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 "Big Myth" That Markets Will Solve Everything Was Foisted on the World
December 01, 2023 17:09 - 41 minutes - 37.5 MBNaomi Oreskes is a historian of science at Harvard University. Erik M. Conway works as the historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Together they have just published The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. We've talked a lot on this program about that failures of neoclassical economics and the myth of the pristine free market whose great Invisible Hand delivers justice to all. But Oreskes and Conway are historians of science rather t...
How to Win Every Argument (w/ Mehdi Hasan)
November 29, 2023 18:35 - 39 minutes - 36.2 MBMehdi Hasan, who hosts The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC, is known as one of the most formidable interviewers in journalism. He has tangled with Blackwater's Erik Prince, John Bolton, Richard Dawkins, Paul Bremer, and many others. A video of a powerful speech he gave defending Islam at Oxford University has received 10 million views. He has now written a book on his methods, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, showing how to effectively confront and expose t...
Lessons for Today's Movements from the Radical "Young Lords" (w/ Johanna Fernández)
November 27, 2023 18:00 - 52 minutes - 48.1 MBJohanna Fernández is a historian of social movements who is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, a deeply researched history of one of the most vibrant and fascinating social movements of the 20th century. From their origins as a Chicago street gang in the early 60s, the Young Lords became an effective grassroots radical movement, the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panthers. They helped produce an early version of the "patient's bill of rights" in medicine, organized lea...
How Right-Wing Propaganda Gives People "Brain Worms" (w/ Adam Glenn)
November 24, 2023 18:00 - 41 minutes - 37.8 MBAdam Glenn is a Current Affairs reader who has produced a free online book called Brain Worms: How Right-Wing Propaganda Destroys Reason, Conscience, and Democracy. Today he joins to discuss how (and why) to engage with conservative arguments (which Nathan does a lot as well). The text of Adam's book usefully explains in plain language the flaws in right-wing philosophy, but the comprehensive bibliography alone is well worth browsing through. Adam explains how familiarizing yourself with the...
Banishing the "Bootstraps" Mythology from American Life (w/ Alissa Quart)
November 22, 2023 18:00 - 37 minutes - 34.1 MBAlissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of the new book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. Her book looks at the cruelty of the myths of being "self-made" or "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." In the first part of her book, Quart examines the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (one of Quart's chapters is called "Little House of Propaganda") to show how radicall...
How Come "Everyone Is Beautiful But Nobody is Horny"? (w/ R.S. Benedict)
November 20, 2023 17:57 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBR.S. Benedict is a speculative fiction writer whose popular 2021 essay "Everyone Is Beautiful But Nobody is Horny," published in Blood Knife, argued that the disappearance of sex from movies is linked to wider cultural trends toward the celebration of militarism and violence, the shunning of hedonistic pleasure, a utilitarian disdain for frivolous things, and increasing social isolation. Today, Benedict joins to discuss this essay as well as her 2022 piece on "safe fiction." We also tie in t...
How the U.S. "War on Terror" Spread Islamophobia Around the World (w/ Khaled Beydoun)
November 17, 2023 19:36 - 46 minutes - 43 MBKhaled Beydoun is a professor of law at Wayne State and the author of two books, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear and The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. American Islamophobia is a definitive analysis of the roots and spread of anti-Muslim animus in the United States, but The New Crusades expands the analysis to look at how the same bigotry manifests around the world, from France to India to China to New Zealand. The new book also show...
Where "Effective Altruism" and "Longtermism" Go Wrong (w/ Émile Torres)
November 15, 2023 18:27 - 55 minutes - 51 MBÉmile P. Torres is an intellectual historian who has recently become a prominent public critic of the ideologies of "effective altruism" and "longtermism," each of which is highly influential in Silicon Valley and which Émile argues contain worrying dystopian tendencies. In this conversation, Émile joins to explain what these ideas are, why the people who subscribe to them think they can change the world in very positive ways, and why Émile has come to be so strongly critical of them. Émile ...
