Current Affairs

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Nuclear weapons are always lurking there in the background, out in remote places where we don't have to think about them, but ready to be fired at any time. Journalist Sarah Scoles was interested to find out more about the people who maintain the system of nuclear weapons. What do they do and how do they explain it to themselves? In a very real sense, they have to spend their days preparing to commit the worst imaginable genocide, should the need arise. It's eerie and disturbing to realize how quickly an unprecedented horror could take place, and how much depends on having sane and competent world leaders.Today Sarah joins to discuss her book Countdown: The Blinding Future of Nuclear Weapons and what she learned about nuclear war and the systems that make it a terrifyingly real possibility.For more on this topic, see these Current Affairs articles:Taking World War III SeriouslyWhy It's So Hard to Face the Threat Posed By Nuclear WeaponsPretending It Isn't ThereSarah's book was reviewed here in the New York Times.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist at the New School for Social Research and the author of Work, Retire, Repeat, which shows how the possibilities for having a comfortable and dignified retirement are slipping away.We begin with a news story about a 90-year-old veteran who was pushing shopping carts in the Louisiana heat to make ends meet. Prof. Gilarducci explains how it can be that in the richest country in he world, a person that age can still be having to work. She shows how the pension system disappeared, why Social Security isn't enough, and explains how even the concept of retirement is beginning to disappear, with many arguing that work is good for you, people should do it for longer. Prof. Ghilarducci also explains how things could be different, advocating a "Gray New Deal" to help older Americans experience the comfort and stability they deserve after decades in the labor force."Working longer is not the solution to bad retirement policy. In fact, working longer is causing an insidious problem, eroding both the quantity and the quality of older people’s years. Not only is retirement—which is precious time before death—slipping away, but also retirement time is becoming more unequal,, .The nation should not depend on people working longer to make up for inadequate retirement-income security. Doing so only exacerbates inequalities in wealth, health, well-being, and retirement time." - Teresa Ghilarducci

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Radley Balko is one of America's leading journalists on policing and criminal punishment. His book The Rise of the Warrior Cop is a remarkable expose of the militarization of local police forces around the country. Recently, Radley has produced several excellent essays on the authoritarian promises of Donald Trump and those in his circles.Radley's pieces compile frightening evidence of what a 2nd Trump presidency might look like. In "Lines in the Sand," he discusses some of the possibilities like invoking the Insurrection Act, arresting or deporting critical journalists, purging the civil service of anyone who opposes him, etc. In "Trump's deportation army" he looks specifically at immigration, and what it would actually involve to fulfill Trump's stated ambition of deporting all undocumented immigrants. Whether or not this nightmare will actually come true, it is what Trump is pledging, and we should take Radley's warnings very seriously indeed. The scale of this threat is one reason why we at Current Affairs insist that no leftist could want a Trump presidency, and Trump should be taken seriously when he vows to build vast new deportation camps.Radley has also recently produced a valuable three-part series (I, II, III) that responds to those on the right who excuse the killing of George Floyd."How we react to what Trump and Miller are promising will speak volumes about who we are and how we see ourselves. Will we see the kids — the kids they want to pry from the arms of parents and stash in an abandoned warehouse or crumbling shopping mall under armed guard — as our own kids, or as someone else’s? When they rouse parents and grandparents from their homes at gunpoint, herd them onto military planes, fly them to the border, then pen them behind barbed wire, outdoors, in 110-degree heat, will we see that as an assault on our own parents, grandparents, and ancestors, or as someone else’s problem? We can’t allow these things to happen, then later pretend we didn’t know. Because they’ve told us. There are no surprises here." — Radley Balko

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!John Ghazvinian is the leading historian of U.S.-Iranian relations, the author of the indispensable study America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present. His book shows how opportunities for positive relations between the U.S. and the Iranian people have been repeatedly squandered. From installing and propping up one of the world's most abusive dictators (the Shah) to ignoring overtures from Iranian leaders interested in reducing tensions, the opportunity to be a partner rather than an adversary to Iran has been overlooked. Unfortunately, hostility is met with hostility, and Ghazvinian does not know whether the U.S. and Iran can pull themselves out of the downward spiral of relations. Ghazvinian does not defend the current Iranian regime, and is fair in criticizing Iranian failures as well as those of the U.S., but his book presents Americans with crucial facts about their government's policies (from U.S. support for Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks on Iran to the rebuffing of Iranian attempts to cooperate) that should unsettle anyone who sees Iran simplistically as an irrational rogue state, or part of an "axis of evil."“This myopic understanding of Iran carries over into the foreign policy arena as well. Today, every time Iran refuses to be dictated to, or attempts to protect its national interests, a chorus of U.S. congressmen, media pundits, and ideological opponents of the Islamic Republic portray it as “defiant.” Every time Iran shows flexibility or a willingness to compromise, it is accused of “stalling tactics” or “trying to divide the international community.” And anyone who tries to point out that Iran might have legitimate security concerns, or that it is behaving as a rational state actor, is smeared as an “apologist” for the Islamic Republic and is excluded from a say in decision-making. This points to a larger problem: the United States in recent years has painted itself into a corner in which the only acceptable response from Iran, ever, is complete and unconditional capitulation." - John Ghazvinian, America and Iran

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !With antiwar protests jeopardizing a Democratic president's reelection and an upcoming party convention in Chicago, 2024 has some eerie echoes of one of the world's most tumultuous years: 1968. Perhaps by revisiting that year we can better understand our own time. To see what lessons it holds, we turn today to Charles Kaiser, the author of the book 1968 in America: Music, Politics, Chaos, Counterculture, and the Shaping of a Generation. Charles reminds us why the year 1968 went down in history, and we reflect on the legacy of the activists of that generation.Charles Kaiser's latest Guardian piece is here. Listeners may also enjoy Nathan's article "Life in Revolutionary Times: Lessons From the 1960s."“We did experience hope in 1968: hope and ambition and amazing joy. But to millions of us, Bobby Kennedy's assassination felt like the resounding chord that ended Sgt. Pepper's: a note of stunning finality. For me, at least, I hope the memory of that trauma and all the others of 1968 will now begin to fade away, so that our dream to make a better world may once again become vivid.” - Charles Kaiser, 1968 in America

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Jeet Heer has written two major essays about the intellectual legacy of the New Republic magazine’s 70s-2000s heyday. The first, from 2015, excavates the magazine’s history of racism and its role in Clinton-era “welfare reform” and in pushing Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve into public consciousness. The second piece, published recently, looks more broadly at the career of New Republic owner Martin Peretz: his racism, his hawkish foreign policy, and his role in creating the conservative “New Democrats” of the 1990s, who abandoned FDR-era liberalism.Jeet joins us today to tell us more about why this magazine once mattered, and the enormous effect that such a small publication and a single man have had on the politics of our time."[Peretz's New Republic] promoted many of the worst decisions in modern American history: the killing fields in 1980 Central America, the invasion of Iraq, the downgrading of diplomacy and preference to military solutions in foreign policy, the neoliberal economics that have fueled inequality and instability, the brutalization of the Palestinians, the revival of scientific racism, and the persistent whittling down of the welfare state." - Jeet Heer

