Current Affairs
466 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago - ★★★★★ - 576 ratingsA podcast of politics and culture, from the editors of Current Affairs magazine.
Homepage Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
Episodes
Why Children Make Such Good Philosophers
August 19, 2022 12:24 - 44 minutes - 40.3 MBIn this episode, we discuss the strange creatures known as children. Scott Hershovitz is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Michigan and the author of Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy With My Kids, which chronicles (hilariously) his philosophical conversations with his sons Rex and Hank. The book is a great primer on some basic philosophical questions for adult readers, but it also shows that children are more profound philosophers than they are often a...
The Life of Murray Bookchin / Revolution in Rojava
August 19, 2022 12:23 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBJanet Biehl is one of the leading libertarian socialist writers in the country. For several decades, she was the partner and collaborator of the late political theorist Murray Bookchin, who stood, in the words of the Village Voice, "at the pinnacle of the genre of utopian social criticism." In bracing works like "Listen, Marxist!" and The Ecology of Freedom, Bookchin laid out the basis for an anti-capitalist, ecologically-oriented, and anti-authoritarian left. Bookchin's analysis was often p...
How Much Is a Whale Worth? (w/ Adrienne Buller)
August 19, 2022 12:22 - 46 minutes - 42.7 MBIn our last episode, we took a break from the depressing facts of the ecological crisis to simply marvel at the immense variety of experiences and sensations in the animal kingdom. Today we return to the tough stuff, although we begin with 30 seconds of whalesong to relax our spirits. Nathan's guest is Adrienne Buller of the progressive UK think tank Common Wealth, whose book The Value of a Whale: On The Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester University Press) is a thorough, devastating...
The Wonderful World of Animal Senses and How They Expand Our View of The Universe (w/ Ed Yong)
August 19, 2022 12:20 - 41 minutes - 38.1 MBEd Yong of The Atlantic is the author of the new bestselling book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which is about all of the fascinating ways in which animal senses differ from our own, and how they show the immense amount of information in the universe that is inaccessible to human beings. Ed's book gives us a glimpse of what the subjective experiences of other species are like, and they are incredible. Today we discuss how mind-expanding it is to empa...
Have the Suburbs Ruined Everything? (w/ Bill McKibben)
July 31, 2022 18:01 - 42 minutes - 38.7 MBBill McKibben is a legendary activist and writer whose 1989 book The End of Nature introduced the problem of global warming to a general audience. Since then, he has been one of the world's leading environmental activists, taking major roles in the fossil fuel divestment movement and the campaign against the Keystone pipeline. In his latest book, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, McKibben look...
A Set of Progressive Economic Principles That Can Actually Win Elections
July 31, 2022 17:59 - 50 minutes - 46.5 MBThings do not look good for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party right now. Polls show that nearly 3/4 of Americans, including a staggering 94% of people under 30, do not want Biden to run for reelection. Biden's prospects look slightly better when people are asked if they prefer him or Donald Trump, and for Biden that's apparently enough. The New York Times says the president has a favorite aphorism: "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." (This is the worst aphoris...
A Neuroscientist Critiques the Dangerous "Populist" Pseudoscience of Yuval Noah Harari
July 31, 2022 17:56 - 55 minutes - 50.5 MBYuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian whose books have been major bestsellers, praised by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. Harari not only offers a sweeping chronicle of the human past, but makes confident predictions about the human future. His visions of a future in which technology creates godlike humans has turned him into a kind of prophet, especially in Silicon Valley, though Harari insists he is a mere objective chronicler. Darshana Narayanan is a neuroscientist an...
Cory Doctorow on The Wondrous World of the Early Internet & How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
July 31, 2022 17:54 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBPioneering blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has been an activist for online freedom since the early days of the history of the internet. He has long been one of the major voices opposing restrictive copyright and corporate domination, and a visionary defending a pluralistic online world where eccentricity and individuality are allowed to flourish. In books like Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (which, like all of his b...