How to Manipulate The Public Into Believing Corporate Lies (w/ Jennifer Jacquet)
November 13, 2023 18:57 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MBJennifer Jacquet is not actually an evil corporate consultant. She's a professor in NYU's Department of Environmental Studies and deputy director of the school's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. But you might think otherwise if you flipped open her book The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World, a tongue-in-cheek handbook supposedly directed toward CEOs who want to fully follow Milton Friedman's dictum that "The Social Responsibili...
How U.S. Foreign Policy Is Making War With China More Likely (w/ Van Jackson)
November 10, 2023 15:57 - 50 minutes - 46.5 MBVan Jackson is a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals, a harsh critic of the infamous "Blob." His Un-Diplomatic newsletter is essential reading (and its accompanying podcast essential listening), and his analyses of U.S. policy in the Pacific in Foreign Affairs are very useful for those who want to understand what is going on in the region. These include: Great-Power Competition Is Bad for Democracy America is Turning Asia into a Powder Keg The Problem With Primacy: America's Da...
How to Spot Pseudoscience About Sex Differences (w/ Cordelia Fine)
November 08, 2023 17:55 - 50 minutes - 46.4 MBCordelia Fine is a psychologist and philosopher of science whose work brilliantly demolishes myths about the "nature" of differences between men and women. Prof. Fine has written three books, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, and Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds. Today she joins for a conversation about various popular myths about how men and women are "wired" and why a lot of supp...
How to Respond to The Right—Introducing Nathan's New Book!
November 06, 2023 16:48 - 1 hour - 55.3 MBToday on the podcast: Nathan takes a turn as the guest, to discuss his new book Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments. Get your copy now! Responding to the Right goes through arguments about abortion, minimum wages, trans rights, immigration, Big Government and much more and shows both why right-wing talking points are wrong and how to effectively defeat them. In Part I of the book, Nathan discusses how conservative arguments work and why they can sound persua...
What Living Under Jim Crow Was Like In New Orleans (w/ Adolph Reed)
November 03, 2023 16:15 - 48 minutes - 44 MB“What I didn’t realize at the time was that what I was living through was the death paroxysms of the Jim Crow order.” — Adolph Reed Prof. Adolph Reed Jr. has been called (by Cornel West) “the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.” His new book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is a departure from Reed’s previous work in political science, as it is a personal reflection on his upbringing as part of the last generation to experience the Jim Crow south firsth...
Why Is The Internet So Broken? What Would a "People's Internet" Look Like? (w/ Ben Tarnoff)
November 01, 2023 15:29 - 41 minutes - 37.9 MBBen Tarnoff is the author of Internet For The People: The Fight For Our Digital Future. Today he joins to discuss what's wrong with the internet and how we fix it. Ben helps us to think more clearly about how the ownership of the underlying infrastructure of the internet affects our experiences—not just platforms like Facebook and Twitter but the "pipes." Ben takes us through the history of how the internet began as a public infrastructure project and gradually became privatized and shows us...
Exposing the Corporate "Mindfulness" Racket (w/ Ronald Purser)
October 30, 2023 18:05 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MB"When the individualized self bears sole responsibility for its happiness and emotional wellbeing, failure is synonymous with failure of the self, not external conditions.” — Ron Purser Ronald Purser is a Professor of Management at San Francisco State University and the author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality. Prof. Purser’s book exposes how corporations have pushed pseudo-Buddhist “mindfulness” training to shift the burden of dealing with stress to ...
Understanding The Right's Never-Ending War to Destroy Social Security (w/ Alex Lawson)
October 26, 2023 18:59 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBAlex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works and the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. He has spent his career working to try to save Social Security from Republican (and sometimes Democratic) attempts to "reform" (i.e., cut) it. Today, Alex joins to discuss: Why Social Security is a huge social democratic achievement and the fight it took to get it in the first place Why the right has always hated Social Security (it shows government can work ...
How To Hold The New York Times Accountable (w/ Margaret Sullivan)
May 02, 2023 16:00 - 40 minutes - 36.7 MBHow To Hold The New York Times Accountable (w/ Margaret Sullivan) Margaret Sullivan is one of the country’s most astute media critics. During her time as Public Editor of the New York Times (essentially an ombudsman) Sullivan became widely respected for her willingness to call out the paper’s lapses, often to the considerable consternation of her Times colleagues. Sullivan criticized the paper’s reliance on anonymous government sources, its practice of allowing sources to approve their own ...
