In its heyday, the Bush Terminal industrial complex spanned several city blocks along Brooklyn’s waterfront and employed more than 35,000 people. Built by Irving Bush in the late nineteenth century, it was an "early intermodal shipping hub." Goods arrived by water and left by rail. Bananas, coffee, and cotton came in through doors on one side of the warehouses and were loaded onto trains on the other. But after World War II, as trucks replaced rail and shipping patterns changed, the Terminal’s p...
Dec 15, 2025•30 min
The Trump administration has released a new National Security Strategy that is a marked shift not only from earlier administrations but also Trump’s first term in office. While the new policy statement eschews the goal of global hegemony, it promotes culture war in Europe by promising support of anti-immigration political parties, economic rivalry in Asia with China, and a renewal of US military hegemony in the Western hemisphere. To survey this document and Trump’s often contradictory foreign p...
Dec 14, 2025•39 min
Subscribe now to skip the ads and get all of our episodes. Listen to our Chinese Prestige miniseries ! Danny and Derek will sadly not be doing a CBS News town hall event. This week in the news: the Thailand–Cambodia conflict resumes (1:47); the DRC–M23 conflict also resumes as M23 makes new advances (7:05); in Gaza, questions remain over the “second phase” of the ceasefire as a winter storm hits (10:38); separatists in Yemen gain control of the country’s south (17:18); the RSF takes Sudan’s larg...
Dec 12, 2025•43 min
Paris Marx is joined by Ben Wray to discuss Europe’s capitulation to pressure from the United States on Nexperia, as well as on digital protections and labor rights that could have big implications for the future of work. Ben Wray is a researcher specializing in the platform economy. He writes the Gig Economy Project newsletter and his most recent report for the ETUC is called Uberisation . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Dec 11, 2025•59 min
Republicans are about to end Obamcare subsidies, driving up premiums for 20 million people during the year of the midterm elections. How have they managed to end up after all these years with no health insurance plan of their own? John Nichols comments. Also: Bob Dylan’s earliest recordings have just been released—the first is from 1956 when he was 15 years old—on the 8-CD set ‘Through the Open Window: The Bootleg Series vol. 18” – which ends in 1963, with his historic performance at Carnegie Ha...
Dec 10, 2025•43 min
Derek and journalist Mat Nashed assess the state of Sudan’s ongoing civil war, particularly the fall of Al-Fasher and the Rapid Support Forces’ consolidation of control across much of Darfur. They discuss the throughline from the 2003 genocide to today; the wider humanitarian catastrophe; the shifting battlefield in Kordofan; the growing role of drones; the RSF’s political gambits; the international dimension of the war, including the UAE’s backing of the RSF and the Sudanese army’s search for e...
Dec 09, 2025•1 hr 20 min
On one side of the world, a major corporate landlord is evicting tenants by jacking up rents by hundreds of dollars. On the other, its parent company is linked to Israeli bombs, genocide, and illegal settlements. This is the multibillion-dollar story of American Landmark — one of the country’s most eviction-happy landlords — and Elco, a corporate powerhouse whose subsidiaries are tied to the Israeli military and far-right settler movements. It’s even been cited by the UN for facilitating human r...
Dec 08, 2025•34 min
Only a few years ago, European elites were patting themselves on the back for fending off the tide of right-wing anti-system parties (often styled as populists). But recent polls in France, Germany and the United Kingdom show that that the far right is once again gaining traction, thanks in no small part centrist governments that have demoralized the population and legitimized xenophobia. David Broder, author of Mussolini’s Grandchildren and European editor of Jacobin , wrote a wide-ranging essa...
Dec 07, 2025•45 min
Charlotte delves into Ecclesiastes through the work of liberation theologist Elsa Támez (When the Horizons Close) before Jo shares some of Pierre Guyotat’s horny, rapturous literary memoir, Idiocy. Icon of many RW conversations past, the thoughtful Jackie Ess then joins to discuss Tolstoy’s crank-inflected final novel, Resurrection. Jackie Ess is the author of a novel called Darryl, and more recently of a long short-story length chapbook called Eugene. Please consider supporting our work on Patr...
Dec 06, 2025•49 min
Subscribe now to skip the ads and get more content. Don’t forget to download our Chinese Prestige miniseries, currently on sale for $5. Annual subscribers get the series free! Despite sitting on a large surplus of Labubus, Danny and Derek work hard to bring you the news. This week: in Russia-Ukraine, new US diplomacy goes nowhere (1:08), Ukraine is now attacking Russian commercial ships (5:55), and the EU moves to phase out Russian natural gas (8:35); in the DRC-Rwanda conflict, Trump hosts a pe...
