A recent article in Vanity Fair about the National Conservatism Conference profiles figures on the "New Right," including Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, and a deeply unpleasant individual called Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin/Moldbug is an advocate of " neoreactionary " politics and explicitly believes in ending democracy and instituting a dictatorship in the United States. J.D. Vance, who may well be a U.S. senator soon, admits in the Vanity Fair profile that he is an ad...
May 31, 2022•50 min•Ep. 145
Santa Claus is the mayor pro-tem of North Pole, Alaska. Yes, he's real, and he's a democratic socialist running for Congress in the special election against Sarah Palin. Current Affairs is honored to be joined by a man falsely thought to be a mere myth. In fact, when parents tell their children there is no Santa, they just don't want kids to know that the real Santa is a leftist who believes love is more important than presents. Note from Nathan: Apologies for the absence of new podcast episodes...
May 31, 2022•37 min•Ep. 144
Tom Wetzel's forthcoming book Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century (AK Press) is both a primer on the basic left critiques of capitalism and a handbook for creating a new economic system. Wetzel explains in clear, accessible language why exploitation, waste, and environmental destruction are built into the capitalist model and then explores possible alternative economic structures and shows how we might get there. He probes important questions like "What is t...
May 31, 2022•45 min•Ep. 143
Jennifer Taub is a law professor whose book Big Dirty Money: Making White Collar Criminals Pay is about the double standard in American law that harshly punishes street crime while giving a free pass to corporate criminals. Taub tallies up the immense costs of corporate wrongdoing from fraud to wage theft and exposes how CEOs commit acts of destructive criminal wrongdoing with complete impunity. But Taub isn't just bemoaning the corruption of the justice system—she also shows how we can change i...
May 31, 2022•40 min•Ep. 142
Tariq Ali is the author of two dozen books and his career as a public intellectual and activist stretches back to the 1960s. His new book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes is an effort to demolish the "Churchill myth" that has been built up since the Thatcher years. Ali demonstrates that Churchill was: - Not actually popular among the British public, who threw him out of office immediately at the end of World War II, and voted in the socialist Labour government instead - A virulent white ...
May 10, 2022•55 min•Ep. 141
Chris Mullin served from 1987 to 2010 as a Labour MP in the British parliament. During that time, he kept a daily diary of his observations, which has since been published in three acclaimed volumes. The diaries trace the rise and fall of Tony Blair's "New Labour." Mullin himself was associated with the party's left (he edited Tony Benn's book Arguments for Socialism and was the only member of Blair's government to vote against the Iraq war) but found himself trying to tread carefully to use the...
May 10, 2022•53 min•Ep. 140
Mark Vonnegut MD has been a pediatrician for over 30 years. He is the author of the books The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, and most recently The Heart of Caring: A Life in Pediatrics . His new book is a collection of observations from his life treating children in the American healthcare system. In it, he shows how the for-profit private insurance industry has destroyed doctors' ability to provide effective care for patients, and he e...
May 10, 2022•45 min•Ep. 139
Justine Medina is a member of the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union and a packer at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. The ALU recently won a historic victory , defeating Amazon's multi-million dollar union-busting campaign to make JFK8 the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. It was a victory many thought impossible. But Amazon underestimated the ALU and through persistent organizing work, the union pulled off an astonishing victory that is expected to be a game-chan...
May 10, 2022•44 min•Ep. 138
Angie Schmitt is a transportation writer and planner whose book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America examines the shocking and disturbing growth in pedestrian deaths on the streets of the United States. After declining for 20 years, pedestrian deaths began climbing drastically again around 2010: These gruesome tragedies are preventable—in Europe, deaths are declining rather than increasing—and in Angie's book, she discusses all of the factors contrib...
May 10, 2022•41 min•Ep. 137
Noam Chomsky is " arguably the most important intellectual alive ," the founder of modern linguistics, one of the most cited scholars in history, and the author of over 100 books. He is currently laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He recently co-authored the book Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance and is soon to release The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragil...
