Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Grace Blakeley is one of the left's leading economic thinkers. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism , Blakeley explains how capitalism really works and gives a crucial primer on the modern economy. She joins today to explain why conceiving of "free markets" and "government planning" as opposites is highly misleading, because our neoliberal "market-based" economy involves many deep ties between the state and corporations. Instead of thinking o...
Jun 10, 2024•36 min•Ep. 308
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, and writes the organization's farm animal welfare research newsletter. In the newsletter, Bollard has argued that animal welfare is a crucial moral issue and tried to explain the dissonance between people's stated compassion for animals and their willingness to tolerate animals' mass suffering in factory farms. Bollard explains the massive amount of work it will take...
Jun 07, 2024•33 min•Ep. 307
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality , a history of the 20th century women's movement that documents the remarkable courage of the women who gave us suffrage, abortion rights, and greater equality across many dimensions of social and economic life. Today she joins to discuss how those gains were made, but also the failures (such as the story of the Equal Rights Amendment...
Jun 05, 2024•31 min•Ep. 306
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Zoë Schiffer is the author of the new book "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter," which tells the full story of how the richest man in the world took over a major piece of the 21st century "public square." Schiffer does not take a nostalgic view of pre-Musk Twitter, showing that the company was in many ways poorly run and Twitter itself highly dysfunctional. But she shows how Musk's capricious, self-aggrandizing approach to runnin...
Jun 03, 2024•40 min•Ep. 305
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! The day Henry Kissinger died, Jacobin magazine released a book, which they had completed years before, called The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger. In the book, edited by René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, a group of foreign policy experts trace Kissinger's career from continent to continent, showing the human consequences of his Machiavellian choices. But The Good Die Young doesn't just treat Kissinger as a unique...
May 31, 2024•39 min•Ep. 304
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Hamilton Nolan is a leading labor journalist whose new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor is both a study of recent labor organizing in our time and a strong case for why unions are vital to the health of the country. Hamilton goes around the country, from South Carolina to Las Vegas to New Orleans, showcasing the achievements of organized labor and revealing what is possible when working people come t...
May 29, 2024•43 min•Ep. 303
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Marxist philosophers do not often write bestsellers, but as the New York Times wrote in a profile of today's guest, Kohei Saito's work has unexpectedly taken Japan by storm: "When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. Economic growth is gospel. So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnatio...
May 27, 2024•39 min•Ep. 302
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Originally aired January 29, 2024 There is an ongoing case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa against Israel, which alleges that Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes a serious breach of the Genocide Convention. The Court recently issued a preliminary ruling allowing the case to go forward and requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept joins u...
May 24, 2024•46 min•Ep. 301
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ingrid Robeyns is a professor at Utrecht University, where she specializes in political philosophy and ethics. She's the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth , a new book which argues for rational limits on how much money a single person can amass. Today on the podcast, Dr. Robeyns joins to explain how the super-rich keep everyone else poor, how large concentrations of wealth damage democracy and the environment, and how ...
May 22, 2024•44 min•Ep. 300
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ryan Grim is the Intercept' s D.C. bureau chief and the author of The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution . Ryan's book chronicles the rise of the "Squad" in Congress, but also chronicles the entire recent history of left politics in the United States including the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the legislative fights under Biden. The book is a fascinating insider account of how power really works. The Squad were all elected as i...
May 20, 2024•44 min•Ep. 299
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ed Broadbent was perhaps the best-known democratic socialist in Canada. He served for 14 years as the head of the country's New Democratic Party, after beginning his career as a political theorist. Broadbent's new book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality (written in collaboration with, among others, Current Affairs contributor Luke Savage) is a tour through the last half century of Canadian politics, and for Ame...
May 17, 2024•35 min•Ep. 298
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Mark Chiusano of Newsday knows George Santos better than anyone else, having covered Santos’ political career from its start to its recent ignominious end. His new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos documents the full rise and fall of our country’s most infamous lying legislator. Today on the podcast, Chiusano joins us to explain how it came to be that, in a country as commit...
May 15, 2024•42 min•Ep. 297
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist who's been reporting on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation since 2019. His work has appeared in The Nation , the Columbia Journalism Review , and the British Medical Journal . He's also the author of a new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire , which compiles many of his findings. Schwab argues that Bill Gates is far from the generous, kind-hearted philanthro...
May 13, 2024•37 min•Ep. 296
Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Peter Kalmus is one of the country's most visible and engaged climate scientists. He is the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution and works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Kalmus has advocated civil disobedience as a necessary means of spurring action to stop the climate catastrophe. Dr. Kalmus wrote a scathing article about the UN’s recent COP 28 climate summit, which was dominated by the fossil fuel indust...
May 10, 2024•37 min•Ep. 295
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Keira Havens is a science writer whose blog series " Box of Rocks " aims to identify and expose racist pseudo-science. She joins us today to explain some of the fallacious reasoning that is used to rationalize social hierarchies, and how proponents of toxic ideologies manage to cast themselves as mainstream researchers. We talk about the intellectual misdeeds of such figures as Charles Murray and Steven Pinker , and Keira shows us how to spo...
May 08, 2024•40 min•Ep. 294
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Vincent Bevins is a journalist who has written for the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times , and elsewhere, and is the author of the acclaimed The Jakarta Method . His latest book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (PublicAffairs) is about the mass protests that took place around the world from 2010 to 2020. The book shows how these protests were sparked, how they often went in directions their originators couldn'...
