Current Affairs
466 episodes - English - Latest episode: 10 days ago - ★★★★★ - 576 ratingsA podcast of politics and culture, from the editors of Current Affairs magazine.
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Episodes
How The Occupation Shapes Everything (w/ Nathan Thrall)
April 10, 2024 11:00 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBNathan 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 even...
The Current Israel-Palestine Crisis Was Entirely Avoidable (w/ Jerome Slater)
April 08, 2024 14:56 - 40 minutes - 37.4 MBPolitical 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. Sla...
Why Wars Happen (w/ Michael Mann)
April 05, 2024 15:23 - 45 minutes - 41.2 MBMichael 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...
A McKinsey Whistleblower on Life Inside The Secretive Consulting Firm
April 03, 2024 15:11 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBSeveral years ago, Garrison Lovely wrote an insider account of McKinsey & Co. for Current Affairs. At the time he published using a pseudonym, but he's now gone public with a cover story for a recent issue of The Nation, entitled "Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower," where he recounts observations of the firm's work for ICE and the Riker's Island jail. Garrison joins today to tell us what McKinsey is like on the inside: how it justifies serving odious clients, why young "idealists" are ...
How Big Pharma Makes a Killing From Letting People Die (w/ Nick Dearden)
April 01, 2024 15:19 - 33 minutes - 30.8 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Nick Dearden's Pharmanomics is an essential primer on how the pharmaceutical industry works, taking a tour across the globe to explain clearly why Big Pharma's profits come at the expense of public health. Dearden, an investigative journalist and director of Global Justice Now, destroys the argument that high drug prices are necessary in order to maintain innovation. He shows how the pharmaceutical industry has pushed drugs that don't w...
What Makes For a "Strong Town"? (w/ Allison Lirish Dean)
March 29, 2024 15:45 - 43 minutes - 39.7 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Allison Lirish Dean is a journalist and urban planner in North Carolina. She is the author of a recent piece for the Current Affairs print edition (and now available online) critiquing the "Strong Towns" organization. Strong Towns is highly critical of suburban sprawl and many of its suggestions for improving our cities and towns are sensible. But Allison argues that in its disdain for "government" and its rejection of important progres...
How White Supremacist Ideology Made Its Way Into Music Theory (w/ Philip Ewell)
March 27, 2024 11:00 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Philip Ewell is a professor of music theory and the author of the new book On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press). Ewell is one of the most "controversial" music theorists in the country, having sparked a major controversy in his field by criticizing the "white racial frame" that dominates in music theory. Ewell argued that much of mainstream music theory has been build around unstat...
Gary Younge's 30-Year Panorama of the African Diaspora
March 25, 2024 14:51 - 37 minutes - 34.1 MBGary Younge spent three decades as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian, where he became one of the publication's most incisive and widely-read contributors. His new book, Dispatches from the Diaspora, collects some of the best of Gary's reporting and commentary. It is a unique collection of snapshots from the African diaspora, from Barbados to London to Ferguson to South Africa. Gary recounts meetings with Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Desmond Tutu, and other greats, as well as highlight...
Why The Cop City Indictment Threatens Everyone's Freedom (w/ Christopher Bruce)
March 22, 2024 21:10 - 25 minutes - 22.9 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Originally aired 9/19/2023 Dozens of protesters in Atlanta have recently been hit with serious charges, including domestic terrorism and racketeering, stemming from protest activity over "Cop City," a proposed police training center in the forest outside the city. The Defend the Atlanta Forest movement has been occupying parts of the forest and clashing with police and construction companies, and prosecutors have now come down hard on ...
Why We Need Utopias (w/ Kristen Ghodsee)
March 20, 2024 14:54 - 42 minutes - 38.5 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Kristen Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of books like Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and, most recently, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life. Today she joins to explain why she believes utopian thinking, and studying the utopian experiments that people have engaged in across history, can help us figure...
