of illumination as a powerful metric of human progress, Schumpeter's notion of innovation as new combinations, and what Auerswald calls the most important question the field of economics can ask: How much of human progress is inevitable, and how much depends on the determination of remarkable individuals?

Skin cancer comes from the sun. But so do many good things, according to author Rowan Jacobsen. Jacobsen talks with EconTalk's Russ Roberts about the health benefits of sunshine and makes the case for prudent sun exposure. Topics discussed include the "heliotherapy" movement that peaked in the early 1900s in response to rickets and tuberculosis, why diagnosing skin cancer is on the rise, and why yesterday's sunscreens may have done more harm than good.