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Jonathan Kozol is one of the leading critics of the U.S. education system, having written a series of widely acclaimed books across a 60-year career, including Savage Inequalities, The Shame of the Nation, and Letters to a Young Teacher. Today he joins to discuss his new book An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education in America, which sums up his argument about what is wrong with the public schools and what we can do about it.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Anne Kim's book Poverty For Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America's Poor gives a partial answer to an enduring question: how come we spend so much trying to solve poverty but poverty persists? One major reason, Kim argues, is that parasitic for-profit industries suck a lot of the money out of antipoverty programs. The privatization of government functions has meant that plenty of money that should be going to the least well-off ends up padding the pockets of the already wealthy. Kim's book helps us understand why, for example, cities can spend so much trying to combat homelessness and not seem to actually do much to alleviate it. Kim shows us how our tax dollars get siphoned away, and lays out a blueprint for how we might use government far more effectively, if we abandon the mindset that privatization means "efficiency.""The infrastructure of poverty is big business. And as such, it is a major component of the systemic barriers low-income Americans face. No systemic understanding of poverty can be complete without a hard look at the businesses that profit from—and perpetuate—the structural disadvantages that hold back so many Americans... Self-serving private interests have hijacked the war on poverty. Failures in governance and public policy have enabled predatory industries to thrive at the expense of low-income Americans and of taxpayer dollars." -Anne Kim, Poverty For Profit

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Thomas Sowell may be the best-selling economics writer of our time. For decades, the Hoover Institution pundit has published books and columns introducing economic concepts to a popular audience. He has been acclaimed as a genius and maverick whose insights are ignored by the academy because they discomfort progressives.But Dr. Cahal Moran, who runs the YouTube channel Unlearning Economics, argues that Sowell's free market talking points are shallow and mistaken. Cahal recently published the first of a two-part video debunking Sowell and introducing alternative ways of thinking about economics. Since Nathan has published his own long takedown of Sowell, we thought a conversation between the two of them might be illuminating and passionate.Cahal's co-authored book The Econocracy is here. A review in the Guardian is here. His Current Affairs article "The Death of Econ 101" is here. Our episode with Jonathan Aldred, a fellow critic of "Econ 101," may also be of interest.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Steven Thrasher is a professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide. He has also recently been present at the Columbia protests over Gaza. He joins today to discuss what he saw at the protests, before moving on to discuss his concept of the "viral underclass," tracing how inequality and disease interact, from the AIDS crisis to COVID-19. An excerpt from this interview was played in our recent audio documentary on the Gaza protests. Prof. Thrasher's LitHub essay on the protests is here.“Viruses challenge the concept that any one of us “has” one body. As they move freely between the lungs, bloodstream, and genitals of one of us to another, they show how we is a more relevant concept than you or me...The most fundamental, largely unexamined premise we have in the United States is the belief that I am me and you are you and that each of us is the master of our own hero’s journey. What if viruses teach us that there is no “me” and no “you” at all and that we all share one collective body? And that such individualistic thinking creates not only an underclass, but alienation across lines of class?” - Steven Thrasher, The Viral Underclass

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Today we talk to David Austin Walsh, a postdoc at Yale and the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, a new book about the history of the U.S. right wing. Walsh is particularly interest in what the boundaries are (if any) between "mainstream" conservatism and the "far right." He goes back to the time of William F. Buckley and talks about the relationship between fascist sympathizing reactionaries and the "respectable" right, and how that relationship evolved over time. He joins today to help us better understand how to think about terms like "right," "far right," and "conservative."A Current Affairs article about Buckley, including his King speech, can be read here. A previous Current Affairs podcast episode devoted exclusively to Buckley is here. A book review on the John Birch Society by Nathan at The Nation is here."Modern conservatism emerged out of opposition to the New Deal in the 1930s and 1940s, forming a right-wing popular front—a term coined by William F. Buckley Jr. in his private correspondence—with the openly racist, antisemitic, and pro-fascist far right. This coalition proved to be remarkably durable until the 1960s, when the popular front began to unravel as some conservatives proved to be unwilling to make even modest concessions to the demands of the civil rights movement and jettison explicit racism and antisemitism. These apostate conservatives would form the basis of modern white nationalism—and the boundaries between where “responsible” conservatism ended and the far right began were usually blurred... Twentieth-century American conservatism did not equal fascism, but it evolved out of a right-wing popular front that included fascist and quasi-fascist elements. This is the key to understanding how American conservatism embraced MAGAism in the twenty-first century." - David Austin Walsh

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Bestselling author Johann Hari, whose Lost Connectionsand Stolen Focus have previously been discussed on this program, returns today to discuss his new book Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs. New weight-loss drugs have proved remarkably effective, but invite a whole host of questions. First, is a society where people take drugs to lose weight a healthy place? Should we be encouraging positive body images rather than the use of drugs to shed pounds? Shouldn't we be reforming the food system to be healthier rather than trying to counteract its effects with obesity drugs? And are the drugs even safe? Johann done voluminous research on the drugs and their effects and joins today to discuss what it means to have a society where people can radically change their bodies by swallowing a pill.We need to radically change the kind of food we are given from an early age, so the next generation doesn’t become hooked on shitty, satiety-sapping foods and they don’t feel the need to drug themselves to escape them. There are risks to the weight-loss drugs; there are no risks to becoming more like the Japanese. - Johann Hari, Magic Pill

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Who actually comprises the MAGA movement? Where do Trumpian politicians come from? How do they defeat "establishment" Republicans on the local and state level? How much is organized from above? What's the role of Steve Bannon in all this? In Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washington Post investigates the MAGA movement around the country, from Arizona to Georgia, showing how ordinary people get sucked into it and how Bannon and others are part of a long game that aims to fundamentally alter American institutions. Arnsdorf's book offers vital insights for those concerned with stopping this movement in its tracks.“Are we gonna have some losses?” [Bannon] said. “Fuck yes. We’re going to get fucking rolled. And we may get rolled today. But that’s OK. At every defeat, there’s enough seeds of other victories that are there. People just gotta stay on it, understand that we’re winning more than we’re losing. That’s why—a revolutionary vanguard. This has happened before in human history, right? We have to take over and we have to rebuild it. Remember, it’s a Fourth Turning. ... That’s all to come. I’ve got a task and purpose. That’s for others behind me and others that are at the vanguard of taking this on and tearing it down to rebuild. It will have to be rebuilt. That’s gonna be huge. We’re not going to be rebuilding any time in the foreseeable future. We’re going to be taking things apart. They say Trump’s a divider. This is what I keep saying on the show—what’s my mantra? One side’s going to win, and one side’s going to lose. No compromise here” - Steve Bannon, quoted in Isaac Arnsdorf, Finish What We Started