Debunking The Right's Bad History of Abortion Laws w/ Leslie Reagan
July 20, 2022 00:19 - 44 minutes - 40.9 MBProf. Leslie Reagan is the probably the country's leading expert on the history of abortion laws. Her award-winning book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 is the most comprehensive available history of the era of criminalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, and Prof. Reagan is quoted regularly in the press for her knowledge of US abortion history. Her book on abortion law is distinguished by the fact that it focuses not just on the text of laws,...
Robin D.G. Kelley on the Importance of Utopian Visions for Social Movements
July 20, 2022 00:10 - 46 minutes - 43 MBRobin D.G. Kelley is a professor of American History at UCLA. His classic study Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination is about to be re-released in a 20th Anniversary Edition. The book looks at how, throughout Black history, movements against oppression have been inspired by (and produced) grand visions of alternate possibilities for what life could be. Kelley shows how radicals have, in circumstances of grinding oppression, managed to expand our minds as to what is possible. Kelley'...
The 20-Year Catastrophe of the War In Afghanistan
July 20, 2022 00:07 - 45 minutes - 41.6 MBThe war in Afghanistan was a calamity from the start and four US presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden) have deceived the American public about it as they wrecked the country. This is the inescapable conclusion one gets from reading Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's bestselling book The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (Simon & Schuster). Whitlock obtained internal government records showing that U.S. officials at every level knew that the war lacked coherent objective...
Oxford and the Making of the British Ruling Class
July 07, 2022 12:50 - 38 minutes - 35.4 MBFinancial Times journalist Simon Kuper's book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK argues that in order to understand how power works in the UK, you have to examine Oxford University, where most of its prime ministers are educated. The university has long functioned as the springboard to power for aspiring UK politicians, and Kuper takes us inside this insidious clubhouse, delivering a "searing critique of the British ruling class." Kuper argues that Brexit, far from bei...
Why Web3 Is Going Just Great (w/ Molly White)
July 07, 2022 12:48 - 41 minutes - 38.3 MBMolly White is the world's foremost critic of cryptocurrency, according to a recent profile in the Washington Post. A veteran Wikipedia editor and software developer, White documents the frauds and catastrophes in the so-called "Web3" space on her website Web 3 Is Going Great. Molly actually drafted the Web3 Wikipedia entry, and joins today to explain whether it is anything more than a buzzword and how we can make sense of the bizarre ecosystem of cryptocurrency, Web3, blockchain, etc. We ...
Thinking About Police After Uvalde and the San Francisco Prosecutor Recall (w/ Alex Vitale)
July 07, 2022 12:45 - 45 minutes - 41.8 MBAlex Vitale is one of the country's foremost experts on policing and criminal punishment. He is a professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he coordinates the Policing and Social Justice Project. His book The End of Policing is a comprehensive critique of U.S. police and argues that nearly everything useful done by police can be done better by other institutions. (The book was published in 2017 but recently got an unexpected boost from U.S. senator Ted Cr...
Unearthing Queer History in America
July 07, 2022 12:43 - 41 minutes - 38.4 MBHugh Ryan is a writer and curator who unearths and preserves lost queer history. His books When Brooklyn Was Queer and The Women's House of Detention both tell stories of LGBTQ life before Stonewall, showing the vibrant and diverse lives of queer people in the United States in the early 20th century that have been left out of history textbooks. The New York Times calls When Brooklyn Was Queer "a boisterous, motley new history… an entertaining and insightful chronicle.” Writer Kaitlyn Greenid...
Destroying Democracy in Education: The Case of New Orleans
July 07, 2022 12:42 - 52 minutes - 48.4 MBCeleste Lay is a professor of political science at Tulane University and the author of Public Schools, Private Governance: Education Reform and Democracy in New Orleans, which discusses the New Orleans charter school experiment. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans has switched to an all-charter system, essentially abolishing public schools, as part of one of the most radical experiments in "education reform" anywhere. Prof. Lay discusses the politics that made this change possible, ...
