Maureen Farrell is a business reporter with the New York Times and co-author of the book The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion , which documents one of the most bizarre stories in 21st century capitalism: the staggering rise (and subsequent collapse) of WeWork, an office space rental company that presented itself as a game-changing "technology company" that was going to revolutionize the world and change the way humans interacted with each other. Led by a strangely...
Feb 03, 2022•49 min•Ep. 115
The International Criminal Court in the Hague is the place where war criminals are supposed to be tried and punished. It embodies a vision of global justice in which war crimes are universally forbidden, intended to carry forward humanitarian principles. But so far, the court has only completed a handful of trials, and it has been heavily criticized for focusing on crimes committed in Africa while ignoring Western atrocities. Yet the court has only existed since 2002, and many hold hope that it ...
Feb 03, 2022•44 min•Ep. 114
Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He has recently attracted a lot of (almost entirely negative) attention for a column and tweets arguing that mocking the deaths of anti-vaxxers is "necessary." Hiltzik joins to defend and explain his position to Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson, who believes that Hiltzik's stance is cruel and unhelpful. Michael argues that his argument is more nuanced than it is being characterized as. Nat...
Feb 03, 2022•48 min•Ep. 113
Judge Judy Sheindlin has long been one of the highest-paid TV stars, earning a staggering $47 million per year for her show, Judge Judy . She is universally known and loved nationwide for her acerbic, "take no BS" style of dispute resolution. "Who doesn't love Judge Judy?" asked Barack Obama . Current Affairs editor-at-large Yasmin Nair does not love Judge Judy. In a new article for In These Times magazine, Nair reviews Sheindlin's new show for Amazon Studios, Judy Justice , and argues that Judg...
Feb 03, 2022•53 min•Ep. 112
Sheryll Cashin is the author of White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality . She has been called "one of the most important civil rights scholars of our time." Her book "exposes the ways in which American policy decisions, from the early twentieth century to the present, have constructed a ‘residential caste system’ resulting in the entrapment of Black people in high-poverty neighborhoods while ‘overinvesting in affluent white space.’" In this rich con...
Feb 03, 2022•56 min•Ep. 111
Editors of Current Affairs recently took Hillary Clinton's "MasterClass" and had a deeply unpleasant time. But Bill Clinton, too, has a MasterClass, and as public interest journalists committed to understanding and explaining the political world, we felt obligated to take this one, too. To save you the $180 MasterClass fee, we tell you everything you'll learn from Bill Clinton's "Inclusive Leadership" lessons, including: - How to associate yourself with the legacy of Nelson Mandela and other gre...
Feb 03, 2022•59 min•Ep. 110
Today, in our last episode of the year, we present a hopeful discussion about what leftists can accomplish in power. Sam Bell is a Rhode Island state senator and Democratic Socialists of America member. The Boston Globe has called him " the most outspoken member " of the RI state senate, and he has tried to use his position to advance left policies in a state historically dominated by extremely conservative Democrats and a powerful political machine. In this episode, we have what is hopefully an...
Feb 03, 2022•49 min•Ep. 109
Today Nathan is joined by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, author of The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe. Under pressure from progressive Democrats, Joe Biden recently agreed to continue a pause on student loan payments. There has been a great deal of debate over whether Biden should consider canceling large amounts of student debt outright. Mitchell has spent years studying every aspect of the student loan crisis. On this episode, he helps us better underst...
Feb 02, 2022•42 min•Ep. 108
Kristin Henning directs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She has worked as a public defender for juveniles in Washington, D.C. and is the author of the book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth . In the book, Prof. Henning "explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and resist the police, and details the long-term consequences of racism and trauma Black youth experience...
Feb 02, 2022•45 min•Ep. 107
A UK court recently ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States. Assange faces serious charges over violating the Espionage Act, based on WikiLeaks' publication of classified United States government documents and video related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The prosecution has been condemned by a number of press freedom and human rights organizations, but there are those who argue that Assange is a criminal or even a " terrorist ." To discuss the case, ...
