Benjamin Howard is a Current Affairs reader who was once a huge fan of Canadian psychologist, pundit, and self-help guru Jordan Peterson . But Howard eventually became a harsh critic of Peterson's work, to the point where he is putting together a website called JordanPetersonIsWrong.com . Today he joins us to explain how and why he changed his mind. We talk about the sources of Peterson's appeal and how Benjamin found that by getting to a different place in his life and learning critical thinkin...
Jan 22, 2024•47 min•Ep. 248
Michael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother Jones and the author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All . Michael's book goes beyond quantitative statistics about inequality to take a close-up look at the actual lives of the American oligarchs. Today he joins to discuss life inside "the bubble" that the super-wealthy inhabit—why they ceaselessly pursue endless accumulation, how they rationalize their privileges, and how they rig the system to make sure the...
Jan 19, 2024•51 min•Ep. 247
Danny Katch is the author of the most accessible and entertaining existing introduction to socialist ideas, Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide To Human Liberation , available from Haymarket Books (in a new edition that promises 50% more socialism). Danny's book attempts something quite difficult: it tries to make reading about socialism fun. It's full of jokes and is non-dogmatic. It's a real blast and you should buy it! Today, Danny joins to discuss how he explains socialism in a way that ord...
Jan 17, 2024•50 min•Ep. 246
Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada is the author of the new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism , a bombshell exposé of how the burgeoning socialist movement in the British Labour Party was destroyed by false accusations of anti-Semitism, amplified in the British press. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of why, after such a promising take-off , Jeremy Corbyn's party leadership came to a calamitous end. Asa joins us today to explain the history of what happened and the ...
Jan 15, 2024•46 min•Ep. 245
Terri Friedline is an associate professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She's also a contributor to Current Affairs , where she published one of our most unusual pieces ever: a piece of speculative utopian fiction about the end of Wells Fargo . Terri is also the author of the excellent book Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System . Today, Terri joins to explain why Wells Fargo is so pernicious that she wrote a story imagining its obliteration....
Jan 12, 2024•39 min•Ep. 244
Emily Hund is the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media . Today she joins to discuss how "influencing" turned from something bloggers did, organically, to a giant industry where powerful commercial interests try to manufacture authenticity. Influencers are a paradox, because they have to work very hard in order to appear real, and if they ever stop seeming real they stop being paid. Hund takes us behind the curtain to try to sort out what's real and what's...
Jan 10, 2024•32 min•Ep. 243
Today Norman Solomon returns to the program to discuss his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine . Norman is one of the country's leading progressive media critics. In this book, he talks about how the media helps construct a mental wall between the people of the United States and the victims of U.S. foreign policy. He talks about how the reality of violence is kept from view and how heroic whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale are pu...
Jan 08, 2024•43 min•Ep. 242
Mark Paul is an economist who argues that there can be no meaningful freedom without economic freedom—by which he does not mean the libertarian idea of the freedom to exploit others. Mark's book The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights explains how having a functional and free country will require establishing new rights: the right to employment, the right to housing, the right to healthcare, the right to a clean environment, etc. Today he joins us to explain how...
Jan 05, 2024•39 min•Ep. 241
Samuel Miller McDonald is a regular contributor to Current Affairs, where he has written about such disparate subjects as collectivism , the food system , Game of Thrones , cultural atrophy , ecofascism , His Dark Materials , the term "development," the history of oil , the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson , the future of cities , and the forests of Madagascar . In our latest issue, Sam takes on one of his most challenging subjects yet: menswear. Sam is unapologetic about enjoying clothes, and sh...
Jan 03, 2024•41 min•Ep. 240
Today on the podcast, we dive into the question of what kinds of musical borrowing constitute "influence" versus "plagiarism." In the news at the moment is a lawsuit against pop singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who is accused of lifting parts of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" for his song "Thinking Out Loud." We're going to listen to both songs, and you can decide what you think. But we're also going to go on a tour through musical history and see how supposed "original" artists are often blatant ...