How To Create Beautiful Places - A guide to the work of the late Christopher Alexander
July 07, 2022 12:39 - 56 minutes - 52.1 MBThe architect Christopher Alexander died recently. As the (surprisingly good) New York Times obituary described him: [Alexander] believed that ordinary people, not just trained architects, should have a hand in designing their houses, neighborhoods and cities, and proposed a method for doing so in writing that could be poetically erudite, frustratingly abstract and breathtakingly simple... Mr. Alexander was a fierce anti-modernist who found traditional and indigenous structures — the beehi...
Current Affairs Book Club: The Novels of Sally Rooney
July 07, 2022 12:38 - 1 hour - 56.8 MBThe bestselling novels of Sally Rooney have been subject to endless chatter. She has been hailed as the great millennial novelist by some, her work called "extraordinarily lucid, gorgeous and nuanced." (Washington Post) On the other hand, there are those who say that "Rooney and her readers hope to bask in the self-congratulatory glow of their supposed egalitarianism without ceding any of their accolades." Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Lily Sánchez, and Nathan J. Robinson decided to s...
How Can We Plan a Viable Eco-Socialist Future That Everyone Likes?
July 07, 2022 12:36 - 57 minutes - 52.5 MBOne of the most fascinating and thought-provoking books of our time is Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics (Verso) by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. The book asks the question: how could we actually have a future for Earth that is both green and socialist? The authors dive into the history of attempts to plan the economy, unearthing useful insights from neglected thinkers like Otto Neurath (developer of the very cool Isotype syste...
Inside the Real World of Union Organizing
July 07, 2022 12:34 - 46 minutes - 42.2 MBDaisy Pitkin has been in the labor movement for two decades and is the author of the new book On the Line A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union, which tells the story of an effort to unionize an industrial laundry in Arizona. It's a moving account of the difficult grinding work of putting together a labor union under the most hostile imaginable conditions. In this episode, we discuss: The world of industrial laundries—hot, dangerous places hidden from pu...
How the War In Ukraine Can Be Ended
July 07, 2022 12:32 - 51 minutes - 47 MBAnatol Lieven is an international relations expert and journalist who serves as a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His books include Russia and Ukraine and most recently Climate Change and the Nation State. His commentaries on the Ukraine war have appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Anatol is a highly experienced reporter with a thorough knowledge of the region, and in this conversation he explains what he thinks is left out of mainstream d...
Why This Computer Scientist Says All Cryptocurrency Should “Die in a Fire”
July 07, 2022 12:29 - 53 minutes - 48.9 MBCryptocurrencies have been hyped in Super Bowl ads and promoted by everyone from Bill Clinton to Glenn Greenwald to Spike Lee to Larry David to New York City mayor Eric Adams (who has pledged to turn the city into a "crypto hub"). But times are tough for crypto. As the New York Times reports, “the crypto world [recently] went into a full meltdown... in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.” One of cryptocurrency’s most voca...
How to Get Past the Need for Endless Economic Growth (w/ "Doughnut Economics" author Kate Raworth)
May 31, 2022 15:03 - 50 minutes - 46.4 MBKate Raworth is an economist at Oxford University whose book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist is a radical attempt to rethink foundational concepts in economics and create a new framework for a sustainable economy that does not depend on "infinite growth." Prof. Raworth shows how the ideology that growth needs to be "maximized" causes catastrophic ecological destruction while not even building an economy that serves human needs. She goes beyond critique o...
The Terrifying and Stupid Ideas of "Neoreactionaries"
May 31, 2022 15:00 - 49 minutes - 45.4 MBA recent article in Vanity Fair about the National Conservatism Conference profiles figures on the "New Right," including Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, and a deeply unpleasant individual called Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin/Moldbug is an advocate of "neoreactionary" politics and explicitly believes in ending democracy and instituting a dictatorship in the United States. J.D. Vance, who may well be a U.S. senator soon, admits in the Vanity Fair profile that he is an ...
Santa Claus for Alaska
May 31, 2022 14:57 - 36 minutes - 33.5 MBSanta Claus is the mayor pro-tem of North Pole, Alaska. Yes, he's real, and he's a democratic socialist running for Congress in the special election against Sarah Palin. Current Affairs is honored to be joined by a man falsely thought to be a mere myth. In fact, when parents tell their children there is no Santa, they just don't want kids to know that the real Santa is a leftist who believes love is more important than presents. Note from Nathan: Apologies for the absence of new podcast epi...