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !When we think of American power, we often think of missiles, guns, and tanks. But operating in the background is an incredibly powerful weapon whose use often goes unnoticed: the dollar. In her new book Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, Bloomberg News correspondent Saleha Mohsin explains how the dollar's power actually works. What does it mean for the dollar to be the "global reserve currency" and how does this confer power? What do sanctions do and what determines whether they succeed or fail? How do changes in the value of currency alter the relative power of countries across the world? Mohsin joins us to answer a few basic questions that are crucial for understanding the world today.“ The seeds of its weaponization were sown in 1944 as World War II came to an end, began in earnest after September 11, 2001, and may have gone too far in 2022... If the currency falls from kingship, then the country won’t be the first superpower or empire to collapse because of fiscal mismanagement. While the dollar has changed the world, the world may now change the dollar. The biggest threat to its dominance doesn’t stem from outside its borders but from a rolling series of self-inflicted policy wounds further stoking doubts of whether the United States should remain at the center of the global financial system.” - Saleha Mohsin, Paper Soldiers

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post. Her new essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess, draws together and expands on some of her best work. It covers subjects including Marie Kondo and minimalism, the films of David Cronenberg, the novels of Sally Rooney, and the new sexual puritanism. However varied the topics, a few important themes recur, including a rejection of utilitarian minimalism and an embrace of pleasure, and a view that fulfilling "basic needs" is not enough, because our "wants" matter too. The declutterers and the puritans strip away some of what is most essential to the good life. Becca joins today to talk about her arguments, including why she thinks Sally Rooney's egalitarian Marxism rings false.Declutterers’ books, it turns out, are every bit as insubstantial as their slender clients. All the staples are short and snappy: though they are padded with cute visualizations and printed in big, bubbly fonts, they are rarely much longer than two hundred pages, and all of them can be read (or, perhaps more aptly, gazed at) in a matter of hours. In place of full paragraphs and complete sentences, they tend to opt for sidebars, acrostics, and diagrams. Kernels of advice are surgically extracted from the usual flab of prose. Language is a vehicle for the transfer of information, never a source of pleasure in its own right. To enjoy the sound or look of a word would be to delight, illicitly, in something needless, something exorbitant. Hence the declutterer’s penchant for lists and bullet points, for sentences compressed into their cores: “You Know You Are an Obsessive Organizer When . . . ,” “12 Ways I’ve Changed Since I Said Goodbye to My Things,” “15 Tips for the Next Stage of Your Minimalist Journey.” Visually, the results are reminiscent of an iPhone, with apps sequestered into adjacent squares. Each page in The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up does its best impression of a screen. — Becca Rothfeld, All Things Are Too Small

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !We know the left is, generally speaking, anti-war and anti-imperialist. But if a left-wing government ever took power in the U.S., what would its foreign policy look like? How would it deal with, say, human rights abusing governments? Would it shun them? Sanction them? Would a leftist government send weapons to the victims of aggression? What would a left policy on Ukraine look like, for instance?Van Jackson is a leading left foreign policy thinker. His new book Grand Strategies of the Left aims to think through the toughest questions about what it would actually mean to have a "progressive" foreign policy. Jackson notes that because the DC think tank world is dominated by hawkish "blob" types, a lot of the most thorough research and thinking on foreign policy is done by people whose values he rejects. In this conversation, we talk about how the existing establishment sees the world, and how we can look at it differently."In prioritizing what it sees as the foundational sources of global insecurity, the progressive perspective portrays itself as uniquely realistic compared to its prevailing liberal internationalist alternative. It diagnoses the problems that preoccupy militaries as the surface level of deeper political dysfunctions, making mainstream grand strategy and security studies appear solution-less insofar as they deal only with national defense policy or strategy. Progressive worldmaking, in other words, directs us to reshape the very context that gives rise to traditional security problems." - Van Jackson, Grand Strategies of the Left

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Daniel Knowles is a reporter for The Economist (yes, that one). His book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse argues that cars are a problem, and shows all the ways in which we could have more satisfying, sustainable, affordable lives with fewer cars. That's a tough sell in a car-loving country like the U.S.A., where we love our giant-ass trucks and our drive-thru daiquiri stands. Daniel is British: who is he to tell us we have to trade in our pedestrian-mashing SUVs for Chairman Mao-style bicycles?Today, Daniel joins to make the sell for walkable communities, showing us all the ways cars cause problems, why the situation we're in wasn't inevitable, and how we can change our deadly, inefficient, climate-killing ways and have transit that better serves human needs.“There is simply no good reason that the sustainable option—living in a decent-size apartment or rowhouse, in a neighborhood where you can walk, cycle, and use public transport to get around—ought to be so expensive, while living in an enormous detached house and using vast quantities of natural resources is the cheap option. It is only the case because of decisions made by our leaders over decades that have compounded to create a world where wasting resources is normal, and sustainable living is rare.” - Daniel Knowles, Carmageddon

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ben Burgis is a philosopher and occasional contributor to Current Affairs, who runs the Philosophy for the People Substack and hosts Give Them An Argument. Today, Ben joins to respond to common arguments made to justify the policies of Israel and the United States in Gaza. "Israel has a right to defend itself," "Palestinian violence is the root cause of the problem," and other talking points are put to Ben, who gives logically precise but passionate defenses of the Palestinian people's rights and dignity. Ben offers a crash course in how to effectively argue the case against the war on Palestine.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !“While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ―Eugene V. Debs"Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?" —Bernie SandersPolitical philosophy is full of talk about liberty and justice. But in Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea, Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor argue that another concept is just as crucial when we consider how society ought to be ordered and what we owe one another: solidarity. A solidaristic ethic means seeing other people's fates as intertwined with your own, and being committed to fighting for the interests of those whose problems you do not necessarily share. It has underpinned the socialist project from Eugene Debs to Bernie Sanders, and as Hunt-Hendrix and Taylor show in the book, it has deep historical roots. They trace the origins of the idea of solidarity, showing how it evolved as a crucial part of left thought and practice, and argue that what we need today is a reinvigorated commitment to it. They explain what it would mean to practice it, and the demands it makes of us. Today, Leah Hunt-Hendrix joins us to give us a tour through the history and show us what solidarity means. (Our recent interview with co-author Astra Taylor is also worth a listen and touches on some of the same themes!)"With the planet swiftly tipping toward climate chaos and a right-wing reaction gaining influence globally, we have no choice but to attempt to cultivate solidarity from wherever we happen to sit. Individually, the vast majority of us are locked out of the halls of power and lack wealth and influence. The only viable pathway to exerting power is to organize from the bottom up. The solidaristic, internationalist, and sustainable world order we desperately need must be built virtue by virtue, relationship by relationship, struggle by struggle, day by day. Constructing a larger Us—one large and powerful enough to overcome the myriad obstacles in our way—is a hopeful and imaginative act: curious about other people, open to change, and determined to bring new possibilities into being." — Leah Hunt-Hendrix and Astra Taylor

