Here's where to find podcasts from The Nation. Political talk without the boring parts, featuring the writers, activists and artists who shape the news, from a progressive perspective.
Bob Dylan fans have been puzzled and troubled by his Christmas album ever since he released it in 2009. To help figure out what Dylan was doing, we turn to Sean Wilentz. He’s the official historian at BobDylan.com, and he also teaches history at Princeton. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
On this episode of American Prestige, our last news roundup before the holidays —but stay tuned for other fun AP programming! This week: in Palestine-Israel, yet more Gaza ceasefire talks (1:33) and two new reports on Israeli conduct in the Strip (6:54); in Syria, reports of reprisal attacks (12:18), the US fails to broker a Turkey-SDF ceasefire (16:23), and Israel occupies the country's south (20:40); Russia appears to have moved military assets from Ukraine to Libya (23:32); the RSF carries ou...
Hotel and restaurant workers in Los Angeles won a $30 minimum wage last week, Disneyland workers are getting $233 million in back pay, and Wisconsin public employees regained collective bargaining rights. Harold Meyerson reports on some victories in the class struggle in America. Also: a special feature: novelist Rachel Kushner reports on the world of Nostalgia Drag Racing, where people make machines – with their hands. One of them is her teenage son. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com...
On this episode of American Prestige , Danny speaks with Andrew deWaard, assistant professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, about his book Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture . The two discuss how the falling rate of profit shapes the modern media landscape, the increased drive toward consolidation in entertainment companies, the big movers like private equity firms, hedge funds, asset managers, and venture capitalists, artists' limited ability to defend themselves, ...
On this week's American Prestige news roundup: 2024 is officially the hottest year on record (0:57), particularly because the Arctic is no longer a carbon sink, but rather a net carbon emitter (2:40); regarding the situation in Syria, an update on the political transition (5:16), renewed fighting between the SDF and Turkish proxies (10:56), and Israel makes a land grab for an extended "buffer zone" (15:01); in Israel-Palestine, Hamas makes a major ceasefire concession (18:22); rebels in Myanmar ...
On this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, Paris Marx is joined by Amanda Mull to discuss the data-informed decisions that are changing the way we all experience air travel, mostly for the worse. Amanda Mull is a senior reporter and Buying Power columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Kamala Harris lost not because Democratic voters switched to Trump, Steve Phillips shows, but because of a massive failure of the Democrats to turn out their base. Also: In a new episode of “The Children’s Hour,” Amy Wilentz reports on “Lives of the In-Laws” – Ivanka’s and Tiffany’s – and comments also on the rise of Eric’s wife Lara, and about the latest schemes of Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/pr...
On this episode of American Prestige , Danny and Derek speak with Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post, about his series on US sanctions for the Post , "The Money War". They talk about the function of economic sanctions for the US and how that's changed over time, broader cases like Iran to targeted ones like Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg, how sanctions can "disconnect" war from the public, the humanitarian impact, and more. Advertising Inquiries: https://re...
Matthew Yglesias, a very influential journalist and proprietor of the Slow Boring substack , has emerged as a divisive figure within the Democratic party. To admirers, he’s a compelling advocate of popularism, the view the Democratic party needing to moderate its message to win over undecided voters. To critics, he’s a glib attention seeker who has achieved prominence by coming up with clever ways to justify the status quo. For this episode of the podcast, I talked to David Klion, frequent guest...
On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, host Paris Marx is joined by Cam Wilson to discuss Australia’s plan to ban under-16s from social media, the interests driving it, and whether it’s the right approach to tackle the harms of those platforms. Cam Wilson is associate editor at Crikey . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
“Our worst enemy right now is not Trump himself, but fatalism about our ability to stop him.” That’s what David Cole says – he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU, after 8 years and hundreds of lawsuits against the first Trump administration. Also: Project 2025,the Heritage Foundation’s famous 900 page book, is partly “"too dumb to accomplish anything at all”--that’s what Rick Perlstein says. The rest, he says, can be read as a useful catalog of how we should focus our r...
On this episode of American Prestige , hosts Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner are joined by Ben Fong of Arizona State University for a two-part discussion of his book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Bing e . In this episode, the group covers everything from coffee to opiates to antidepressants, how they interact with capitalist society, the CIA, commodity fetishism, licit vs. illicit as distinct from legal vs. illegal, and more. Check out more of Ben's work at ...
For this week's edition of The Time of Monsters podcast, we're posting a talk that host Jeet Heer gave at Carleton University earlier this November on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on factchecking. But as I argue, this strategy is deeply flawe...
On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us , Paris Marx is joined by MV Ramana to discuss the tech industry’s push to have nuclear energy power its data centers and why the reality of nuclear power isn’t as great as its promoters often make it seem. MV Ramana is a Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of Nuclear Is Not the Solution: The Folly of Atomic Power in the ...