Feb 02, 2022•57 min•Ep. 106
Hillary Clinton has just released an online course on "The Power of Resilience" through the website MasterClass, where celebrities teach their skills. The course has made the news because in it, she delivers the speech she would have given had she won the presidency in 2016, which she did not. We were curious what else is in Hillary Clinton's MasterClass, so Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Nathan J. Robinson, and Lily Sánchez paid the fee and took the class. In this episode, we reveal all o...
Jan 19, 2022•57 min•Ep. 105
Prof. Aya Gruber teaches criminal law at the University of Colorado Law School. Her book The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration makes the case that many feminists have been too quick to push for more severe criminal punishments for crimes against women, and have as a result ended up legitimizing or even contributing to the expansion of mass incarceration. Prof. Gruber makes a strong argument against "carceral feminism," claiming that it sees "p...
Jan 19, 2022•58 min•Ep. 104
Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy has been known for decades as a critic of Critical Race Theory, which was developed in part by his late colleague Derrick Bell. But Kennedy's critiques come from a position of intellectual respect, and over the years he has become more sympathetic to some of the central claims CRT makes about the pervasive and intractable nature of American racism. His new book Say It Loud! On Race, Law, History, and Culture collects his essays from the past several d...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 103
Today Nathan is joined by Edward Niedermeyer, an investigative journalist whose book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors remains the definitive critical account of the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla. Edward is an auto industry expert whose work has been featured in the New York Times , Wall Street Journal , Bloomberg View , and elsewhere, and he currently hosts the Autonocast podcast about the development of autonomous cars. We discuss how Tesla motors has been built into a powerhouse ...
Jan 19, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Ep. 102
In this contentious conversation, Nathan speaks to Prof. John McWhorter about his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Prof. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, regular New York Times contributor, and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast. His book argues that anti-racist social justice ideology is properly described as a "religion" and that its practitioners are beyond reasoning with. It's a thesis Nathan takes serious issue with and the conversation illumin...
Jan 17, 2022•40 min•Ep. 101
Today's guest is molecular biologist Dr. Alina Chan, a fellow at the Broad Institute and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 . She has been one of the most prominent commentators on the origins of COVID-19 and has attracted controversy for encouraging more serious consideration of the possibility that the pandemic began through an accident at a virology lab. She has been credited for changing the discussion about the issue and causing scientists and the media to pay more at...
Jan 17, 2022•51 min•Ep. 100
Prof. Harvey J. Kaye is the author of books like Thomas Paine and the Promise of America , The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great , and most recently Take Hold Of Our History: Make America Radical Again . Running through his work is the argument that the social democratic left should draw more on the richness of the American radical tradition and take greater pride in the history of those who have struggled to achieve the promise of democratic equa...
Jan 13, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Ep. 99
Today Nathan is joined by legendary former Harper's editor Lewis Lapham. Lapham is the author of numerous books including Money and Class in America , Age of Folly , and Lapham's Rules of Influence . He currently edits Lapham's Quarterly . He also wrote and starred in the delightfully strange documentary/musical The American Ruling Class . He was called "without doubt our greatest satirist" by Kurt Vonnegut, is a member of the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame, and went to India ...
Jan 13, 2022•48 min•Ep. 98
Julia Serano is a PhD molecular biologist, writer, and musician whose books include Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity , Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism , and the surrealist novel 99 Erics . Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Salon, and elsewhere. Dr. Serano is a patient debunker of anti-trans talking points, and has written a number of articles patiently taking apart com...
Jan 05, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 97
Dean Preston represents District 5 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A tenants' rights attorney and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he was the first democratic socialist elected to the board in 40 years. Recently, a campaign by a group called the "YIMBYs" has accused Preston of denying housing to thousands of people . In this episode, we talk about why San Francisco has a housing crisis and how to solve it. We also talk about how pro-developer groups produce propaganda t...