ZINNOPHOBIA - Why So Many Still Fear "A People's History of the United States" (w/ David Detmer)
March 19, 2024 14:57 - 58 minutes - 53.7 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! David Detmer is the author of the book Zinnophobia: The Battle Over History in Education, Politics, and Scholarship. David's book was published five years ago, after former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels became the president of Purdue University and immediately tried to ban Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. Detmer, a Purdue professor and former student of Zinn, set out to understand the remarkable hostility ("Zinnop...
Why Do We Have Any Poverty In America When It's Such a Solvable Problem? (w/ Matt Desmond)
March 15, 2024 18:09 - 20 minutes - 18.9 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Matthew Desmond's bestselling book Poverty, By America poses a straightforward question: Why is there any poverty at all in such a wealthy country as the United States? Surely we could solve the problem of poverty if we were committed to doing so. Desmond points a finger at those who profit from poverty and argues that there is no justification for our inaction. Desmond, a leading sociologist whose work has won the Pulitzer Prize and th...
Mini-Cast: Ending Period Poverty Through the "Menstrual Equity for All" Act (w/ Grace Meng)
March 13, 2024 14:50 - 16 minutes - 14.8 MB"I’m pretty sure that some of my colleagues have signed on to my bill because they wanted me to stop talking about periods on the floor of the House." — Grace Meng Grace Meng represents the 6th District of New York in the United States Congress. She recently reintroduced her Menstrual Equity for All Act, which aims to dramatically expand free access to menstrual products across the country. She joins today to discuss the problem of period poverty and what it would take to solve it. A trans...
There Is No Alternative to Ending Fossil Fuel Use (w/ Lorne Stockman)
March 11, 2024 15:34 - 45 minutes - 41.2 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Lorne Stockman is the research co-director at Oil Change International, which is dedicated to exposing the harms caused by fossil fuel use and advocating for a green transition. Today Lorne joins us to rebut some common nonsense conservative talking points on climate change, to explain how a transition to 100% renewable energy can happen, and to give a clear assessment of how much progress we've made so far and how much is left to go. I...
Why "Climate Optimism" Is Irrational and What Global Climate Justice Requires (w/ Jag Bhalla)
March 08, 2024 12:00 - 43 minutes - 39.4 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jag Bhalla is a contributor to Current Affairs who has also written for Scientific American and Big Think. His pieces for our magazine have frequently focused on debunking popular narratives about climate change and arguing that anything resembling a just future will require a fundamental change in the distribution of global wealth and consumption. Read his articles here: ‘Climate Optimism’ Is Dangerous and Irrational We Can’t Have Cl...
Is Being "Moderate" Actually How Democrats Win? (w/ Alex Bronzini-Vender)
March 06, 2024 12:00 - 38 minutes - 35.3 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Alex Bronzini-Vender has contributed several articles to Current Affairs, about progressive politics in the U.S. today. In his first, "Progressives Aren’t Hurting the Democratic Party—In Fact, They’re The Only Thing Saving It," he looks at his home state of New York. Bronzini-Vender argues that, contrary to the narrative that tough-on-crime Democrats are more "electable," the most progressive Democrats are in fact scoring the most impor...
The Many Layers of Injustice in American Criminal Punishment (w/ Stephen Bright & James Kwak)
March 04, 2024 15:49 - 36 minutes - 33.2 MBGet new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today we are joined by Stephen Bright and James Kwak to discuss their new book The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts. The book is a comprehensive primer on the problems with the American criminal court system, from the power of prosecutors to the underfunding of public defenders to the biases of judges to the obstacles to getting a wrongful conviction overturned. Bryan Stev...
Can The Concept of "Philanthropy" Be Saved? (w/ Amy Schiller)
February 28, 2024 15:51 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBPhilanthropy 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 far too much damned money. But Amy Schiller, in The P...
What Would It Take To Have a Democracy? (w/ Thom Hartmann)
February 26, 2024 15:52 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MBThom Hartmann is America's #1 progressive radio host and the author of the "Hidden History" series of books. His latest, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, encouragingly argues that democracy is the most natural form of organization. Drawing from examples from the animal kingdom to the Iroquois confederacy to Thomas Paine, Hartmann lays out a vision of what it would mean to have an actual democracy. He counsels against pessimism, though ...