The Pseudoscience and Faux Feminism of Sobriety Memoirs (w/ Jennifer Dines)
April 24, 2023 16:00 - 42 minutes - 38.6 MB“It’s not that hard to let yourself be led by something that doesn’t match up with your morals, when you’re desperate.” — Jennifer Dines Jennifer Dines is a Boston-based schoolteacher, poet, and essayist who has written an article for Current Affairs called "The Quit-Lit Pseudoscience and Faulty Feminism of Women’s Sobriety Memoirs," which critiques the bestselling books targeted at women recovering from alcoholism. In her piece, Dines shows how these books often try to sell women on expen...
The Dysfunctions of Our "Democracy" and How To Fix Them (w/ Tom Geoghegan)
April 17, 2023 19:00 - 30 minutes - 28 MBThomas Geoghegan is a labor lawyer and writer whose latest book is The History of Democracy Has Yet To Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again. MSNBC's Chris Hayes says of the book: "This book made me laugh out loud and also gave me glimpses of an entire horizon of possibility I hadn't seen before.” Indeed, while Tom's book examines the hopeless dysfunction of our political system (including amusingly describing his own effort to run for Congress), it's also a look at how w...
STAY WOKE: Vital Lessons From Black Musical History (w/ Samuel James)
March 27, 2023 21:10 - 1 hour - 61.6 MB“There’s an old adage ‘He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it.’ But what’s missing in that phrase is that there are the people who are in charge of keeping your history. And they can make you forget it. They can keep it from you. And then you’re doomed to repeat something that they want you to repeat.” — Samuel James Samuel James is a musician and storyteller from Portland, Maine, who specializes in blues and roots music. Samuel has a deep knowledge of American musical history an...
The Entirely Predictable Collapse of FTX and the Future of Crypto Cons (w/ Stephen Diehl)
November 29, 2022 23:18 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBOne of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, recently imploded spectacularly. Its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been called "the next Warren Buffett" and was a Democratic megadonor as well as a major funder of the "Effective Altruism" movement. Overnight, Bankman-Fried saw his fortune and his company wiped out, and he is now under criminal investigation. To explain what happened, and why we keep seeing spectacular frauds in the crypto industry, we are joined today by Stephen Die...
Why Socialism and Trans Liberation Need Each Other (w/ Shon Faye)
November 29, 2022 23:16 - 51 minutes - 46.7 MBShon Faye is the author of the book The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice is Justice For All, available from Verso. The title of the book is meant slightly ironically, because part of Faye's argument is directed against talking about a "transgender issue" in the first place. Faye's book is a manifesto for a specifically socialist form of trans liberation, which she contrasts with the politics of liberal inclusion, which is often "inclusion within deeply unequal at best and at worse quite oppr...
How a Marine Became a Critic of U.S. Imperialism (w/ Lyle Jeremy Rubin)
November 29, 2022 23:13 - 43 minutes - 40.1 MBLyle Jeremy Rubin is a veteran of the U.S. Marines who served in Afghanistan. He is the author of the new memoir Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming, which documents his evolution from a Young Republican patriot into a socialist critic of U.S. empire through direct exposure to the front-line realities of the U.S. “war on terror.” He shows how the “politics of overcompensation” convinces young men who want to feel secure and masculine to submit to oppressive hierarchical ...
Why The Market Is Not The Economy (w/ Nomi Prins)
November 29, 2022 23:12 - 36 minutes - 33.1 MBNomi Prins is one of the country's leading financial journalists, who has gone from working on Wall Street to exposing the inner workings of the economy and how it is rigged in favor of the powerful. Her books include Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, and most recently Permanent Distortion: How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever. Today Nomi joins Nathan to explain how the financial markets and the "real ...
What Happens When McKinsey Shows Up?
November 29, 2022 23:10 - 36 minutes - 33.3 MBMcKinsey & Co. is the world's leading consulting company. But it also does a lot of work that's, well, pretty downright sinister, and it's very secretive about that work. But in the new book When McKinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm,Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe of the New York Times expose the hidden hand of McKinsey across the world. McKinsey has assisted opioid manufacturers, tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies, ICE, and auth...
