Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jeremiah Moss (pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury ) is the author of two books, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul and Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York . Jeremiah's blog Vanishing New York has documented the disappearance of precious city institutions from delis to newsstands to theaters. Jeremiah's photography has previously appeared in Current Affairs . The New York Times , in its review of Moss' first book...
Aug 21, 2024•44 min•Ep. 338
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Dennis Fritz is the author of the new book Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq (OR Books) , which dives into the historical record to understand the Bush administration's motivations for launching one of the most disastrous criminal wars of our era. It's well-known by now that the stated justifications (the search for weapons of mass destruction) were lies, because Bush officials misrepresented the available i...
Aug 19, 2024•43 min•Ep. 337
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Richard Beck is a senior writer for N+1 magazine and the author of the forthcoming book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life . His recent article " Bidenism Abroad " in the New Left Review is a vitally useful analysis of Joe Biden's record internationally. He discusses the continuities and breaks from Trump's foreign policy. He joins today to discuss what Biden and his administration have thought they were trying to do, and what they...
Aug 16, 2024•37 min•Ep. 336
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Interestingly, thinkers on both the right and left have found inspiration in Nietzsche, and his ideas show up everywhere from the anti-democratic elitism of H.L. Mencken to the liberatory politics of the Black Panther Party. There is an ongoing debate over whether Nietzsche is best categorized as a reactionary or a champion of personal liberation. Today we are join...
Aug 14, 2024•44 min•Ep. 335
Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service. Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program , the "right...
Aug 09, 2024•42 min•Ep. 334
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jeffrey Sachs is an economist at Columbia University and the author of the book A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism , which argues that both Democratic and Republican presidents are worsening global instability. He joins today to explain his critique of American foreign policy. First, we ask Prof. Sachs how he went from being seen as an exemplar of the U.S. intellectual establishment (the neoliberal " Dr. Shock ") to one of ...
Aug 07, 2024•36 min•Ep. 333
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is the Policy Director of the American Immigration Council and a leading expert on U.S. immigration law. He has testified before Congress several times and frequently appears as a public commentator on immigration issues including recently on the Chris Hayes podcast . He joins today to explain exactly how U.S. immigration law works at its most basic level, what makes our system so cruel and dysfunctional, and what chan...
Aug 05, 2024•49 min•Ep. 332
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Max (just Max) is the host of Unfucking the Republic (UNFTR), one of our favorite podcasts. UNFTR publishes intensively-researched deep dives into some of the most important issues in the world. One of their most recent investigations is into Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), an insidious cartel that has wormed its way deep into the basic structure of the American healthcare system. Today Max joins to explain what PBMs are, why they're hurti...
Aug 02, 2024•40 min•Ep. 331
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Kyla Scanlon is a leading online economics commentator and Bloomberg contributor, who regularly publishes TikTok explainers helping people understand the economy. Her new book In This Economy? is meant to help laypeople understand the economic forces around them that are so determinative in the outcomes of our lives. Scanlon is the one who coined the term " vibecession " to describe the disjunction between certain "objective" economic indica...
Jul 31, 2024•33 min•Ep. 330
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Nuclear weapons are always lurking there in the background, out in remote places where we don't have to think about them, but ready to be fired at any time. Journalist Sarah Scoles was interested to find out more about the people who maintain the system of nuclear weapons. What do they do and how do they explain it to themselves? In a very real sense, they have to spend their days preparing to commit the worst imaginable genocide, should the...
Jul 29, 2024•29 min•Ep. 329
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist at the New School for Social Research and the author of Work, Retire, Repeat , which shows how the possibilities for having a comfortable and dignified retirement are slipping away. We begin with a news story about a 90-year-old veteran who was pushing shopping carts in the Louisiana heat to make ends meet. Prof. Gilarducci explains how it can be that in the richest country in he world, a person that age ca...
Jul 26, 2024•38 min•Ep. 328
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Radley Balko is one of America's leading journalists on policing and criminal punishment. His book The Rise of the Warrior Cop is a remarkable expose of the militarization of local police forces around the country. Recently, Radley has produced several excellent essays on the authoritarian promises of Donald Trump and those in his circles. Radley's pieces compile frightening evidence of what a 2nd Trump presidency might look like. In " Lines...
Jul 24, 2024•37 min•Ep. 327
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! John Ghazvinian is the leading historian of U.S.-Iranian relations, the author of the indispensable study America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present. His book shows how opportunities for positive relations between the U.S. and the Iranian people have been repeatedly squandered. From installing and propping up one of the world's most abusive dictators (the Shah) to ignoring overtures from Iranian leaders interested in reducing tensions,...
Jul 22, 2024•43 min•Ep. 326
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! With antiwar protests jeopardizing a Democratic president's reelection and an upcoming party convention in Chicago, 2024 has some eerie echoes of one of the world's most tumultuous years: 1968. Perhaps by revisiting that year we can better understand our own time. To see what lessons it holds, we turn today to Charles Kaiser, the author of the book 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation . Cha...
Jul 19, 2024•32 min•Ep. 325
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jeet Heer has written two major essays about the intellectual legacy of the New Republic magazine’s 70s-2000s heyday. The first, from 2015 , excavates the magazine’s history of racism and its role in Clinton-era “welfare reform” and in pushing Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve into public consciousness. The second piece, published recently, looks more broadly at the career of New Republic owner Martin Peretz : his racism...