How Did the Idea of Being "Self-Made" Come About? (w/ Tara Isabella Burton)
February 23, 2024 16:55 - 36 minutes - 33 MBTara Isabella Burton is a novelist and the author of the new nonfiction book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, a history of the rise of the idea of a curated self. Tara's book looks at the transition from seeing human beings as made by God to being made by our own individual wills. From Renaissance painters to the famous dandy Beau Brummell to Thomas Edison to contemporary Instagram influencers and reality television stars, Tara looks at those who have care...
Our Plan to Make It Actually Enjoyable to Read The News
February 21, 2024 16:08 - 33 minutes - 30.4 MBCurrent Affairs has recently launched a new project: the Current Affairs News Briefing, a twice-weekly digest of important (and often neglected) news stories. We're really tired of having to sift through a mountain of clickbait and ads every morning to "find the news," so we're putting together our own alternative, which relays the things that matter most in the distinctive CA style. We think fans of our magazine and podcast will enjoy it! The News Briefing's chief researcher and writer is ...
The Role of Drugs in American Life (w/ Benjamin Fong)
February 19, 2024 16:15 - 37 minutes - 34.7 MBBenjamin Y. Fong is the associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and the author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge. From cigarettes to crack to opioids, Fong's book looks at how the United States became a country with a major drug habit. He talks about the role of private industry in monetizing addictive chemicals, and the hideous consequences of the war on drugs. For a leftist, drugs pose a cert...
The History of Arab-Jews Can Change Our Understanding of The World (w/ Avi Shlaim)
February 16, 2024 19:13 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBAvi Shlaim is a distinguished historian and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. He is one of the Israeli "New Historians" whose pathbreaking work debunked some of Israel's most cherished national myths. Now he has written a fascinating memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew that challenges conventional understandings of Zionism, the binary categories of "Arabs"/"Jews," and the very nature of nationalism. Prof. Shlaim is known as a "British-Israeli" his...
A HEATED Encounter with Chris Rufo: Critical Race Theory, The Left, and American History
February 14, 2024 15:47 - 52 minutes - 47.9 MBOriginally aired 7/23/2023. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today we have another in our Contentious Arguments series, as Nathan clashes with Christopher Rufo, the architect of the right's "critical race theory" moral panic and a close advisor of Ron DeSantis. Rufo has lately been criticized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for appearing to retaliate against public university professors for their political beliefs in his capacity as a trustee of Ne...
The Dark Side of Fashion (w/ Alyssa Hardy)
February 12, 2024 15:54 - 37 minutes - 34 MBAlyssa Hardy is a fashion journalist whose work has turned in recent years to exposing the underbelly of the industry, from the labor conditions of those who make the clothes to the colossal amounts of waste in our clothing industry and the climate consequences of "fast fashion." Today she joins to discuss her book Worn Out: How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion's Sins, which is appreciative of good style but devastatingly critical of an industry where the people who make the clothes are mercil...
How To Make Schools That Children Actually Enjoy Going To (w/ Lauren Fadiman)
February 09, 2024 12:00 - 44 minutes - 40.7 MBSchool sucks. But why? And must it? For our print magazine, Lauren Fadiman writes about how radical leftists have historically tried to rethink schooling entirely, to create alternative schools that truly nourish the mind and soul rather than simply preparing kids to enter the workforce. Today she joins for a discussion of why we shouldn't just think of fixing schools as a matter of increasing their funding, but should broaden our imaginations and look to historic (and contemporary) examples...
How Rupert Murdoch Killed The Only Good Social Media Platform (w/ Michael Tedder)
February 07, 2024 11:00 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBPerhaps only those between the ages of about 30 and 35 will remember the golden years of MySpace, which dominated social media before Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. MySpace was a mess, but it's looked back on fondly by many, in part because it encouraged individual expression and customization. Michael Tedder, in his new book Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music shows that MySpace allowed musical culture to flourish in a way that succeeding social networks haven't. This was in part because t...