The Editors Take a MasterClass: Anna Wintour Edition
November 29, 2022 23:08 - 47 minutes - 43.9 MBThe editorial team of Current Affairs is fascinated by the online learning platform MasterClass, on which A-list celebrities offer “classes” that are sometimes very cool but frequently of dubious educational value. We have previously taken and discussed the MasterClasses of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. (We have not yet mustered the fortitude to sit through the Leadership Lessons From George W. Bush MasterClass.) Today we take and discuss the class offered by longtime Vogue editor-in-chi...
Why Our Wars Never End (w/ Chris Hedges)
November 29, 2022 23:05 - 41 minutes - 37.6 MBChris Hedges, who appeared on this program a few months back after the publication of his book Our Class, returns to discuss his powerful new book The Greatest Evil is War, which shows the true face of war and exposes the propagandistic narratives that help to sustain and escalate wars. Hedges, a veteran war correspondent, shows us the people who actually do the fighting and the dying, from those maimed and traumatized for life to those who must collect the corpses from the battlefield. He s...
A Merciless Intellectual Brawl Between a YIMBY and a "Left NIMBY"
November 29, 2022 23:01 - 1 hour - 65.6 MBFor some time, Nathan has been critical of the "YIMBY" (Yes In My Backyard) movement, which takes stances on housing policy that are sometimes classified as "market fundamentalist" or "trickle-down." Nathan's article "The Only Thing Worse Than a NIMBY is a YIMBY" is scathing, and Current Affairs has published a public service announcement discouraging people from letting their friends become YIMBYs. For their part, online YIMBYs generally do not care for Nathan, and he has been branded a lea...
How Billionaires Plan To Escape The World They've Destroyed
November 04, 2022 20:59 - 49 minutes - 45 MBDouglas Rushkoff is a media and tech critic who has been called "one of the world's ten most influential intellectuals" by MIT. He has hosted PBS Frontline documentaries and written many books including Life Inc., Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and most recently Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Today we talk about how Silicon Valley's elite are trying to shield themselves from the consequences of inequality and climate destruction. Douglas' new book bu...
How Giant Corporations Squeeze Every Last Penny Out of Writers and Musicians
November 04, 2022 20:54 - 49 minutes - 45.5 MBRebecca Giblin is a professor at the University of Melbourne and the co-author (with Cory Doctorow) of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back. The book is about how corporations that act as gatekeepers between the creators of creative work and the public are able to use their power to extract huge amounts of wealth from workers. From YouTube to Amazon to LiveNation concerts to news conglomerates to Spotify, Giblin and D...
How to Save Sick Piglets While Avoiding Jail Time (w/ Wayne Hsiung and Matt Johnson)
November 04, 2022 20:51 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBWayne Hsiung is a former law professor who was recently acquitted by a Utah jury after being charged with stealing two piglets from a factory farm, in a story that made national news. In 2017, animal liberation activist group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) released a video showing the horrifying conditions of pigs in a facility run by Smithfield Foods, and showing the rescue of two dying piglets from the farm. The activists, including Hsiung, were pursued relentlessly for the next five years...
How To Be A Smart Media Critic Who Knows Propaganda When They See It
November 04, 2022 20:48 - 59 minutes - 54.2 MBNorman Solomon is one of the foremost progressive media critics, having founded the Institute for Public Accuracy and authored or co-authored many books on media including Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death, and The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. Today Norman joins to give us a crash course in how to be an informed and careful consumer of news media who can spot bias and buzzwords. Norman expla...
How Do You Create A Leftist Animated Cartoon That Is Actually Funny?
November 04, 2022 20:45 - 51 minutes - 46.7 MBShawn Vulliez and Aaron Moritz are the creators and hosts of the utopian leftist comedy podcast Srsly Wrong and also the creators of the new animated series Papa and Boy, currently making its debut on the worker-owned streaming platform Means TV. Papa and Boy is an absurdist comedy, but it's rich with political and social commentary. It's set in a dystopian world where fathers tyrannize over sons and justify their rule with a spurious ideology. Today Sean and Aaron join to discuss how they...