Matt Gaetz dropping out as Attorney General nominee was a major setback for Trump, which exposes his vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Harold Meyerson reports on the divide in the Senate, and then between the MAGA movement and Republicans on Wall Street and in the corporations. Also on this episode of Start Making Sense : Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is terrible, but the idea of expelling people considered undesirable is not unprecedented in the American past. Eric Fo...
On this episode of American Prestige , Anton Jäger, historian of political thought, returns to the program to speak with Danny about "the big picture" in the wake of the US election. They discuss the crisis of liberalism, the state of the left, where capital is in its own historical cycle, how the reactions to this election compare with that of 2016, hyperpolitics, empire, the view from Europe, and more. Read Anton's latest piece in New Left Review , "Hyperpolitics in America" . Further reading:...
On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by Branko Marcetic to discuss media narratives that misrepresent what happened. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
On this week's American prestige world news roundup: One more news episode before us Yankees have a holiday. Note: Although we will not have a news roundup next week, we'll have other new content. This week: In Israel-Palestine, the ICC issues arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant (0:56) and the US vetoes another ceasefire resolution (6:11); US envoy Amos Hochstein is working on a ceasefire in Lebanon (8:50); in Sri Lanka, the leftist coalition wins a parliamentary majority (12:26); in Sudan...
On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us , Paris Marx is joined by Becca Lewis to discuss the right-wing project to shape the internet in the 1990s and how we’re still living with the legacies of those actions today. Becca Lewis is a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
A lot of people who voted for abortion rights referenda this year also voted for Trump. What were they thinking? How do they understand politics? Amy Littlefield spent election day in Amarillo, Texas, trying to find out. Also: John Lewis, who died in 2020, challenged injustice from the sit-ins of 1960 to the Age of Trump. Historian David Greenberg talks about what we can learn from his example. Greenberg’s new book is “John Lewis: A Life.” Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Priv...
On this episode of American Prestige , Abby Mullen , assistant professor at the US Naval Academy, joins the program to talk about her book To Fix a National Character: The United States in the First Barbary War, 1800–1805 . We explore the conflict, American geopolitics in their infancy, the Barbary States and piracy committed on their behalf at the time, how US naval expeditions in an era without a global network of bases functioned, the myth of the war in "The Marines' Hymn", and more. Advertis...
On this episode of American Prestige, your weekly news roundup. This week: struggles at the UN COP29 climate change conference (1:48), not the least of which is the incoming climate denier president of the US (5:45); in Israel-Palestine, the US doesn't follow through on its 30-day humanitarian aid deadline (7:57), Trump appointments signal imminent formal annexation of Palestinian territories (12:24), and Qatar withdraws from ceasefire talks (16:48); in Lebanon, Israel is working on a ceasefire ...
On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us , Paris Marx is joined by Brian Merchant to discuss the fallout from the US election, what it means for the tech industry, and more importantly, what it might mean for all of us. They also celebrate the show hitting 250 episodes! Brian Merchant is a longtime tech writer and author of Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Hope does not mean saying ‘this is not bad,’ Rebecca Solnit argues; it just means we will not give up—because we know that what we do matters, and we also know we’ve been surprised by good things we never expected. Also: The bromance between Elon Musk and Donald Trump cannot last – historian David Nasaw will explain why. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Historian Benji Rolsky speaks with Danny about how others in their profession have thought about the far right, a subset of history which has expanded greatly in the last decade or so. They explore how the study of the far right might be "broken", anti-fundamentalism, Christian nationalism, the episodic nature of this field, and how Trump might have changed the historiography. Read Benji's piece "Why the Study of the Right is Broken": Part 1 and Part 2 . Also check out his book The Rise and Fall...
On this final episode of The Nation's election coverage podcast, See How They Run , D.D. Guttenplan is joined by John Nichols and Jeet Heer to discuss lessons learned from the 2024 Presidential races. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
On this week's edition of the American Prestige world news roundup: in Palestine-Israel, Netanyahu fires defense minister Gallant (0:57), a leak scandal involving Netanyahu's office (6:36), an update on the humanitarian situation in northern Gaza (8:52), and the IDF appears to admit to committing ethnic cleansing (13:05); in Lebanon, the ceasefire push collapses (15:39), the IDF looks to create a "buffer zone" (17:46), and the Washington Post reports that Israeli evacuation warnings are misleadi...
On this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us , Paris Marx is joined by tante to discuss troubling developments in the open source world as WordPress goes to war with WP Engine and a new definition of open source AI doesn’t require being open about training data. tante is a sociotechnologist, writer, speaker, and Luddite working on tech and its social impact. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
John Nichols looks at the elections results: how we got here, and what we do next. For starters: Trump got fewer votes than 4 years ago; 55% of voters in the CNN exit poll said he was "too extreme." Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy
On this episode of American Prestige, Derek and Danny are joined by Eli Clifton, senior advisor and investigative journalist at large at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, to talk about the role of foreign policy in US presidential elections (including tomorrow's). They talk about chatter on the ground regarding Gaza/Lebanon, whether the Democrats are capable of "learning lessons" from a loss, how to once again make foreign policy relevant to American voters, the broken discourse a...