How Labor Can Drive a Hard Bargain (w/ Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor)
February 05, 2024 16:10 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBOn this program, we have previously discussed the inspiring fight waged by the Amazon Labor Union on Staten Island, and the confrontational tactics that can help unions win recognition despite the best efforts of corporations to thwart them. But even when unions win recognition, in many ways the battle is only just beginning. At Amazon and Starbucks, workers may have won recognition, but they haven't actually gotten contracts, because the companies are ruthless at the negotiating table (and ...
Learning From Neglected Novels By 1900s Radicals (w/ the Rickard Sisters)
February 02, 2024 15:47 - 37 minutes - 34.7 MBThe Rickard Sisters, Sophie and Scarlett, have produced two wonderful graphic novel adaptations of books by early 20th century radicals. First they made The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, adapted from Robert Tressell's classic socialist story about a group of house painters who experience all of the horrors of laissez-faire capitalism. Then the Rickards made No Surrender, adapted from Constance Maud's neglected novel about the suffragette movement. Today, the Rickards join to talk about...
Why Minimalism? (w/ Kyle Chayka)
January 31, 2024 11:00 - 40 minutes - 37.3 MBKyle Chayka is a cultural critic and staff writer for the New Yorker. (Incidentally, he also wrote a piece back in 2017 that covered the early years of Current Affairs.) Kyle's book The Longing For Less: Living With Minimalism, is a delightful, profound exploration of the idea of "minimalism." Beginning with the Marie Kondo phenomenon, Kyle tours world history and culture to discuss everything from Thoreau's cabin to John Cage's music to Japanese rock gardens to the sculptures of Donald Judd...
Is U.S. Democracy Just Going To Be Dysfunctional Forever? (w/ Benjamin Studebaker)
January 29, 2024 16:06 - 59 minutes - 54.2 MBBenjamin Studebaker's new book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut is a provocative critique of contemporary American politics. Studebaker argues that "none of the existing political movements in the United States are capable of responding to [our] economic problems." He's critical not only of conservatives who stir up culture war issues to distract from people's economic suffering, but of a left which he sees as irrationally committed to goals and strategies that won't...
What Happens to the Disappointed When Social Movements Fail? (w/ Sara Marcus)
January 26, 2024 18:46 - 35 minutes - 32.5 MBSara Marcus is the author of Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. A lot of studies of social movements look at movement triumphs, but Marcus is interested in what happens when people fail, when they throw themselves into a cause and (at least in the short term) it doesn't react its goals. Often, she argues, disappointment ends up forming the basis of new culture, expressing itself through art and music, sometimes in subtle ways. There is also a...
The Disaster of Privatizing Everything (w/ Donald Cohen)
January 24, 2024 16:11 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MBYou name it, it's been privatized somewhere in the United States. Schools, roads, libraries, courts, prisons, and even the law itself have been outsourced to private companies by state and local governments who buy into the idea that The Private Sector is more efficient at serving the functions of government. But this is baloney, as Donald Cohen shows in The Privatization of Everything How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back (co-written with Allen Mikael...
The Process of Leaving Jordan Peterson Behind (w/ Benjamin Howard)
January 22, 2024 17:51 - 47 minutes - 43.3 MBBenjamin Howard is a Current Affairs reader who was once a huge fan of Canadian psychologist, pundit, and self-help guru Jordan Peterson. But Howard eventually became a harsh critic of Peterson's work, to the point where he is putting together a website called JordanPetersonIsWrong.com. Today he joins us to explain how and why he changed his mind. We talk about the sources of Peterson's appeal and how Benjamin found that by getting to a different place in his life and learning critical think...