How Do We Overcome Capitalism?
May 31, 2022 14:55 - 44 minutes - 41 MBTom Wetzel's forthcoming book Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century (AK Press) is both a primer on the basic left critiques of capitalism and a handbook for creating a new economic system. Wetzel explains in clear, accessible language why exploitation, waste, and environmental destruction are built into the capitalist model and then explores possible alternative economic structures and shows how we might get there. He probes important questions like "What ...
How Corporations Get Away With Criminality—And How to Stop Them
May 31, 2022 14:53 - 39 minutes - 36.3 MBJennifer Taub is a law professor whose book Big Dirty Money: Making White Collar Criminals Pay is about the double standard in American law that harshly punishes street crime while giving a free pass to corporate criminals. Taub tallies up the immense costs of corporate wrongdoing from fraud to wage theft and exposes how CEOs commit acts of destructive criminal wrongdoing with complete impunity. But Taub isn't just bemoaning the corruption of the justice system—she also shows how we can ch...
The Life and Crimes of Winston Churchill
May 10, 2022 14:13 - 55 minutes - 76 MBTariq Ali is the author of two dozen books and his career as a public intellectual and activist stretches back to the 1960s. His new book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes is an effort to demolish the "Churchill myth" that has been built up since the Thatcher years. Ali demonstrates that Churchill was: - Not actually popular among the British public, who threw him out of office immediately at the end of World War II, and voted in the socialist Labour government instead - A virulent...
A View of British Government From the Inside w/ former Labour MP Chris Mullin
May 10, 2022 14:11 - 52 minutes - 48.3 MBChris Mullin served from 1987 to 2010 as a Labour MP in the British parliament. During that time, he kept a daily diary of his observations, which has since been published in three acclaimed volumes. The diaries trace the rise and fall of Tony Blair's "New Labour." Mullin himself was associated with the party's left (he edited Tony Benn's book Arguments for Socialism and was the only member of Blair's government to vote against the Iraq war) but found himself trying to tread carefully to use...
Dr. Mark Vonnegut on the Soullessness of Modern Medicine
May 10, 2022 14:10 - 44 minutes - 41.3 MBMark Vonnegut MD has been a pediatrician for over 30 years. He is the author of the books The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, and most recently The Heart of Caring: A Life in Pediatrics. His new book is a collection of observations from his life treating children in the American healthcare system. In it, he shows how the for-profit private insurance industry has destroyed doctors' ability to provide effective care for patients, and h...
How the Amazon Labor Union Defeated the Bezos Behemoth
May 10, 2022 14:08 - 44 minutes - 60.5 MBJustine Medina is a member of the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union and a packer at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. The ALU recently won a historic victory, defeating Amazon's multi-million dollar union-busting campaign to make JFK8 the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. It was a victory many thought impossible. But Amazon underestimated the ALU and through persistent organizing work, the union pulled off an astonishing victory that is expected to be a game-c...
Why Are So Many Pedestrians Getting Killed in America?
May 10, 2022 14:07 - 40 minutes - 56 MBAngie Schmitt is a transportation writer and planner whose book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America examines the shocking and disturbing growth in pedestrian deaths on the streets of the United States. After declining for 20 years, pedestrian deaths began climbing drastically again around 2010: These gruesome tragedies are preventable—in Europe, deaths are declining rather than increasing—and in Angie's book, she discusses all of the factors...
Noam Chomsky on How to Avoid World War 3
April 22, 2022 14:34 - 54 minutes - 50.2 MBNoam Chomsky is "arguably the most important intellectual alive," the founder of modern linguistics, one of the most cited scholars in history, and the author of over 100 books. He is currently laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He recently co-authored the book Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance and is soon to release The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Frag...