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Jessica L. Burbank is a broadcaster and commentator who appears on The Hill's Rising, co-hosts the Funny Money podcast, and now hosts her own online news program called Weeklyish News. Jessica is also big on TikTok, where she produces remarkable short videos communicating left political and economic ideas, such as this one on the power relationship between workers and bosses or this one on Elon Musk. Today Jessica joins to discuss how she thinks about the project of communicating ideas accessibly, using wit and operating within the limits of 21st century attention spans.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !John Washington is a journalist with Arizona Luminaria, whose new book The Case for Open Borders rebuts common anti-immigrant argument and shows that a world in which people can freely move from one territory to another will not create a "crisis" but will in fact benefit everyone. Today he joins to discuss the bipartisan rhetoric about immigration being a disaster or crisis, and to help us understand why militarized borders cause a lot more harm than they prevent. Washington argues that fears of immigration are overblown and instead of moving toward greater "border security" we should be reforming the border to relax admissions. The photo above is of the Arizona-Mexico border circa 1899, when crossing from one country into another was as simple as crossing the street. See also the Current Affairs article "We Need To Make the Moral Case for Immigration." "The case for open borders must ultimately be a positive one, explaining why the freedom to move—coupled with the freedom and possibility to remain—is a necessary good, and why a world not divided into exclusive nation states with militarized borders would be more egalitarian, would promote and cultivate diversity instead of fear, and would help form a world where sustainability and justice take precedence over extraction and exploitation." — John Washington, The Case for Open Borders

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Grace Blakeley is one of the left's leading economic thinkers. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism, Blakeley explains how capitalism really works and gives a crucial primer on the modern economy. She joins today to explain why conceiving of "free markets" and "government planning" as opposites is highly misleading, because our neoliberal "market-based" economy involves many deep ties between the state and corporations. Instead of thinking of "capitalism" and "socialism" as a spectrum that runs from markets to government, Blakeley says we should focus our analysis on who owns and controls production, and who gets the benefits."The choice isn’t “free markets” or “planning.” Planning and markets exist alongside each other in capitalist societies—indeed, in any society. The choice is whether the planning that inevitably does take place in any complex social system is democratic or oligarchic. Do we allow a few institutions to make decisions that affect everyone else, considering only their own interests, or do we move toward a system in which everyone has the power to shape the conditions of their existence? We must stop talking about “free-market capitalism” and instead accept that capitalism is a hybrid system based on a fusion between markets and planning. Rather than seeing the world in which we live as emerging from mystical market forces beyond our control, we must realize that the world in which we live results from the conscious choices of those operating within it. When we are able to view the world in these terms, the space for conscious, democratic design of our world expands." — Grace Blakeley

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, and writes the organization's farm animal welfare research newsletter. In the newsletter, Bollard has argued that animal welfare is a crucial moral issue and tried to explain the dissonance between people's stated compassion for animals and their willingness to tolerate animals' mass suffering in factory farms. Bollard explains the massive amount of work it will take to reduce or eliminate factory farming, and the setbacks including the challenges plant-based meats have had. He also shows, however, that there have been striking successes that should make the issue feel less hopeless and insurmountable, and actually major improvements to animal welfare are within reach. Today he joins to explain why the issue is a priority, why it's so challenging to mobilize people around, what has been accomplished so far, and what could be accomplished with more activism and political pressure. "We face a mighty challenge: ending the abuse of more sentient beings than humans who have ever lived on earth. We do so with few resources: all advocacy for farmed animals globally has a combined budget smaller than the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yet we’ve already achieved progress for billions of sentient beings." — Lewis Bollard

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality, a history of the 20th century women's movement that documents the remarkable courage of the women who gave us suffrage, abortion rights, and greater equality across many dimensions of social and economic life. Today she joins to discuss how those gains were made, but also the failures (such as the story of the Equal Rights Amendment). She also talks about how many of the striking victories for women's equality are now under serious threat of rollback.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Zoë Schiffer is the author of the new book "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter," which tells the full story of how the richest man in the world took over a major piece of the 21st century "public square." Schiffer does not take a nostalgic view of pre-Musk Twitter, showing that the company was in many ways poorly run and Twitter itself highly dysfunctional. But she shows how Musk's capricious, self-aggrandizing approach to running the platform have altered it. We discuss the role of Twitter in 21st century America, Musk's radicalization into anti-woke politics, and the harms that come from having someone with so much wealth be given so much power to shape our public discussions.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !The day Henry Kissinger died, Jacobin magazine released a book, which they had completed years before, called The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger. In the book, edited by René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, a group of foreign policy experts trace Kissinger's career from continent to continent, showing the human consequences of his Machiavellian choices. But The Good Die Young doesn't just treat Kissinger as a uniquely malevolent figure, and shows how he fits into broader schemes of U.S. global dominance after the Second World War. Co-editor Jonah Walters joins us today to give a rundown of Kissinger's career, to explain what makes him an important figure, and to assess what his legacy will be."It’s small wonder that the political establishment regarded Kissinger as an asset and not an aberration. He embodied what the two ruling parties share in common: a commitment to maintaining capitalism, and the resolve to ensure favorable conditions for American investors in as much of the world as possible. A stranger to shame and inhibition, Kissinger was able to guide the American empire through a treacherous period in world history, when the United States’ rise to global domination indeed sometimes seemed on the brink of collapse." — from The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry KissingerRead a Current Affairs article on Kissinger by Ben Burgis here.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Hamilton Nolan is a leading labor journalist whose new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor is both a study of recent labor organizing in our time and a strong case for why unions are vital to the health of the country. Hamilton goes around the country, from South Carolina to Las Vegas to New Orleans, showcasing the achievements of organized labor and revealing what is possible when working people come together to wield their "hammer" through collective action. He is highly critical of some of the country's largest labor unions for "fortress unionism" (protecting the gains of their existing members without organizing new ones). In today's conversation, he explains why union density has remained stubbornly low in the United States, and lays out a vision for what could happen once working people become conscious of the power that they can wield together.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Marxist philosophers do not often write bestsellers, but as the New York Times wrote in a profile of today's guest, Kohei Saito's work has unexpectedly taken Japan by storm:"When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. Economic growth is gospel. So a book arguing that Japan should view its current condition of population decline and economic stagnation not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for Marxist reinvention, sounded like a tough sell. But sell it has. Since its release in 2020, Mr. Saito’s book “Capital in the Anthropocene” has sold more than 500,000 copies, exceeding his wildest imaginings. Mr. Saito, a philosophy professor at the University of Tokyo, appears regularly in Japanese media to discuss his ideas. ... Mr. Saito has tapped into what he describes as a growing disillusionment in Japan with capitalism’s ability to solve the problems people see around them, whether caring for the country’s growing older population, stemming rising inequality or mitigating climate change."Prof. Saito's book has caught on in Japan because it is a powerful statement of an important and challenging set of ideas. Saito points out the ecologically and socially destructive tendencies of capitalism, and argues for an alternative way of structuring the economy and society that could leave us (and the planet) better off. He calls these ideas "degrowth communism." Today he joins us to explain what he means, to respond to myths and challenges, and clear up misconceptions. Saito's book Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto is now available in English.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Originally aired January 29, 2024There is an ongoing case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa against Israel, which alleges that Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes a serious breach of the Genocide Convention. The Court recently issued a preliminary ruling allowing the case to go forward and requiring Israel to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention. Jeremy Scahill of The Intercept joins us today to explain the basics of the accusations being made against Israel, the Israeli government's response, and to give his evaluation of the evidence that South Africa has presented so far. Note that this interview was recorded before the court issued its preliminary ruling allowing the case to go further. Jeremy's analysis of the ruling can be found here. An analysis of the case in Current Affairs is available here.During its presentation before the court, Israel made no arguments to defend its conduct in Gaza that it—and its backers in the Biden administration for that matter—has not made repeatedly in the media over the past three months as part of its propaganda campaign to justify the unjustifiable. Each day that passes, more Palestinians will die at the hands of U.S. munitions fired by Israeli forces and the already dire humanitarian situation will deteriorate further. - Jeremy Scahill