How The Super-Rich Really Live (w/ Michael Mechanic)
January 19, 2024 15:56 - 51 minutes - 46.8 MBMichael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother Jones and the author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. Michael's book goes beyond quantitative statistics about inequality to take a close-up look at the actual lives of the American oligarchs. Today he joins to discuss life inside "the bubble" that the super-wealthy inhabit—why they ceaselessly pursue endless accumulation, how they rationalize their privileges, and how they rig the system to make sure ...
How to Explain Socialism To People Who Aren't Socialists (w/ Danny Katch)
January 17, 2024 21:22 - 49 minutes - 45.7 MBDanny Katch is the author of the most accessible and entertaining existing introduction to socialist ideas, Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide To Human Liberation, available from Haymarket Books (in a new edition that promises 50% more socialism). Danny's book attempts something quite difficult: it tries to make reading about socialism fun. It's full of jokes and is non-dogmatic. It's a real blast and you should buy it! Today, Danny joins to discuss how he explains socialism in a way tha...
Exposing the Spurious Anti-Semitism Accusations That Helped Bring Down Corbyn (w/ Asa Winstanley)
January 15, 2024 19:13 - 46 minutes - 42.3 MBAsa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada is the author of the new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism, a bombshell exposé of how the burgeoning socialist movement in the British Labour Party was destroyed by false accusations of anti-Semitism, amplified in the British press. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of why, after such a promising take-off, Jeremy Corbyn's party leadership came to a calamitous end. Asa joins us today to explain the history of what happened and th...
Dreaming of a World Without Wells Fargo (w/ Terri Friedline)
January 12, 2024 15:42 - 39 minutes - 36.1 MBTerri Friedline is an associate professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She's also a contributor to Current Affairs, where she published one of our most unusual pieces ever: a piece of speculative utopian fiction about the end of Wells Fargo. Terri is also the author of the excellent book Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System. Today, Terri joins to explain why Wells Fargo is so pernicious that she wrote a story imagining its obliteration...
How "Influencing" Became an Industry (w/ Emily Hund)
January 10, 2024 16:50 - 32 minutes - 29.7 MBEmily Hund is the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media. Today she joins to discuss how "influencing" turned from something bloggers did, organically, to a giant industry where powerful commercial interests try to manufacture authenticity. Influencers are a paradox, because they have to work very hard in order to appear real, and if they ever stop seeming real they stop being paid. Hund takes us behind the curtain to try to sort out what's real and wha...
Why Americans Don't See Or Talk About Their Wars (w/ Norman Solomon)
January 08, 2024 15:58 - 43 minutes - 39.6 MBToday Norman Solomon returns to the program to discuss his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. Norman is one of the country's leading progressive media critics. In this book, he talks about how the media helps construct a mental wall between the people of the United States and the victims of U.S. foreign policy. He talks about how the reality of violence is kept from view and how heroic whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Hale are...
What "Economic Freedom" Would Look Like (w/ Mark Paul)
January 05, 2024 20:31 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBMark Paul is an economist who argues that there can be no meaningful freedom without economic freedom—by which he does not mean the libertarian idea of the freedom to exploit others. Mark's book The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights explains how having a functional and free country will require establishing new rights: the right to employment, the right to housing, the right to healthcare, the right to a clean environment, etc. Today he joins us to explain...
Can The Love of Menswear Be Justified? (w/ Sam Miller McDonald)
January 03, 2024 17:19 - 41 minutes - 37.7 MBSamuel Miller McDonald is a regular contributor to Current Affairs, where he has written about such disparate subjects as collectivism, the food system, Game of Thrones, cultural atrophy, ecofascism, His Dark Materials, the term "development," the history of oil, the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, the future of cities, and the forests of Madagascar. In our latest issue, Sam takes on one of his most challenging subjects yet: menswear. Sam is unapologetic about enjoying clothes, and showcase...