Jan 05, 2022•51 min•Ep. 96
Aziz Huq is an expert in constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school. He is the author of the book The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies , available from Oxford University Press. Prof. Huq's book focuses on the fact that constitutional rights are meaningless unless there are remedies for violations of those rights, and that while we ostensibly have the same rights as always, courts have steadily eroded our ability to get anything if the government chooses to violate our rights. ...
Jan 05, 2022•48 min•Ep. 95
Today's guest is Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Brown University. Prof. Loury has had a distinguished career—he was the youngest-ever tenured Black economics professor at Harvard and is known for coining the term "social capital." Prof. Loury is generally associated with political conservatism, but his books The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American Values actually offer a rebuke to conservative "color blindness" rhetoric and sketch precise explanations for w...
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 94
Today's guest is Stephen Bright, one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the United States . Prof. Bright teaches at Yale Law School and Georgetown Law, but has spent most of his life working as an advocate for poor people accused of serious crimes. During his decades in charge of the Southern Center For Human Rights, he argued multiple times in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and represented defendants some of the most difficult death penalty cases. Today we discuss the status of the righ...
Dec 14, 2021•50 min•Ep. 93
In this, the second part of our look into the realities of abortion in the contemporary United States, Nathan talks to Prof. Diana Greene Foster, Director of Research at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) collaborative research group at UC-San Francisco. Prof. Foster is the author of the new book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having―or Being Denied―an Abortion. The book is based on a remarkable study that followed a thousand wom...
Dec 13, 2021•39 min•Ep. 92
Carol Joffe is one of the foremost experts on reproductive rights in the United States. A professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, she has been studying and writing about the battle over abortion rights for decades and received lifetime achievement awards from the Abortion Care Network and the Society of Family Planning. She is the co-author of the book Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Aborti...
Dec 13, 2021•43 min•Ep. 91
Andrew Cockburn is a veteran journalist who serves as the Washington Editor of Harper's magazine. His new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine, available from Verso collects his reporting on the military-industrial complex and the way the public coffers are looted by profiteers. He joined Nathan to discuss why he thinks the ever-bloating military has become an out-of-control "virus," as well as: - The bureaucratic waste that means the US military isn't even good a...
Dec 09, 2021•53 min•Ep. 90
Tara Isabella Burton is the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. She joined Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson to discuss changing religious practices in the United States. Traditional organized religion has been on the decline for years, as more and more young people are identifying as nonreligious. But are we really? Tara's book looks at the way that new communities and spiritual practices, from SoulCycle to astrology to online political communities, have arisen in t...
Dec 09, 2021•47 min•Ep. 89
Today Nathan is joined by Oxford University philosophy professor Henry Shue, author of Climate Justice and most recently The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now. Prof. Shue's new book is about the moral obligations conferred on people by the historical circumstances they find themselves in. The actions of living people have huge consequences for those born to subsequent generations. What responsibilities do we have to those who come after us? W...
Dec 09, 2021•47 min•Ep. 88
Ross Barkan, author of The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York, joins Nathan to discuss the career of the infamous ex-New York governor. We talk about: - How an un-charismatic and unpleasant bully made his inspiring journey from humble beginnings as the son of the governor of New York to become the governor of New York - How Cuomo managed to keep a blue state from actually passing progressive legislation - How his Machiavellian ruthlessness, and New York's broken election...
Dec 09, 2021•46 min•Ep. 87
Current Affairs editor and physician Dr. Lily Sánchez joins Nathan to discuss her new (and first) Current Affairs article, "Continuing The Pandemic Is A Choice." Lily explains: - the many things the U.S. could do differently if it was actually trying to get COVID-19 cases as close to 0 as possible - the weird lack of a serious public education and messaging campaign around vaccination - why having 50 different state policies makes no sense when you're trying to control a pandemic - the need for ...
Dec 09, 2021•54 min•Ep. 86