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ingrid Robeyns is a professor at Utrecht University, where she specializes in political philosophy and ethics. She's the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth, a new book which argues for rational limits on how much money a single person can amass. Today on the podcast, Dr. Robeyns joins to explain how the super-rich keep everyone else poor, how large concentrations of wealth damage democracy and the environment, and how "limitarian" public policies can become a reality. "There are many different reasons why you might endorse a limitarian worldview. There is the principled objection against inequality. Or there’s the fact that so much excess wealth is tainted. Society’s richest have appropriated an unfairly large part of the economic gains of the past century, and they need to redistribute that surplus. Or you might support limitarianism because it would do a huge amount to address existing power imbalances and protect political equality—to halt the erosion of democracy, and prevent the domination of politics by the wealthy few. Or it might be the fact that limitarianism can take us a long way toward saving our planet, given that the lifestyles, business strategies, tax avoidance or evasion, and lobbying of the super-rich have led to civilization-threatening ecological harm. A world on fire needs a lot of money to extinguish the flames, and the super-rich are holding on to money they don’t need. It makes much more sense to take the money for dousing the fire from the super-rich than from the middle classes, let alone the poor. The same point also holds for meeting other needs beyond protecting the livability of the planet, such as fighting poverty and other forms of deprivation. Collectively acknowledging that at some point enough is enough would also make the rich themselves better off. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally: no one can claim that they deserve to be a millionaire."- Ingrid Robeyns

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ryan Grim is the Intercept's D.C. bureau chief and the author of The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. Ryan's book chronicles the rise of the "Squad" in Congress, but also chronicles the entire recent history of left politics in the United States including the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the legislative fights under Biden. The book is a fascinating insider account of how power really works. The Squad were all elected as insurgent Democrats challenging the party establishment. But once inside the House, they encountered a familiar dilemma: do you go to war against the party leaders, and alienate them, or do you try to work with them? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez herself, Grim reports, had conflicting impulses, but ultimately axed staff members who pushed for a more confrontational approach. Did the more conciliatory path gain the hoped-for results? Grim joins today to discuss. Who is the "Squad"? Are they just a media creation or do they act as a group? What differentiates them from other progressives in the House? What is their relationship with the party leadership like? What compromises have they had to make? Has their approach worked? All of this and more is put to Ryan Grim in our conversation. “Her staff and many of the backers of Justice Democrats wanted to go to war against the people they saw as in the way of progress, Riffle said. They wanted a real political revolution. “The difference of what Corbin and Saikat and myself and other people in the incoming AOC camp thought was, ‘These are shitty people. And the reason that these policies are bad is that the party is being run by shitty people.’ I don’t think [the Squad] thought that,” he said. “We thought you should burn it down because the house was occupied by shitty people. They thought we should burn it down because, you know, we can build a better house with better policies.” - Ryan Grim, The Squad

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Ed Broadbent was perhaps the best-known democratic socialist in Canada. He served for 14 years as the head of the country's New Democratic Party, after beginning his career as a political theorist. Broadbent's new book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality (written in collaboration with, among others, Current Affairs contributor Luke Savage) is a tour through the last half century of Canadian politics, and for Americans it offers a fascinating window into what it looks like when a democratic socialist politician gets close enough to power to have to make serious policy decisions. Broadbent joins us today to introduce listeners to the basics of the Canadian political system and talk about what he learned over the course of his career, where he earned the respect of a wide swath of Canadians, to the point where he has been called "Canada's most iconic social democrat" and "the best prime minister we never had." We discuss how Canada built social democratic institutions, and how to have a politics critical of both state and corporate power.[Note: Sadly it was announced the day after this interview was originally posted that Ed has passed away.]"So, what is to be done? Are we going to sit back and watch conservative politicians capitalize on economic insecurity to erode the potential of the social democratic state and reimpose their new, hollow model of “freedom”? They see starving the state as the solution to our problems. Take away the power and money of the state, they claim, and humanity will be set free. I reject this blinkered vision. Generations of Canadians, notably after the Second World War, demonstrated that the opposite is the case. It was the establishment of social rights like health care, unemployment insurance, and national pensions that enabled millions of Canadians to feel free for the first time in their lives. Having been undermined by successive governments, the remarkable achievements of the democratic age are now at risk of full-blown collapse. Now more than ever, we require prompt and effective state action to respond to the new destabilizing threats to people’s livelihoods and preserve a sustainable life on this planet." — Ed Broadbent, Seeking Social Democracy

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Mark Chiusano of Newsday knows George Santos better than anyone else, having covered Santos’ political career from its start to its recent ignominious end. His new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos documents the full rise and fall of our country’s most infamous lying legislator. Today on the podcast, Chiusano joins us to explain how it came to be that, in a country as committed to honesty and fairness as the United States, someone who lies shamelessly could make it into a position of power. The lessons of the Santos saga may tell us as much about who we are as a nation as they do about the House of Representatives’ most infamous grifter.Transcript available here: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/12/the-journalist-who-most-understands-george-santos-explains-how-he-made-it-to-congress

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist who's been reporting on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation since 2019. His work has appeared in The Nation, the Columbia Journalism Review, and the British Medical Journal. He's also the author of a new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire, which compiles many of his findings. Schwab argues that Bill Gates is far from the generous, kind-hearted philanthropist he's often portrayed as in the media. Instead, his reporting shows how Gates has constructed a "PR halo" around himself through his extensive donations to news outlets, many of which fail to report their financial ties to the Gates Foundation. He also criticizes the culture of secrecy that surrounds the Foundation itself, and reveals how the monopoly capitalism Gates practiced at Microsoft influences his decisions today, including his pivotal role in restricting vaccine patents that prevent poor countries from making their own life-saving medicines. Schwab's book shows how Gates has bought himself outsized influence in everything from education to agriculture, and how his influence has often been a malignant one. A sober analysis of Gates shows he is just as worthy of the titles of hoarder and miser as he is philanthropist and mensch. Relative to his vast wealth, Gates is giving away a tiny amount of money—that he doesn’t need and that he could never possibly spend on himself. So the question is: Instead of celebrating the million-dollar gifts his foundation donates, why aren’t we interrogating the $184 billion that Gates isn’t giving away? Why aren’t we asking: How is it that the world’s most generous philanthropist is becoming richer and richer, year over year?- Tim SchwabCurrent Affairs' own coverage of Gates can be found here and here.

Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Peter Kalmus is one of the country's most visible and engaged climate scientists. He is the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution and works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Kalmus has advocated civil disobedience as a necessary means of spurring action to stop the climate catastrophe. Dr. Kalmus wrote a scathing article about the UN’s recent COP 28 climate summit, which was dominated by the fossil fuel industry. He joins today to explain why, as a climate scientist, he wants people to understand the basic fact that we have no choice but to eliminate the fossil fuel industry as soon as possible. "In fact, the laws of physics guarantee that it will get much too fucking hot if we keep burning fossil fuels. So, pardon my language, but I don't know what it's going to take. I'm really disappointed because I thought that at this level of heating, of obviousness, of disaster, that everyone would wake up and realize that none of our hopes and dreams will come to fruition if we don't have a habitable planet." — Peter KalmusA transcript of this interview is available here. Listeners may also be interested in our episode with Henry Shue, a moral philosopher on the obligation we have to future generations.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Keira Havens is a science writer whose blog series "Box of Rocks" aims to identify and expose racist pseudo-science. She joins us today to explain some of the fallacious reasoning that is used to rationalize social hierarchies, and how proponents of toxic ideologies manage to cast themselves as mainstream researchers. We talk about the intellectual misdeeds of such figures as Charles Murray and Steven Pinker, and Keira shows us how to spot some of their bad arguments in the wild. "As profoundly boring as biological essentialism is, some people are very into it. The ones that are honest about it are easy to spot. It can be harder to identify those that cultivate a careful aura of plausible deniability and then go about building the rest of their career. By hiding their philosophy, they gain access to institutions and platforms, allowing them to pave the way for other useful idiots and convince the next generation that Science Says™ some humans are better than others. The networks manufacturing credibility for their theory of eugenics are not shallow. They run deep, across decades, built by people that devote themselves consistently and continuously to the promotion of hereditarian philosophies." — Keira Havens, Box of Rocks

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Vincent Bevins is a journalist who has written for the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere, and is the author of the acclaimed The Jakarta Method. His latest book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (PublicAffairs) is about the mass protests that took place around the world from 2010 to 2020. The book shows how these protests were sparked, how they often went in directions their originators couldn't have predicted, and what legacies they left in countries from Brazil to Tunisia. The book is an invaluable source of lessons for activists; as the Current Affairs review of the book (by Raina Lipsitz) says, "Bevins shows that we can, and must, analyze and learn from the failures of our most inspiring movements." Bevins joins us today to take us through some of this history (much of it unreported in the United States) and the most crucial takeaways for protest movements of today. “As I spent years traveling around the world, talking to the people that helped create the mass protests described in this book, and interviewing the experts and government officials who tried to grapple with their meaning, I would always ask what they thought had happened. But I never did so to cast blame or to establish that mistakes were made. Most people who spoke with me know very well that things can go terribly wrong regardless of intentions, and the conversations often became difficult. Many of these individuals have suffered for years trying to understand the events of the past decade. I always put my question something like this: “If you could speak to a teenager somewhere around the world right now, someone who might be fighting to change history in some kind of political struggle in their lifetime, what would you tell them? What lessons did you learn?” — Vincent Bevins

Today we have a most unusual episode: a parody of American radio cliches, pieced together by Nathan. Using audio editing software, sound effects libraries, voice cloning technology, and "AI" music tools, he has created an absurdist soundscape satirizing media, politics, and commercialism. Filled with jingles, talk shows, news reports, and presidential speeches, it portrays the darkness lurking beneath cheery American mythology.The "Manatee Facts Podcast" mentioned in the introduction can be heard here. Nathan's article about the remarkable power of new audio technology is here.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Philanthropy 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 Price of Humanity, goes beyond this critique, and argues that we can engineer a better concept of philanthropy. First, she argues that we need a social democratic welfare state, so that the meeting of basic needs is not the domain of philanthropy (no more GoFundMes for medical care). But then we also need to go beyond a basic living wage to instead have a "giving wage," meaning we should all earn enough to be able to give some of it away. The things we support through giving should be special projects that aren't funded by the state but nevertheless enrich life. Schiller joins today to discuss her ideas for a better kind of philanthropy. She explains why she thinks the effective altruists have everything backwards and why the "roses" in "bread and roses" should not be considered optional. Listeners might also enjoy our conversation from last year with Prof. Linsey McGoey, author of No Such Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy."The project of philanthropy is to make the earth more of a home, and to encourage inhabitants of the spaces and institutions it provides to feel at home in the world. Ours is a world for humans. It should serve all of us, not the few who can exploit the many for maximum profit. The money we use to build the common world communicates our belief in that world, and in all who inhabit it. It affirms the value of humanity beyond price." - Amy Schiller, The Price of Humanity

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! And if you like our work, please consider subscribing or donating to beautiful Current Affairs Magazine. Brian Merchant is the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the new book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech. Brian's book takes us back to early 19th century England, and the birth of the "Luddite" movement. The Luddites famously smashed new machines that were expected to take away jobs in the textile industry. Brian argues that the Luddites are often misunderstood and misrepresented, and that by examining their uprising, we can better prepare ourselves to deal with the socially disruptive effects of new technology in our own time.The Luddites, Brian shows, weren't anti-technology. In fact, they embraced new machines that helped them do their jobs better. They were against machines that destroyed workers' livelihoods and rendered their skills useless. The Luddites rejected technology when it was used to enrich capitalists at the expense of laborers. Their dispute is best understood not as being over "technology" but about who gets the benefit of new technologies and who decides what kinds of technologies will be implemented. Today, Brian joins to clear up misconceptions about the Luddites and show us what we can learn from them.“If the Luddites have taught us anything, it’s that robots aren’t taking our jobs. Our bosses are. Robots are not sentient—they do not have the capacity to be coming for or stealing or killing or threatening to take away our jobs. Management does. Consulting firms and corporate leadership do. Gig company and tech executives do...If the machinery or the robots are simply “coming,” if they just show up and relieve a helpless lot of humans of their livelihoods, then no one is to blame for this independently arising phenomenon, and little is to be done about it beyond bracing for impact. It’s not the executives, swayed by consulting firms who insist the future is in AI text generation or customer service bots; or the tech titans, who use algorithmic platforms to displace traditional workers; or the managers, who see an opportunity to improve profit margins by adopting automated kiosks that edge out cashiers; or the shipping conglomerate bosses, who decide to try to replace dockworkers with a fleet of automated trucks.” - Brian Merchant, Blood in the MachineThe Current Affairs article "The Luddites Were Right" pairs well with this episode.

