In March, the journalist Graeme Wood joined us to put the Islamic State under the microscope. What is it? Where did it come from, and what does it want? In an article for The Atlantic magazine, Wood argued that ISIS seeks to revert civilization to a “seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately bring about the apocalypse,” and it’s committed to killing vast numbers of people in the process. We talked about ISIS’s intellectual genealogy and why it’s imperative the West better understand it. (Rebroadcast)

Graeme Wood’s article “What Isis Really Wants” is the cover story of the March 2015 issue of The Atlantic magazine. Read it here.

Graeme Wood is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.