Jul 17, 2024•41 min•Ep. 324
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jonathan Kozol is one of the leading critics of the U.S. education system, having written a series of widely acclaimed books across a 60-year career, including Savage Inequalities, The Shame of the Nation, and Letters to a Young Teacher. Today he joins to discuss his new book An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America , which sums up his argument about what is wrong with the public schools and what we can...
Jul 15, 2024•35 min•Ep. 323
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Anne Kim's book Poverty For Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America's Poor gives a partial answer to an enduring question: how come we spend so much trying to solve poverty but poverty persists? One major reason, Kim argues, is that parasitic for-profit industries suck a lot of the money out of antipoverty programs. The privatization of government functions has meant that plenty of money that should be going to the least well-off ends ...
Jul 12, 2024•33 min•Ep. 322
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Thomas Sowell may be the best-selling economics writer of our time. For decades, the Hoover Institution pundit has published books and columns introducing economic concepts to a popular audience. He has been acclaimed as a genius and maverick whose insights are ignored by the academy because they discomfort progressives. But Dr. Cahal Moran, who runs the YouTube channel Unlearning Economics, argues that Sowell's free market talking points ar...
Jul 10, 2024•55 min•Ep. 321
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Steven Thrasher is a professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide . He has also recently been present at the Columbia protests over Gaza. He joins today to discuss what he saw at the protests, before moving on to discuss his concept of the "viral underclass," tracing how inequality and disease interact, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19. An excerp...
Jul 09, 2024•41 min•Ep. 320
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today we talk to David Austin Walsh , a postdoc at Yale and the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right , a new book about the history of the U.S. right wing. Walsh is particularly interest in what the boundaries are (if any) between "mainstream" conservatism and the "far right." He goes back to the time of William F. Buckley and talks about the relationship between fascist sympathizing reactionaries and th...
Jul 05, 2024•42 min•Ep. 319
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Bestselling author Johann Hari, whose Lost Connections and Stolen Focus have previously been discussed on this program, returns today to discuss his new book Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs . New weight-loss drugs have proved remarkably effective, but invite a whole host of questions. First, is a society where people take drugs to lose weight a healthy place? Should we be encouraging p...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 318
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Who actually comprises the MAGA movement? Where do Trumpian politicians come from? How do they defeat "establishment" Republicans on the local and state level? How much is organized from above? What's the role of Steve Bannon in all this? In Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post investigates the MAGA movement around the country, from Arizona to Georgia, showing how ordi...
Jul 01, 2024•26 min•Ep. 317
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! When we think of American power, we often think of missiles, guns, and tanks. But operating in the background is an incredibly powerful weapon whose use often goes unnoticed: the dollar. In her new book Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, Bloomberg News correspondent Saleha Mohsin explains how the dollar's power actually works. What does it mean for the dollar to be the "global reserve currency" and h...
Jun 28, 2024•30 min•Ep. 316
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post. Her new essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess , draws together and expands on some of her best work. It covers subjects including Marie Kondo and minimalism, the films of David Cronenberg, the novels of Sally Rooney, and the new sexual puritanism. However varied the topics, a few important themes recur, including a rejection of utilitarian ...
Jun 26, 2024•39 min•Ep. 315
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! We know the left is, generally speaking, anti-war and anti-imperialist. But if a left-wing government ever took power in the U.S., what would its foreign policy look like? How would it deal with, say, human rights abusing governments? Would it shun them? Sanction them? Would a leftist government send weapons to the victims of aggression? What would a left policy on Ukraine look like, for instance? Van Jackson is a leading left foreign policy...
Jun 24, 2024•41 min•Ep. 314
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Daniel Knowles is a reporter for The Economist (yes, that one) . His book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse argues that cars are a problem, and shows all the ways in which we could have more satisfying, sustainable, affordable lives with fewer cars. That's a tough sell in a car-loving country like the U.S.A., where we love our giant-ass trucks and our drive-thru daiquiri stands . Daniel is British: who is he to tell us we have to trade i...
Jun 21, 2024•34 min•Ep. 313
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ben Burgis is a philosopher and occasional contributor to Current Affairs , who runs the Philosophy for the People Substack and hosts Give Them An Argument. Today, Ben joins to respond to common arguments made to justify the policies of Israel and the United States in Gaza. "Israel has a right to defend itself," "Palestinian violence is the root cause of the problem," and other talking points are put to Ben, who gives logically precise but p...
Jun 19, 2024•1 hr 35 min•Ep. 312
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ― Eugene V. Debs "Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?" —Bernie Sanders Political philosophy is full of talk about liberty and justice. But in Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea , Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astr...
Jun 17, 2024•40 min•Ep. 311
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jessica L. Burbank is a broadcaster and commentator who appears on The Hill's Rising , co-hosts the Funny Money podcast, and now hosts her own online news program called Weeklyish News . Jessica is also big on TikTok , where she produces remarkable short videos communicating left political and economic ideas, such as this one on the power relationship between workers and bosses or this one on Elon Musk . Today Jessica joins to discuss how sh...
Jun 14, 2024•34 min•Ep. 310
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! John Washington is a journalist with Arizona Luminaria , whose new book The Case for Open Borders rebuts common anti-immigrant argument and shows that a world in which people can freely move from one territory to another will not create a "crisis" but will in fact benefit everyone. Today he joins to discuss the bipartisan rhetoric about immigration being a disaster or crisis, and to help us understand why militarized borders cause a lot more...
Jun 12, 2024•39 min•Ep. 309
