The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Publicly listed emails

grayarea@vox.com

Looking for the right person? Join Podseeker to find direct host and producer contacts and manage your podcast outreach.

Kidneys for sale

August 24, 2026

Is it ever okay to put a price on a kidney? Why is it illegal to sell an organ, but perfectly legal to sell blood plasma? This episode explores the world of "repugnant transactions" — the markets we find morally offensive — and asks why we ban certain markets as "gross" or "unethical" while ignoring others that might cause more harm. In this episode of The Gray Area, host Bryan Walsh sits down with Nobel laureate Alvin Roth, who wrote the recent book Moral Economics, to discuss how markets a...

How memory changes you

August 21, 2026

We like to think of memory as a record of the past. But that’s not really what it is. Memory doesn’t keep the past — it can also remake it. It stitches fragments into stories, and those stories — true or not — are what we end up calling our life, and sometimes, our collective history. Today’s episode is a rerun of an interview that originally published last year with Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called Why We Remember. The two discuss the strange alchemy of remembe...

Freud was right about one thing

August 17, 2026

Sigmund Freud is probably the most famous psychoanalyst. Yet many of his theories have been critiqued or discredited. So is there anything we can still learn from the father of psychoanalysis? In today’s episode Sean speaks with professor Mark Solms, author of The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. Mark argues that while Freud may have been wrong about many things, he was right about one important thing: the human mind cannot be fully understood on purely biological ter...