Today we have a documentary episode examining and analyzing the ongoing pro-Palestine uprisings at campuses around the country. We look at the horrifying facts on the ground in Gaza that have caused U.S. students to risk their academic careers in solidarity demonstrations. We discuss how universities have repressed the demonstrations an a manner disturbingly reminiscent of authoritarian states. We expose the myths that the protests are hateful, antisemitic, and pro-terror. And we put the demonstrations in context, looking at how prior generations of anti-war students were similarly motivated to take a stance against violence and injustice.This episode is free to the public and unlocked, because of the subject matter's importance. But Current Affairs is funded entirely by its readers, and can't continue to produce new work without your support, so if you enjoy our work, please consider purchasing a Patreon membership, magazine subscription, or donating to our organization.Jon Ben-Menachem's Zeteo essay is here.Rashid Khalidi's full interview is here.W.D. Ehrhart's full interview is here.More from Dr. Thrasher on what he saw at Columbia is here.The Intercepted episode quoting Yasser Khan is here.Full video of the quoted speech at the Columbia demonstration is here.Further coverage of the protests can be found in the Current Affairs News Briefing.Portions of this radio essay were adapted from the Current Affairs articles "My Date With Destiny" and "Palestine Protests are a Test of Whether This is a Free Country." Script and audio editing by Nathan J. Robinson, who is responsible for any errors.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and activist whose latest book is The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart, based on her CBC Massey Lectures. Today she joins to discuss the themes of her lectures, which are build around the ideas of security and insecurity. What makes us actually "secure"? Security is a word that has right-wing connotations (surveillance cameras, security guards, etc.) But we know that there is another kind of security, the kind promised by programs like Social Security. Astra explains why she, as a longtime activist for debtors, thinks we live in an "age of insecurity" and distinguishes between the kinds of "existential" insecurities we are stuck with and the "manufactured" ones we might be able to get rid of. “My perspective is shaped by the years I’ve spent focused on the topic of inequality and its pernicious effects on culture and democracy both in my creative work as a filmmaker and writer and as an activist. Nearly a decade ago, I helped found the Debt Collective, the world’s first union for debtors, which has become a bastion for people who are broke and overwhelmed. Inequality is, indeed, out of control, with ten billionaire men possessing six times more wealth than the poorest three billion people on earth.6 But numbers do not capture the true nature or extent of the crisis. Insecurity, in contrast, describes how inequality is lived day after day. Where inequality can be represented by points on a graph, insecurity speaks to how those points feel, hovering in space over a tattered safety net or nothing at all. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich, in her 1989 study of the psychology of the middle class, dubbed the condition “fear of falling.” But today there’s barely any middle left, and everyone is afraid of what lies below.” - Astra Taylor, The Age of Insecurity An article Nathan wrote commenting on the book's themes is here.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Myisha Cherry is a philosopher at UC-Riverside whose book The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press) argues that reason and emotion are not, as many people assume, opposites, but our emotions are often important expressions of our reason. We get angry when we our implicit framework for how the world ought to operate is violated, and Prof. Cherry argues that it's okay and even important to have this feeling. She shows that in the history of social movements, anger has been an important motivating factor, and argues that it can coexist with love, compassion, and thoughtfulness. Cherry does not advocate "mindless" rage. She says we need to be reflective, and figure out whether our anger is actually well-grounded in facts and sound morality. She distinguishes between different types of anger, some of which are healthier and more factually grounded than others. But she believes that if we embrace the right kinds of rage, they can help us "build a better world."Anger plays the role of expressing the value of people of color and racial justice; it provides the eagerness, optimism, and self-belief needed to fight against persistent and powerful racist people and systems; and it allows the outraged to break certain racial rules as a form of intrinsic and extrinsic resistance. This helps explain how the oppressed can feel affirmed when others get angry on their behalf, how people are able to fight against powerful systems despite the risk of abuse and arrests, and why WNBA and NBA players—who used their platform to combat racism—were viewed as radical for simply expressing their feelings. —Myisha Cherry, The Case for Rage

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Malaika Jabali is Senior News and Politics Editor at Essence magazine. She is also the only previous Current Affairs contributor whose writing for our magazine has won an award! Her exceptional piece "The Color of Economic Anxiety" won the 2019 New York Association for Black Journalists award for magazine feature. She has now published her first book, It's Not You, It's Capitalism: Why It's Time to Break Up and How To Move On. In accessible and entertaining prose (with fun illustrations by artist Kayla E.), Jabali presents an introduction to leftist economic and social analysis for the uninitiated reader. Uniquely, the book looks at economics through analogies from modern dating life, and shows how some of the things that keep us trapped in toxic relationships have parallels in the way we feel trapped with our dysfunctional economic system. Her book is also valuable for the way it introduce socialism by highlighting leftists of color. Instead of beginning with Marx and Debs, Malaika gives us W.E.B. DuBois, Assata Shakur, and A. Philip Randolph. Today Malaika joins to discuss not only the basic anti-capitalist argument made in the book, but how she's thought about presenting that argument in a novel and easy-to-read way. (Her book, incidentally, makes a fantastic holiday gift especially for young people.) We also talk about her award-winning Current Affairs essay about neglected Black voters in Milwaukee, who saw no point in supporting the Democratic Party in 2016, and whose "economic anxiety" Hillary Clinton saw little need to address."I broke up with capitalism around my junior year of college. Ever since, I've felt like the patient friend waiting for my bestie to see why she needs to break up with her toxic partner, too. While socialism has captured mainstream attention in the U.S. in the past decade or so, probably because of the popularity of Bernie Sanders and the Democratic Socialists of America, I didn't arrive at my anti-capitalism through electoral politics. It was through studying Black history as an undergrad that I started to see how messed up our whole system really was. Reading about how slaveholders were willing to kidnap, brand, torture, and work their labor force to near-death—oh and create a system of white supremacy to maintain their profits that still thrives today—will do that to you. I also soaked in the words of Black revolutionaries who spoke out against capitalism, including my godfather Charles Barron, a former member of the Black Panther Party. "We keep fighting the symptoms," he is prone to say, "But capitalism is the disease." - Malaika Jabali, It's Not You, It's Capitalism