Dec 20, 2023•41 min•Ep. 239
Today we hear a little-told story, the story of how idealistic socialists around the world, starting around 1890, took over city governments. Prof. Sheldon Stromquist is the author of the book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso), which looks at how leftists in places from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a small mining town in the Australian outback tried to implement socialist ideals in their cities and towns. In Sweden, in Britain, in Austria's "Red Vie...
Dec 18, 2023•35 min•Ep. 238
Julie Suk is a professor of law at Fordham University. Her new book After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It is about why the law has not succeeded at eliminating patriarchy despite advances in formal gender equality. Suk acknowledges that legal feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped bring about equal protection under law, but shows that, just as "colorblind" racial policies leave existing hierarchies untouched, "equal treatment" fails to alter gender imbalances of powe...
Dec 15, 2023•43 min•Ep. 237
Sophie Lewis is a radical critic of the family. In Lewis's books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family and Abolish The Family , she argues that families are expected to take on functions that should be the responsibility of society as a whole, and that the results are disastrous. Families "privatize care." People have to depend on their families to fund their schooling or to take care of them in old age, which means that those who don't having loving and supportive families will simply en...
Dec 13, 2023•39 min•Ep. 236
Lily Sánchez is the managing editor of Current Affairs , and also a physician. In a new article for the magazine, Lily draws on her experiences practicing medicine to discuss different conceptions of what health justice requires. She reviews an acclaimed book called The People's Hospital by Ricardo Nuila, which covers a public hospital that Lily also worked at. Nuila sees this hospital as a model for fairness in healthcare. Sánchez, by contrast, sees it as a place that can't help but be unfair ,...
Dec 11, 2023•44 min•Ep. 235
Today we are joined by political philosopher Matt McManus of the University of Michigan. Matt has contributed to Current Affairs and collaborated with Nathan on articles about Douglas Murray and the right-wing disdain for college . At the time of this recording, Matt was reading Ron DeSantis' autobiography, which he has now written about for Jacobin . Matt has also written for CA about conservative faux-"populism" , the right's long string of anti-"intellectual" intellectuals , and the American ...
Dec 08, 2023•48 min•Ep. 234
Jono Shaffer is a legendary labor organizer who was instrumental in the Justice for Janitors campaign. J4J successfully unionized Los Angeles janitorial workers under unbelievably difficult conditions—the janitors were undocumented and worked for contractors rather than buildings themselves, so they were easily fired. J4J built a movement that successfully pressured building owners to respect the rights of cleaning staff. Today Jono joins to explain how they did it and what the lessons are for t...
Dec 06, 2023•51 min•Ep. 233
Ben Clarkson is an illustrator and animator who has produced work for some of the best magazines in the country, including our own Current Affairs . Matt Bors is a leading political cartoonist and founder of The Nib . They have now teamed up to produce one of the wildest satirical comic books of all time, Justice Warriors . Set in a horrifying dystopia called Bubble City, where the rich live in a bubble dome and mutants inhabit a wasteland outside, the comic chronicles the times and crimes of th...
Dec 04, 2023•43 min•Ep. 232
Naomi Oreskes is a historian of science at Harvard University. Erik M. Conway works as the historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Together they have just published The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market . We've talked a lot on this program about that failures of neoclassical economics and the myth of the pristine free market whose great Invisible Hand delivers justice to all. But Oreskes and Conway are historians of science rather than...
Dec 01, 2023•41 min•Ep. 231
Mehdi Hasan, who hosts The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC, is known as one of the most formidable interviewers in journalism. He has tangled with Blackwater's Erik Prince , John Bolton , Richard Dawkins , Paul Bremer , and many others. A video of a powerful speech he gave defending Islam at Oxford University has received 10 million views . He has now written a book on his methods, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking , showing how to effectively confront and expose...
Nov 29, 2023•40 min•Ep. 230
Johanna Fernández is a historian of social movements who is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History , a deeply researched history of one of the most vibrant and fascinating social movements of the 20th century. From their origins as a Chicago street gang in the early 60s, the Young Lords became an effective grassroots radical movement, the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panthers. They helped produce an early version of the "patient's bill of rights" in medicine, organized lead te...