On Musical Plagiarism: The Case of Ed Sheeran vs. Marvin Gaye
December 20, 2023 16:01 - 40 minutes - 37.4 MBToday on the podcast, we dive into the question of what kinds of musical borrowing constitute "influence" versus "plagiarism." In the news at the moment is a lawsuit against pop singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who is accused of lifting parts of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" for his song "Thinking Out Loud." We're going to listen to both songs, and you can decide what you think. But we're also going to go on a tour through musical history and see how supposed "original" artists are often blat...
How Socialists Took Over The Cities (w/ Shelton Stromquist)
December 18, 2023 17:10 - 35 minutes - 32.3 MBToday we hear a little-told story, the story of how idealistic socialists around the world, starting around 1890, took over city governments. Prof. Sheldon Stromquist is the author of the book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso), which looks at how leftists in places from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a small mining town in the Australian outback tried to implement socialist ideals in their cities and towns. In Sweden, in Britain, in Austria's "Re...
Why Does The Law Fail Women So Badly? (w/ Julie Suk)
December 15, 2023 15:46 - 42 minutes - 39.2 MBJulie Suk is a professor of law at Fordham University. Her new book After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It is about why the law has not succeeded at eliminating patriarchy despite advances in formal gender equality. Suk acknowledges that legal feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped bring about equal protection under law, but shows that, just as "colorblind" racial policies leave existing hierarchies untouched, "equal treatment" fails to alter gender imbalances of ...
Are "Family Values" The Problem? (w/ Sophie Lewis)
December 13, 2023 16:51 - 39 minutes - 36 MBSophie Lewis is a radical critic of the family. In Lewis's books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family and Abolish The Family, she argues that families are expected to take on functions that should be the responsibility of society as a whole, and that the results are disastrous. Families "privatize care." People have to depend on their families to fund their schooling or to take care of them in old age, which means that those who don't having loving and supportive families will simply...
Why Our Healthcare System Needs to Do More than Just "Fairly" Distribute Scarce Resources (w/ Lily Sánchez)
December 11, 2023 21:53 - 43 minutes - 40.2 MBLily Sánchez is the managing editor of Current Affairs, and also a physician. In a new article for the magazine, Lily draws on her experiences practicing medicine to discuss different conceptions of what health justice requires. She reviews an acclaimed book called The People's Hospital by Ricardo Nuila, which covers a public hospital that Lily also worked at. Nuila sees this hospital as a model for fairness in healthcare. Sánchez, by contrast, sees it as a place that can't help but be unfai...
Understanding Reactionary Political Philosophy (w/ Matt McManus)
December 08, 2023 18:30 - 48 minutes - 44.1 MBToday we are joined by political philosopher Matt McManus of the University of Michigan. Matt has contributed to Current Affairs and collaborated with Nathan on articles about Douglas Murray and the right-wing disdain for college. At the time of this recording, Matt was reading Ron DeSantis' autobiography, which he has now written about for Jacobin. Matt has also written for CA about conservative faux-"populism", the right's long string of anti-"intellectual" intellectuals, and the American ...
Why the Labor Movement Needs to be Creative and Disruptive (w/ Jono Shaffer)
December 06, 2023 17:10 - 50 minutes - 46.5 MBJono Shaffer is a legendary labor organizer who was instrumental in the Justice for Janitors campaign. J4J successfully unionized Los Angeles janitorial workers under unbelievably difficult conditions—the janitors were undocumented and worked for contractors rather than buildings themselves, so they were easily fired. J4J built a movement that successfully pressured building owners to respect the rights of cleaning staff. Today Jono joins to explain how they did it and what the lessons are...
Can Our Times Even Be Satirized? (w/ Matt Bors and Ben Clarkson)
December 04, 2023 18:00 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBBen Clarkson is an illustrator and animator who has produced work for some of the best magazines in the country, including our own Current Affairs. Matt Bors is a leading political cartoonist and founder of The Nib. They have now teamed up to produce one of the wildest satirical comic books of all time, Justice Warriors. Set in a horrifying dystopia called Bubble City, where the rich live in a bubble dome and mutants inhabit a wasteland outside, the comic chronicles the times and crimes of t...