Apr 22, 2022•55 min•Ep. 136
Finance expert Grace Blakeley is a staff writer for Tribune magazine. She has served as economics commentator for the New Statesman and as a fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research's Centre for Economic Justice. She is the author of two books, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization and The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism , and editor of the book Futures of Socialism . Blakeley's writings argue that the finance sector has taken on an outsized role in ...
Apr 21, 2022•49 min•Ep. 135
Prof. Aviva Chomsky teaches history and Latin American studies at Salem State University and has authored and edited numerous books including Central America’s Forgotten History, A History of the Cuban Revolution, and Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal . Her latest book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice tries to answer, in a clear and accessible way, the questions about what we ought to do to deal with the climate catastrophe. Prof. Chomsky takes the pos...
Apr 21, 2022•38 min•Ep. 134
Jonathan Aldred is an economist at Cambridge University, but he is a fierce critic of the mainstream of his discipline. In his books The Skeptical Economist and License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us , Prof. Aldred argues that while economics poses as a value-free form of scientific inquiry, it contains many buried assumptions that have deeply pernicious implications. Aldred's books offer excellent, clearly-written explanations of what economics is and how many of its most popular concept...
Apr 12, 2022•41 min•Ep. 133
Laurie Penny is a journalist and activist who has authored seven books including Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution , Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults , and most recently Sexual Revolution : Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback . Penny has been a finalist for both the Orwell Prize and the National Magazine Award. In today's conversation, we discuss the "sexual revolution" of Penny's new book, which they call "an exercise in pointing out the obvious," namely that relati...
Apr 12, 2022•41 min•Ep. 132
Eric Blanc's book Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strikes and Working-Class Politics is about the remarkable 2018-2019 educators' strikes that began in red states. It shows how successful labor struggles can be waged even in the seemingly unlikeliest of places and is a useful case study of one of the most important fights of our time. In the time since these strikes, however, educators have struggled. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that fights over school funding were sidelined, as teachers had to ...
Apr 12, 2022•43 min•Ep. 131
Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing religious faith in the world—by one estimate it obtains around 35,000 new converts per day globally. It now has over 600,000,000 adherents. Elle Hardy is a journalist who has contributed previously to Current Affairs and has traveled the world to speak with Pentecostals from South Korea to London to Nigeria to South Africa. Her book Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over The World (Oxford University Press) documents the rise of this faith...
Apr 01, 2022•57 min•Ep. 130
Across the United States, over the last few years, democratic socialists have been running for office in numbers not seen for a century. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns may not have been victorious, but socialists have run for city councils, state legislatures, and even judgeships and won. In this special 90-minute audio documentary, Current Affairs talks to members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who have reached elected office about how they campaigned, why they won, an...
Apr 01, 2022•1 hr 32 min•Ep. 129
Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, as well as a columnist for the Washington Post. She is also the president of the American Committee For U.S.-Russia Accord and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Katrina has been studying, working in, and writing about Russia for decades. In columns leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Katrina was warning that failures of diplomacy were leading toward disaster. In this conversation, we discuss what...
Mar 26, 2022•42 min•Ep. 128
Carolyn Chen's book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion In Silicon Valley is about how something disturbing is happening in Silicon Valley: people are becoming so totally devoted to their work that their relationship to their companies is a kind of religious devotion. Prof. Chen interviewed scores of employees at tech companies and found that traditional ties of family, church, and community are disappearing in favor of ties to the company. Corporations are providing a site where people f...
Mar 26, 2022•37 min•Ep. 127
Ryan Cooper is the managing editor of The American Prospect and co-host of the Left Anchor podcast. He is the author of the new book How Are You Going to Pay For That: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics (St. Martin's Press), which exposes the faulty economic assumptions that are used to convince Americans that they can't afford generous social democratic programs. In the book—and in this episode—Ryan shows how to argue with libertarians and neoliberals who believe that the private...