Dec 05, 2025•50 min
Paris Marx is joined by Aline Blankertz to discuss how right-wing governments and international corporations in the European Union are pushing to gut tech regulations with the goal of boosting AI development in hope of improving economic growth and geopolitical standing. Aline Blankertz is a cofounder of Structural Integrity. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Dec 04, 2025•57 min
Zorhan Mamdani takes office in four weeks as the first socialist mayor of New York City. How should we understand the constraints he faces, without accepting those constraints? Bhaskar Sunkara has our analysis; he’s president of The Nation and author of ‘The Socialist Manifesto.’ Plus: Sports Talk on The Nation podcast! Of course Thanksgiving was a big weekend for football on TV - a weekend where millions of viewers got to see a festival of brain injuries -- concussions after receiving blows to ...
Dec 03, 2025•39 min
Danny and Derek welcome to the show Molly Lambert, creator of the JENNAWORLD podcast, to talk about the rise of the modern porn industry and its roots in L.A.’s San Fernando Valley. They discuss the medium’s origins in underground stag films and the porno chic era; the shift to home video and the corporate studio model; breakout stars like Ginger Lynn Allen and Jenna Jameson; porn as an outsider industry mirroring Hollywood; gender, labor, and power in late-20th-century media; the relationship b...
Dec 02, 2025•55 min
It’s no surprise that liberal philanthropy — a longtime pillar of the Democratic establishment — has become one of the Trump administration’s latest targets. As David Callahan writes in our December issue, liberal foundations “have often been depicted as the great puppet masters of the left, bankrolling and directing a who’s who of progressive groups intent on destroying the American way of life.” In other words, catnip for MAGA madness. But as Callahan points out, the reality of how these insti...
Dec 01, 2025•39 min
For this special season finale, recorded live during NYC Climate Week, host Shilpi Chhotray convenes a powerful storytelling event with three frontline media makers: Chantel Comardelle, Alexandra Norris, and B. Preston Lyles. This is more than a conversation about films or campaigns — it’s an intimate window into the lived realities of climate and environmental injustice. From Indigenous land loss in Louisiana, to the ongoing fight against the petrochemical buildout in Cancer Alley, to exposing ...
Dec 01, 2025•30 min
Jo and Charlotte discuss secret gardens, indoor kids, and Peter Pan’s baby teeth before they’re joined by culture-shaping Annelise Ogaard, who introduces listeners to the lavish, creepy world of Gabrielle Wittkop’s fiction. Annelise Ogaard is a writer, translator, filmmaker, vibesmith, area woman, and friend of the pod. She has translated a variety of Japanese manga, including Hauntress , (one of the NYPL's top ten graphic novels of the year💅), and is currently at work on the classic boxing ser...
Nov 30, 2025•57 min
Paris Marx is joined by Ketan Joshi to discuss how hyperscale data centers are fueling the consumption of more oil and gas, what that means for climate targets, and the insidious relationship between the tech and fossil fuel industries. Ketan Joshi is a climate writer and data analyst based in Oslo working with climate and environmental groups. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Nov 27, 2025•59 min
Last Friday Marjorie Taylor Greene announced she was quitting after Trump excommunicated her from MAGA, while the same day Trump welcomed Zohran Mamdani to the White House with open arms and high praise. What’s going on with Trump? Harold Meyerson comments - he's editor at large of The American Prospect . Also: Alice Waters, the legendary founder of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, winner of the National Humanities Medal, awarded by Obama, talks about how to make school lunch delicious, affordable, org...
Nov 26, 2025•41 min
In lieu of a typical Tuesday episode this week, we are releasing the first episode of our new miniseries Chinese Prestige . Annual subscribers already have access, while everyone else can get the 8 episodes for a whopping $5 for two weeks only. Enjoy! In this first episode of Chinese Prestige , Yidi, Danny, and Derek trace the origins of the Chinese Communist Party from the May Fourth Movement to the civil war with the Nationalists. They explore the party’s strategic shift from cities to the cou...
Nov 25, 2025•52 min
Angelo Herndon was a Black coal miner turned Communist activist who was repeatedly “arrested, convicted of vagrancy, and incarcerated” for his efforts to educate and mobilize workers. In 1932, he helped organize an interracial protest against a county decision to cut off relief for the poor. But it wasn’t simply the protest that led to his chain-gang sentence — it was Herndon’s possession and distribution of Communist literature, which authorities used to charge him with inciting insurrection. H...