Why You Don't Need To Worry About "Superintelligent AI" Destroying The World (But Artificial Intelligence Is Still Scary)
November 04, 2022 20:41 - 48 minutes - 44.6 MBSome, including both geniuses like Stephen Hawking and nongeniuses like Elon Musk, have warned that artificial intelligence poses a major risk to humankind's future. Some in the "Effective Altruist" community have become convinced that artificial intelligence is developing so rapidly that we could soon create "superintelligent" computers that are so much smarter than us that they could take over and pose a threat to our existence as a species. Books like Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence and ...
The Exciting Rise of the New U.S. Leftist Movement (w/ Raina Lipsitz)
November 04, 2022 20:38 - 40 minutes - 36.8 MBRaina Lipsitz is a journalist whose book The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics profiles the young leftists who are bringing socialism back to American politics. Raina looks at high-profile campaigns like those of AOC and Bernie Sanders, but also at the left political victories that fly under the radar, occurring on city councils and in state legislatures. To anyone who wants to feel hopeful that a new generation of political leaders is rising ...
Why We Have To Teach Kids to Analyze and Debunk Propaganda
November 04, 2022 20:37 - 41 minutes - 38.4 MBSam Shain is a public school teacher whose book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awareness argues that K-12 students need to be equipped with the ability to analyze media and spot misinformation. This crucial skill, which helps them become informed participants in democracy and resist demagogues, is not actually widely taught. Shain explains how he teaches his students critical thinking, including playing "spot the fallacy" with Ben Shapiro videos and having students write ...
How the "Economic Style of Reasoning" Came to Dominate Social Policy
November 04, 2022 20:35 - 44 minutes - 40.6 MBProf. Elizabeth Popp Berman is the author of Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, which documents how a style of reasoning that heavily emphasizes efficiency over equality came to dominate U.S. social policy. In our conversation we discuss the rise of "cost-benefit analysis" and how applying the economists' favored framework excludes important values from being taken into account. We talk about what the "economic style" misses and the solutions ...
Vietnam Veteran W.D. Ehrhart on What Americans Still Don't Know About the War (Part II)
October 04, 2022 18:02 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MBToday we return to our interview with Dr. W.D. Ehrhart, for the second part of a conversation on what Americans should know about the war in Vietnam. The photograph is of Dr. Ehrhart himself in Vietnam. It appears accompanying his 2017 New York Times article "God, Jesus, and Vietnam." Edited by Tim Gray.
Vietnam Veteran W.D. Ehrhart on What Americans Still Don't Know About the War (Part I)
October 04, 2022 17:59 - 31 minutes - 28.9 MBDr. W.D. Ehrhart is a Vietnam veteran, poet, teacher, and essayist who was active in Vietnam Veterans Against The War and has written multiple volumes of memoirs about his observations of the war and his return to civilian life afterwards, beginning with Vietnam-Perkasie. He has been hailed as "the dean of Vietnam war poets" and "one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." His work offers a blunt and often haunting look at the realities of war. His collected poems, on Vietnam and ma...
How to Spot Copaganda (w/ Alex Karakatsanis)
October 04, 2022 17:56 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBAlec Karakatsanis is one of the country's most forceful and persuasive critics of the criminal punishment system. Alec is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and as a civil rights lawyer he has fought against the vicious punishment system that cages the poor and plunges them into debt. Alec's work as a lawyer has been covered in the New York Times and he was recently a guest on the Daily Show. Alec's book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustic...
Can The Minions Tell Us Anything?
September 23, 2022 15:37 - 59 minutes - 54.4 MB"I will never again spend money on a Minion movie. ... I surprised myself. I went into this a huge fan of the Minions. And I thought 'Oh, they're so popular, we should talk about them on the left.' And I don't regret this conversation at all. It has deepened my understanding. But I have come out of it as an anti-fan." — Yasmin Nair Current Affairs podcasts have been deadly serious lately, with many shows devoted to U.S. foreign policy, including episodes on Palestine (Part I, Part II), Af...
Palestine Part II: Rights and Crimes in the Conflict Today
September 23, 2022 15:34 - 42 minutes - 38.8 MBIn our previous episode on Palestine with Rashid Khalidi, we discussed the early history of the conflict. Today we speak with Noura Erakat, human rights lawyer and professor at Rutgers University, whose book Justice For Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press) examines how international law does and doesn't apply in Israel and Palestine. We discuss why a two-state solution has not been implemented, and how international law has treated Palestinians over time.