How Finance Ate The Economy - w/ Grace Blakeley
April 21, 2022 15:05 - 49 minutes - 45.2 MBFinance expert Grace Blakeley is a staff writer for Tribune magazine. She has served as economics commentator for the New Statesman and as a fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research's Centre for Economic Justice. She is the author of two books, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization and The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism, and editor of the book Futures of Socialism. Blakeley's writings argue that the finance sector has taken on an outsized role...
Aviva Chomsky on Why "The Science" Isn't All We Need To Know About Climate Change
April 21, 2022 15:02 - 37 minutes - 34.7 MBProf. Aviva Chomsky teaches history and Latin American studies at Salem State University and has authored and edited numerous books including Central America’s Forgotten History, A History of the Cuban Revolution, and Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal. Her latest book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice tries to answer, in a clear and accessible way, the questions about what we ought to do to deal with the climate catastrophe. Prof. Chomsky takes the...
How Does Economics Corrupt The World? - Jonathan Aldred, author of "The Skeptical Economist"
April 12, 2022 18:55 - 41 minutes - 37.8 MBJonathan Aldred is an economist at Cambridge University, but he is a fierce critic of the mainstream of his discipline. In his books The Skeptical Economist and License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us, Prof. Aldred argues that while economics poses as a value-free form of scientific inquiry, it contains many buried assumptions that have deeply pernicious implications. Aldred's books offer excellent, clearly-written explanations of what economics is and how many of its most popular conc...
Are We In The Middle of A Sexual Revolution? Journalist Laurie Penny on changes in gender relations
April 12, 2022 18:40 - 41 minutes - 37.5 MBLaurie Penny is a journalist and activist who has authored seven books including Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, and most recently Sexual Revolution : Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback. Penny has been a finalist for both the Orwell Prize and the National Magazine Award. In today's conversation, we discuss the "sexual revolution" of Penny's new book, which they call "an exercise in pointing out the obvious," namely that relat...
How Radical Teachers are Re-Igniting the Labor Movement - labor studies professor Eric Blanc on the Minneapolis strike
April 12, 2022 18:37 - 42 minutes - 39.1 MBEric Blanc's book Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strikes and Working-Class Politics is about the remarkable 2018-2019 educators' strikes that began in red states. It shows how successful labor struggles can be waged even in the seemingly unlikeliest of places and is a useful case study of one of the most important fights of our time. In the time since these strikes, however, educators have struggled. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that fights over school funding were sidelined, as teachers h...
How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over The World - an interview with Elle Hardy, journalist and author of "Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity is Taking over the World"
April 01, 2022 18:54 - 57 minutes - 52.2 MBPentecostalism is the fastest-growing religious faith in the world—by one estimate it obtains around 35,000 new converts per day globally. It now has over 600,000,000 adherents. Elle Hardy is a journalist who has contributed previously to Current Affairs and has traveled the world to speak with Pentecostals from South Korea to London to Nigeria to South Africa. Her book Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over The World (Oxford University Press) documents the rise of this f...
SPECIAL: How Leftists Can Run, Win, and Govern - featuring interviews with six Democratic Socialists who have been elected to public office
April 01, 2022 18:46 - 1 hour - 84 MBAcross the United States, over the last few years, democratic socialists have been running for office in numbers not seen for a century. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns may not have been victorious, but socialists have run for city councils, state legislatures, and even judgeships and won. In this special 90-minute audio documentary, Current Affairs talks to members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who have reached elected office about how they campaigned, why they won...
Understanding Putin's Criminal War in Ukraine - interview with Russia expert and publisher of The Nation Katrina vanden Heuvel
March 26, 2022 17:50 - 41 minutes - 38.2 MBKatrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, as well as a columnist for the Washington Post. She is also the president of the American Committee For U.S.-Russia Accord and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Katrina has been studying, working in, and writing about Russia for decades. In columns leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Katrina was warning that failures of diplomacy were leading toward disaster. In this conversation, we discuss ...