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Today we take a dive into the world of "corporate bullshit" with Nick Hanauer, who has become an expert on spotting and debunking it. Nick is a businessman who became known for warning of the devastating social effects of plutocracy, and who now hosts the "Pitchfork Economics" podcast which presents sharp conversations with leading progressive economic experts. Nick's latest project is the book Corporate Bullsh*t, written with Joan Walsh and Donald Cohen. (Listen to Donald's appearance on the CA podcast here.) The book dives into American history to show how every time a progressive reform was proposed, the corporate PR machine spun the proposal as a job-killer, a socialist plot, the end of civilization, etc. Some of the examples collected in the book are truly galling, as Nathan explains in his review of the book here. On this episode, we look at some of the common tendencies used in corporate propaganda and why they can be persuasive to people. We also discuss how Nick came to be a public opponent of plutocracy, and we have a short digression on the fraudulence of the "MyPillow," since Nick comes from a family of immigrants who spent a century making pillows and bedding.Over the past century and a half, on a broad range of issues including the minimum wage, workplace safety, environmental regulations, consumer protection—even on morally indisputable issues like child labor and racial segregation—the people and corporations who profited from the status quo have effectively wielded a familiar litany of groundless ‘economic’ claims and fear mongering rhetoric in their efforts to slow or quash necessary reforms. As even a cursory examination of the quotes we’ve included in this book will show, the wealthy and powerful are willing to say anything—even the worst things imaginable—to retain their wealth and power. But while there is simply no bottom to this well of shamelessness, there is a pattern.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/currentaffairs !Dr. Luke Messac is an emergency physician and historian whose new book is Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine (Oxford University Press). Messac also wrote the article "Why Medical Debt Forgiveness Drives Are Not Enough" for Current Affairs. Messac's book looks at the entire history of medical debt, how hospitals went from being (somewhat) charitable institutions to farming debt collection out to huge companies that make massive profits off shaking down poor people. He joins today to explain the harms that medical debt does to patients' lives (and to their relationships with their doctors), how the debt collection industry works, and why things don't have to be this way. "We must reckon with the bounty hunters of medicine: the debt collectors who haunt the lives of the millions of Americans who cannot pay for their medical care. Any solution that leaves intact an industry that profits off the financial captivity of the poor cannot credibly be called just. It is time to build a future without medical debt or its collectors." — Luke Messac

Jonathan Taplin has had a fascinating career, from being a tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band to a film producer for Martin Scorsese to running the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California's communications school. In recent years, he has turned his attention to writing critically about the tech elite. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy focused on leading monopolistic corporations. His new book, The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto, examines four leading billionaires (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen). Each of them is extremely powerful and has a vision for the future of the world. Taplin thinks those visions are bleak, antidemocratic, and dystopian. He joins us to explain how he thinks these men are destroying our culture and even trying to "end reality." Taplin's background in rock-n-roll and New Hollywood gives him a distinctive perspective on the cultural degradation that these billionaires are contributing to, from the erosion of musicians' livelihoods through streaming services to the threat posed to quality cinema by a nonstop stream of billion-dollar AI-written superhero movies.“There is a choice about what the future holds, and it’s not necessarily Mark Zuckerberg’s or Elon Musk’s to make. The fight that remains will be to once again assert the possibility of constructing our lives as free and autonomous persons in a natural world not destroyed by industrial pollution and not ruled by the algorithms of the tech monopolies. It will be to resist this future of pseudo-experience and fantasy exploration. That resistance will require both government regulation and the individual decisions of millions of citizens around the world about how they are going to use technology. Fortunately these four technologies of the Metaverse, crypto, transhumanism, and space travel are in their early stages of adoption...[My greatest fear is] that enchanted by the magic of the Technocrats’ “immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life,” we will sleep through a right-wing revolution and wake up to find our democracy gone and our children being turned into Meta cyborgs. Let us wake up and resist the end of reality.” — Jonathan Taplin, The End of RealityRead the Current Affairs critique of Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto" here. Our episode on the relationship between MySpace and music is here. The crypto story is fleshed out in our previous episode with Zeke Faux.

Zeke Faux of Bloomberg News is the author of a fascinating and hilarious new book about the crypto world and the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried empire, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. In contrast with Michael Lewis, whose recent book Going Infinite also looks at Bankman-Fried, Faux sees the scamming and lying of the crypto world for what it is, and his book is highly conscious of the harm done to victims by the fraudulence of Bankman-Fried and others. (Faux's book begins: "'I’m not going to lie,’ Sam Bankman-Fried told me. This was a lie.") Today, Faux joins to answer all of the most pressing questions about SBF, FTX, crypto, and the very dumb world of "NFTs," like:When did SBF's (alleged) crimes become detectable? Is Michael Lewis right that at the core of FTX was a "great real business" that was undone by bad luck?When Zeke confronted Jimmy Fallon about all the money people lost by investing in NFTs, how did Fallon justify promoting them?Since Sam Bankman-Fried rationalized his every action in terms of its "expected value" calculation, how did he justify playing video games all the time?Was SBF's "effective altruism" ever actually sincere?Why would anyone ever have bought a "bored ape" image for millions of dollars?What insights about the human condition can be gleaned from examining the world of crypto?Bankman-Fried said that I was wrong. Crypto wasn’t a scam, and neither was Tether. But he wasn’t offended by my question. He said he totally understood my problem. Then he did something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But knowing what I know now, I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to make some kind of winking confession. Bankman-Fried cut me off, nodding, as I tried to explain more. His tone turned chipper. He said: “It’s like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme,’ right?”Right.— Zeke Faux, Number Go Up Listeners may also be interested in prior episodes on crypto/NFTs/"Web3" with Stephen Diehl, Molly White, and Nicholas Weaver. Incidentally, Sam Bankman Fried is testifying in his criminal trial today. It's also never a bad time to reread our 2021 article "Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud."

Nathan 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 events have been canceled since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Based in Jerusalem, Thrall joins us to explain the current state of Israeli society, and to tell us more about the reality of life for Palestinians under occupation. “For all the blame that was cast, no one—not the investigators, not the lawyers, not the judges—named the true origins of the calamity. No one mentioned the chronic lack of classrooms in East Jerusalem, a shortage that led parents to send their children to poorly supervised West Bank schools. No one pointed to the separation wall and the permit system that forced a kindergarten class to take a long, dangerous detour to the edge of Ramallah rather than driving to the playgrounds of Pisgat Ze’ev, a stone’s throw away. ... No one noted that the absence of emergency services on one side of the separation wall was bound to lead to tragedy. No one said that the Palestinians in the area were neglected because the Jewish state aimed to reduce their presence in greater Jerusalem, the place most coveted by Israel. For these acts, no one was held to account.” — Nathan Thrall, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

Political 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. Slater’s exhaustively documented but accessible work also predicted that Israel’s policies toward Palestine were creating the conditions for a “disaster.” Three years later, Slater’s predictions have tragically come true. He joins to explain the background to the conflict.“I’ve become convinced that Israel, with essentially blind US Jewish and government support, is well along the road to both a moral and security disaster.” — Jerome Slater, Mythologies Without End (2020) This interview is available as a transcript here.