The Enduring Moral Insight and Satirical Power of Charlie Chaplin and The Twilight Zone
September 23, 2022 15:32 - 56 minutes - 51.9 MBToday we dive into old cinema and television, looking at the films of Charlie Chaplin and the television show The Twilight Zone, both of which have recently been the subject of essays in Current Affairs by Ciara Moloney. Ciara has written for Current Affairs on subjects ranging from the 2020 Democratic candidates' range of merch to Hollywood's depictions of George W. Bush. Her essays on Chaplin's films and The Twilight Zone make the case that while both have become enduring cultural tropes a...
Sensible Thinking About U.S. Foreign Policy: Russia, China, and the Threat of World War
September 23, 2022 15:30 - 45 minutes - 41.5 MBBranko Marcetic is a staff writer for Jacobin and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He is also a leading heterodox commentator on U.S. foreign policy, and has written critically about the U.S. approach to China and the war in Ukraine. Branko recently wrote an article for Current Affairs arguing that the Eisenhower administration's cautious response to Soviet aggression, prompted by the risk of nuclear escalation, offers an important set of lessons for us today. Today...
How Does the U.S. Exercise Power Around the World?
September 23, 2022 15:28 - 51 minutes - 47.1 MBVijay Prashad is a leading historian on the Global South and U.S. empire. His books include Washington Bullets, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World and most recently The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power, which features Prashad in dialogue with Noam Chomsky. Today, he joins editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson for a spirited conversation on U.S. foreign policy. The discussion covers, among other things: Why the U.S. left has an obligat...
Why Is There an Israel-Palestine Conflict in the First Place?
September 23, 2022 15:26 - 56 minutes - 51.3 MBToday, we see children killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes, but anyone who gets their understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict from news reports lacks the context necessary to make sense of the horrors they are seeing. To understand why there is an Israel-Palestine conflict today, we have to go back a hundred years to see what Palestine was like before the state of Israel was established and how things changed. Joining us to explain the background of the conflict is one of the leadi...
Afghanistan Through Western Eyes
September 23, 2022 15:21 - 51 minutes - 47.2 MBCurrent Affairs editor at large Yasmin Nair and editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson have both written articles that deal with the country of Afghanistan. Yasmin's Evergreen Review piece, "Sharbat Gula Is Not Lost" is about the woman pictured in the iconic "Afghan Girl" photo that appeared on the cover of National Geographic. Nathan's essay "What Do We Owe Afghanistan?" (co-authored with Noam Chomsky) appears in Current Affairs and is a history of the American war from 2001 to 2021, looking at...
How Can We Deal With America's Gun Problem?
August 25, 2022 22:05 - 42 minutes - 38.7 MBDavid Hemenway is a professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the author of Private Guns, Public Health which argues that there are many practical ways to significantly reduce the epidemic of American gun deaths. In his book While We Were Sleeping Success Stories in Injury and Violence Prevention, David provides case studies of previous efforts at reducing injuries and deaths, showing 60 different success stories that have made us all safer. David previously w...
The Moral Atrocity of Factory Farming and Why We Can't Look Away
August 19, 2022 12:27 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBCurrent Affairs is proud to be a publication that takes animal rights seriously. From our lighthearted looks at manatees, ants, and cats, to our more serious pieces on the Orwellian language of the factory farming industry, the reason animal communication shouldn't be the justification for animal rights, and the need for "Veticare For All," we have always believed that left politics and animal welfare go together. Today on the podcast we are joined by Marina Bolotnikova, a freelance journal...
Jeffrey Sachs On Why He Concluded COVID-19 Probably Came From a Lab (And Why Nobody Wants to Talk About It)
August 19, 2022 12:25 - 31 minutes - 29.3 MBProf. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has also served as the chair of the COVID-19 commission for leading medical journal The Lancet. Through his investigations as the head of the COVID-19 commission, Prof. Sachs has come to the conclusion that there is extremely dangerous biotechnology research being kept from public view, that the United States was suppor...