Nov 27, 2023•53 min•Ep. 229
Adam Glenn is a Current Affairs reader who has produced a free online book called Brain Worms: How Right-Wing Propaganda Destroys Reason, Conscience, and Democracy . Today he joins to discuss how (and why) to engage with conservative arguments (which Nathan does a lot as well ). The text of Adam's book usefully explains in plain language the flaws in right-wing philosophy, but the comprehensive bibliography alone is well worth browsing through . Adam explains how familiarizing yourself with the ...
Nov 24, 2023•41 min•Ep. 227
Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of the new book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream . Her book looks at the cruelty of the myths of being "self-made" or "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." In the first part of her book, Quart examines the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (one of Quart's chapters is called "Little House of Propaganda") to show how radically our...
Nov 22, 2023•37 min•Ep. 226
R.S. Benedict is a speculative fiction writer whose popular 2021 essay " Everyone Is Beautiful But Nobody is Horny ," published in Blood Knife , argued that the disappearance of sex from movies is linked to wider cultural trends toward the celebration of militarism and violence, the shunning of hedonistic pleasure, a utilitarian disdain for frivolous things, and increasing social isolation. Today, Benedict joins to discuss this essay as well as her 2022 piece on "safe fiction." We also tie in th...
Nov 20, 2023•44 min•Ep. 225
Khaled Beydoun is a professor of law at Wayne State and the author of two books, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear and The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. American Islamophobia is a definitive analysis of the roots and spread of anti-Muslim animus in the United States, but The New Crusades expands the analysis to look at how the same bigotry manifests around the world, from France to India to China to New Zealand. The new book also shows ho...
Nov 17, 2023•47 min•Ep. 224
Émile P. Torres is an intellectual historian who has recently become a prominent public critic of the ideologies of "effective altruism" and "longtermism," each of which is highly influential in Silicon Valley and which Émile argues contain worrying dystopian tendencies. In this conversation, Émile joins to explain what these ideas are, why the people who subscribe to them think they can change the world in very positive ways, and why Émile has come to be so strongly critical of them. Émile disc...
Nov 15, 2023•56 min•Ep. 223
Jennifer Jacquet is not actually an evil corporate consultant. She's a professor in NYU's Department of Environmental Studies and deputy director of the school's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. But you might think otherwise if you flipped open her book The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World , a tongue-in-cheek handbook supposedly directed toward CEOs who want to fully follow Milton Friedman's dictum that " The Social Responsibility...
Nov 13, 2023•42 min•Ep. 222
Van Jackson is a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals, a harsh critic of the infamous " Blob ." His Un-Diplomatic newsletter is essential reading (and its accompanying podcast essential listening), and his analyses of U.S. policy in the Pacific in Foreign Affairs are very useful for those who want to understand what is going on in the region. These include: Great-Power Competition Is Bad for Democracy America is Turning Asia into a Powder Keg The Problem With Primacy: America's Dangerous...
Nov 10, 2023•51 min•Ep. 221
Cordelia Fine is a psychologist and philosopher of science whose work brilliantly demolishes myths about the "nature" of differences between men and women. Prof. Fine has written three books, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences , and Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds . Today she joins for a conversation about various popular myths about how men and women are "wired" and why a lot of suppose...
Nov 08, 2023•51 min•Ep. 220
Today on the podcast: Nathan takes a turn as the guest, to discuss his new book Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments . Get your copy now! Responding to the Right goes through arguments about abortion, minimum wages, trans rights, immigration, Big Government and much more and shows both why right-wing talking points are wrong and how to effectively defeat them. In Part I of the book, Nathan discusses how conservative arguments work and why they can sound persuasive ...
Nov 06, 2023•1 hr•Ep. 219
“What I didn’t realize at the time was that what I was living through was the death paroxysms of the Jim Crow order.” — Adolph Reed Prof. Adolph Reed Jr. has been called (by Cornel West) “the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.” His new book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is a departure from Reed’s previous work in political science, as it is a personal reflection on his upbringing as part of the last generation to experience the Jim Crow south firsthand. R...
Nov 03, 2023•48 min•Ep. 218