How Companies Make Us Worship Our Work - interview with Carolyn Chen, author of "Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes a Religion in Silicon Valley"
March 26, 2022 17:47 - 36 minutes - 33.8 MBCarolyn Chen's book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion In Silicon Valley is about how something disturbing is happening in Silicon Valley: people are becoming so totally devoted to their work that their relationship to their companies is a kind of religious devotion. Prof. Chen interviewed scores of employees at tech companies and found that traditional ties of family, church, and community are disappearing in favor of ties to the company. Corporations are providing a site where peop...
"How Are You Going To Pay For That?" and Other Dumb Political Questions - interview with Ryan Cooper, managing editor of The American Prospect
March 26, 2022 17:45 - 48 minutes - 44.7 MBRyan Cooper is the managing editor of The American Prospect and co-host of the Left Anchor podcast. He is the author of the new book How Are You Going to Pay For That: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics (St. Martin's Press), which exposes the faulty economic assumptions that are used to convince Americans that they can't afford generous social democratic programs. In the book—and in this episode—Ryan shows how to argue with libertarians and neoliberals who believe that the pri...
How To Be A Foreign Correspondent Without Swallowing Propaganda - interview with Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, about his decades as a foreign correspondent
March 16, 2022 19:36 - 53 minutes - 49 MBPatrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent for The Independent for over 30 years and has become known for his combination of a deep knowledge of the region and a healthy skepticism toward the propaganda of governments. His books The Age of Jihad (Verso) and War In The Age of Trump (OR Books) collect his extraordinary on-the-ground dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the decades since 9/11 and provide a rich understanding of the devastating wars of the last years...
How Bill Gates Makes The World Worse Off
March 16, 2022 19:28 - 54 minutes - 50 MBBill Gates has long cultivated a reputation as the Good Billionaire, giving away vast sums of money toward global health and education initiatives through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For many years, the Gates Foundation was rarely criticized at all in the mainstream press, its work considered unambiguously good. The shine has come off Gates a bit recently, thanks to the negative publicity surrounding both his divorce and his staunch defense of corporate intellectual property rights ...
Astonishingly, There IS An Alternative! Interview with Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of Greece about his book "Another Now"
March 11, 2022 21:14 - 44 minutes - 40.5 MBYanis Varoufakis is the former Finance Minister of Greece, professor of economics at the University of Athens, co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, and member of the Greek Parliament. The Guardian describes him as "a motorcycling, leather jacketed former academic and self-styled rebel who took pleasure in winding up the besuited political class." He calls himself an "erratic Marxist," and has written economics textbooks, a memoir, and popular explainers of economic ideas. But now ...
Why Suppressing "Fake News" Can't Fix Our Journalism Crisis
March 03, 2022 17:58 - 47 minutes - 43.5 MBVictor Pickard is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. His book Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society is about the problem of misinformation: people not knowing what's going on in the world, or thinking they know what's going on but actually believing in propaganda or bullshit (see, e.g., Joe Rogan). There has been a lot of chatter about the problem of "fake news" and how it can be stopped, with...
What Policing Looks Like From The Inside
March 03, 2022 17:55 - 47 minutes - 43.1 MBRosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City, named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicles Prof. Brooks' experiences as a reserve police officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As an academic raised in a socialist household (her mother is a former Current Affairs podcast guest), Prof. Brooks wanted to get a better understanding of how police saw themselves a...
War Zones & Prisons: The Places We Hide Suffering and The Ways We Rationalize It
February 24, 2022 19:48 - 47 minutes - 43.2 MBChris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of many bestselling nonfiction books. He began his career as a war correspondent, and was a reporter for the New York Times for fifteen years, reporting from over 50 countries. He has written books on religion, culture, poverty, and war. For the last ten years, Hedges has been teaching a class in a New Jersey state prison. His latest book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in An American Prison, is about his experiences ...
How Do Hedge Fund Managers Justify Their Existence?
February 24, 2022 19:45 - 48 minutes - 44.3 MBMegan Tobias Neely is a sociologist whose book Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street takes a deep look inside the world of hedge funds, those small boutique investment banks that play with a sizable chunk of the world's wealth. Neely's book draws on her observations from time working in a hedge fund as well as from dozens of interviews with professionals in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss: - How hedge fund managers justify their value to society and why there a...