Nov 24, 2025•36 min
The famed economist Larry Summers, not for the first time, finds himself the center of a scandal. He’s had to take a leave from Harvard, where he teaches, because of embarrassing emails he had with his late friend Jeffrey Epstein. I talked to economic journalist and Nation contributor Doug Henwood, a long-time Summers watcher, about the career of this controversial and influential figure. Summers has been one of the most influential policy makers of his era, serving as Treasury Secretary and Pre...
Nov 23, 2025•43 min
Charlotte overcomes her resistance to novels about sexual abuse in order to read Kate Elizabeth Russell’s excellent My Dark Vanessa, after which Jo introduces listeners to the freewheeling criminality of Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian. The ferociously intelligent Torrey Peters then joins for a conversation about plant consciousness and our relationship with the organic world. Other titles mentioned in this episode: Jamie Hood’s Trauma Plot, The Incest Diary by Anonymous, Is a ...
Nov 22, 2025•1 hr 9 min
Danny and Derek are praying for Kim Kardashian to pass the bar. In this week’s news: Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia visits the White House (1:56); the U.S. pushes a new Ukraine peace deal (8:58); Israel continues killing people in Gaza (12:30), Palestinians’ shelters are failing in heavy rain (13:57), the UN votes on Trump’s Gaza plan (15:22), and Palestinians seeking relief are put on flights to South Africa, raising ethnic cleansing concerns (18:11); Israel continues to bomb and move bord...
Nov 21, 2025•42 min
Paris Marx is joined by Gil Duran to discuss how Peter Thiel’s bizarre obsession with the antichrist is really a desperate and embarrassing attempt to divert attention from his own misdeeds. Gil Duran writes The Nerd Reich and is working on his first book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Global Democracy. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy...
Nov 20, 2025•1 hr 1 min
After almost a year of Trump stonewalling about the Epstein files, Republicans in the House finally took a stand against him. More than a hundred Republican members were prepared to vote for releasing the files. Facing a dramatic defeat, on Sunday night Trump caved, and Tuesday the vote in the House was nearly unanimous. John Nichols has our analysis. Also: The Americans who fought in World War II have been called “the greatest generation,” but historian David Nasaw argues that it’s more appropr...
Nov 19, 2025•34 min
Danny and Derek speak with political theorist and author Lea Ypi about her new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined , which explores how personal memory intersects with imperial collapse, nationalism, and the surveillance state. They discuss her grandmother’s journey from Ottoman Salonika to Albania amid the rise of competing political projects; archives and the stories they erase; the challenge for universalist ideals in a capitalist world; the parallels between the 1930s and today’s anti-migrant ...
Nov 18, 2025•58 min
The scandal around Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked and abused children and died in a prison cell in 2019, has never gone away. It continues to explode now that House Democrats have released thousands of emails from Epstein and his cronies. But while the political class and mainstream media are understandably focused on the sex scandal, another dimension of the scandal goes uncovered except by independent media outlets such as Drop Site: Epstein’s deep ties to the national security state. I talke...
Nov 16, 2025•41 min
This week, Jo discovers the seminal elegance of Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World, while Charlotte considers how well she would fare if she traveled back in time to the era of Alexander the Great, as depicted in Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy. Then, the dazzling Lauren Michele Jackson joins to discuss the chaotic, thrilling, sexually vibrant, and deeply unwell narrator of Nettie Jones’ Fish Tales. Also mentioned in this episode: Percival Everett’s Glyph, Danzy Senna...
Nov 15, 2025•56 min
In this episode of A People’s Climate, host Shilpi Chhotray sits down with Elizabeth Yeampierre, veteran organizer and executive director of UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, to explore how frontline communities are taking climate action into their own hands. In a capitalist world that prioritizes bigger, faster, and more, Elizabeth’s work takes a different path. Small, hyper-local solutions like a community-owned solar grid have huge impacts. Residents of Brooklyn’s...
Nov 15, 2025•25 min
Subscribe now to skip the ads and get all of our content! Danny and Derek are vigorously programmed to bring you the news headlines. This week: the Thai-Cambodia ceasefire breaks down as border fire and incidents escalate (0:30); in Gaza, Trump’s framework stalls while governments debate the shape and purpose of an international security force (4:27); Syria’s President Ahmed al-Shara visits the White House (13:49); Iraq’s elections conclude with Prime Minister Sudani claiming victory despite an ...
Nov 14, 2025•55 min