May 06, 2024•40 min•Ep. 293
Today we have a most unusual episode: a parody of American radio cliches, pieced together by Nathan. Using audio editing software, sound effects libraries, voice cloning technology, and "AI" music tools, he has created an absurdist soundscape satirizing media, politics, and commercialism. Filled with jingles, talk shows, news reports, and presidential speeches, it portrays the darkness lurking beneath cheery American mythology. The "Manatee Facts Podcast" mentioned in the introduction can be hea...
May 03, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 292
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Philanthropy is a problem. Lots of contemporary philanthropy is either useless (Rich people funding new buildings for Harvard) or shouldn't have to happen in the first place (Nonprofits fulfilling crucial social roles that the state doesn't take care of in the age of neoliberalism). The standard left critique of philanthropy is that we should redistribute wealth and income rather than depending on the largesse of the bourgeoisie, who have fa...
May 01, 2024•39 min•Ep. 291
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! And if you like our work, please consider subscribing or donating to beautiful Current Affairs Magazine . Brian Merchant is the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the new book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech . Brian's book takes us back to early 19th century England, and the birth of the "Luddite" movement. The Luddites famously smashed new machines that were expected to take away...
Apr 29, 2024•41 min•Ep. 290
Today we have a documentary episode examining and analyzing the ongoing pro-Palestine uprisings at campuses around the country. We look at the horrifying facts on the ground in Gaza that have caused U.S. students to risk their academic careers in solidarity demonstrations. We discuss how universities have repressed the demonstrations an a manner disturbingly reminiscent of authoritarian states. We expose the myths that the protests are hateful, antisemitic, and pro-terror. And we put the demonst...
Apr 26, 2024•39 min•Ep. 289
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and activist whose latest book is The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart , based on her CBC Massey Lectures . Today she joins to discuss the themes of her lectures, which are build around the ideas of security and insecurity. What makes us actually "secure"? Security is a word that has right-wing connotations (surveillance cameras, security guards, etc.) But we know that there is anot...
Apr 26, 2024•37 min•Ep. 288
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Myisha Cherry is a philosopher at UC-Riverside whose book The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press) argues that reason and emotion are not, as many people assume, opposites, but our emotions are often important expressions of our reason. We get angry when we our implicit framework for how the world ought to operate is violated, and Prof. Cherry argues that it's okay and even important to have...
Apr 24, 2024•42 min•Ep. 287
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Malaika Jabali is Senior News and Politics Editor at Essence magazine. She is also the only previous Current Affairs contributor whose writing for our magazine has won an award! Her exceptional piece " The Color of Economic Anxiety " won the 2019 New York Association for Black Journalists award for magazine feature. She has now published her first book, It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How To Move On . In accessib...
Apr 22, 2024•38 min•Ep. 286
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today we take a dive into the world of "corporate bullshit" with Nick Hanauer, who has become an expert on spotting and debunking it. Nick is a businessman who became known for warning of the devastating social effects of plutocracy, and who now hosts the " Pitchfork Economics " podcast which presents sharp conversations with leading progressive economic experts. Nick's latest project is the book Corporate Bullsh*t, written with Joan Walsh a...
Apr 19, 2024•44 min•Ep. 285
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/currentaffairs ! Dr. Luke Messac is an emergency physician and historian whose new book is Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine (Oxford University Press). Messac also wrote the article " Why Medical Debt Forgiveness Drives Are Not Enough " for Current Affairs. Messac's book looks at the entire history of medical debt, how hospitals went from being (somewhat) charitable institutions to farming debt collection out to huge companies tha...
Apr 17, 2024•37 min•Ep. 284
Jonathan Taplin has had a fascinating career, from being a tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band to a film producer for Martin Scorsese to running the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California's communications school. In recent years, he has turned his attention to writing critically about the tech elite. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy focused on leading monopolistic corporations. His new book, The En...
Apr 15, 2024•38 min•Ep. 283
Zeke Faux of Bloomberg News is the author of a fascinating and hilarious new book about the crypto world and the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried empire, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall . In contrast with Michael Lewis, whose recent book Going Infinite also looks at Bankman-Fried, Faux sees the scamming and lying of the crypto world for what it is, and his book is highly conscious of the harm done to victims by the fraudulence of Bankman-Fried and others. (Faux's boo...
Apr 12, 2024•51 min•Ep. 282
Nathan Thrall, the former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, is the author of two books on Israel and Palestine: The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine and most recently A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy , which focuses on the tribulations of a Palestinian father in the aftermath of a personal tragedy. Because his book is about Palestinians under occupation, several of Thrall's book events ...
Apr 10, 2024•47 min•Ep. 281
Political scientist Jerome Slater is the author of one of the best one-volume summaries of the background of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020 (Oxford University Press). Slater argues in the book that the possibilities for a peaceful resolution to the conflict were consistently eroded by Israel’s refusal to withdraw to its legal borders and successive Israeli leaders’ staunch opposition to a Palestinian state. Slater’...
Apr 08, 2024•41 min•Ep. 280
Michael Mann is a sociologist who has spent his life trying to understand how power works. His latest book, On Wars , surveys the entire history of warfare between human societies to try to understand why wars happen and how they can be avoided. It is the culmination of a decade-long effort by Mann to try to comprehensively understand the origins of war. (See the New York Times review of Mann's book here. ) Today he joins to help us better understand war. Are humans naturally warlike? Are wars r...
Apr 05, 2024•45 min•Ep. 279