Mar 26, 2022•49 min•Ep. 126
Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent for The Independent for over 30 years and has become known for his combination of a deep knowledge of the region and a healthy skepticism toward the propaganda of governments. His books The Age of Jihad (Verso) and War In The Age of Trump (OR Books) collect his extraordinary on-the-ground dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the decades since 9/11 and provide a rich understanding of the devastating wars of the last years, fi...
Mar 16, 2022•53 min•Ep. 125
Bill Gates has long cultivated a reputation as the Good Billionaire, giving away vast sums of money toward global health and education initiatives through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For many years, the Gates Foundation was rarely criticized at all in the mainstream press, its work considered unambiguously good. The shine has come off Gates a bit recently, thanks to the negative publicity surrounding both his divorce and his staunch defense of corporate intellectual property rights ...
Mar 16, 2022•55 min•Ep. 124
Yanis Varoufakis is the former Finance Minister of Greece, professor of economics at the University of Athens, co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement , and member of the Greek Parliament. The Guardian describes him as "a motorcycling, leather jacketed former academic and self-styled rebel who took pleasure in winding up the besuited political class." He calls himself an " erratic Marxist ," and has written economics textbooks , a memoir , and popular explainers of economic ideas . But no...
Mar 11, 2022•44 min•Ep. 123
Victor Pickard is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. His book Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society is about the problem of misinformation: people not knowing what's going on in the world, or thinking they know what's going on but actually believing in propaganda or bullshit (see, e.g., Joe Rogan ). There has been a lot of chatter about the problem of "fake news" and how it can be stopped, with many...
Mar 03, 2022•47 min•Ep. 122
Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City , named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicles Prof. Brooks' experiences as a reserve police officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As an academic raised in a socialist household (her mother is a former Current Affairs podcast guest ), Prof. Brooks wanted to get a better understanding of how police saw themselves and...
Mar 03, 2022•47 min•Ep. 121
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of many bestselling nonfiction books. He began his career as a war correspondent, and was a reporter for the New York Times for fifteen years, reporting from over 50 countries. He has written books on religion, culture, poverty, and war. For the last ten years, Hedges has been teaching a class in a New Jersey state prison. His latest book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in An American Prison , is about his experiences as an...
Feb 24, 2022•47 min•Ep. 120
Megan Tobias Neely is a sociologist whose book Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street takes a deep look inside the world of hedge funds, those small boutique investment banks that play with a sizable chunk of the world's wealth. Neely's book draws on her observations from time working in a hedge fund as well as from dozens of interviews with professionals in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss: - How hedge fund managers justify their value to society and why there are re...
Feb 24, 2022•48 min•Ep. 119
Phil Torres is a scholar of "global catastrophic risk," meaning that he studies the various ways in which terrible things could happen to humanity: nuclear war, global warming, asteroids, killer robots, pandemics, etc. His books include The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse and Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks . Both are available free on his website. His upcoming book is Human Extinction: A History of Thinking About the E...
Feb 16, 2022•55 min•Ep. 118
George Monbiot has been working on issues of climate and environmental justice for three decades. A columnist for The Guardian , George's books include Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis and How Did We Get into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature. His latest essay collection This Can't Be Happening "calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the destruction of the living planet, and wake up to the greatest predicament we ha...
Feb 16, 2022•49 min•Ep. 117
We live in an age where economic success can depend a lot more on hype and branding than offering actual useful things that help people. Occasionally, we see extreme examples of fakers and frauds, like Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos and Billy McFarland of the Fyre Festival. But those are the few that have seen their lies exposed and their careers come crashing down. There are others, like Tesla's Elon Musk , WeWork's Adam Neumann , and America's Donald Trump , who have reaped riches beyond compreh...
Feb 10, 2022•46 min•Ep. 116
