Current Affairs

This episode originally aired on November 18, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Garrison Lovely wrote the cover story for Jacobin magazine's special issue on AI, which explained how leftists should think about the risks posed by the new technologies. He also recently wrote for the New York Times about AI safety, and has written for Current Affairs about psychedelic drugs and McKinsey. Garrison joins today to discuss what the real harms that AI could do are, why Big Tech can't be trusted to self-regulate, and how we can avoid a nightmarish future.Listeners might also be interested in Nathan's recent article on the California legislation.The United States’ current arrangement of managing A.I. risks through voluntary commitments places enormous trust in the companies developing this potentially dangerous technology. Unfortunately, the industryingeneral — and OpenAI in particular — has shown itself to be unworthy of that trust, time and again. — Garrison Lovely, The New York Times

This episode originally aired on November 15, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Is our “child welfare” system successfully helping protect kids from neglect and abuse? Or is it inflicting widespread trauma through unnecessary, unjustifiable family separation? Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been one of the country’s most deeply-informed critics of “child protective services,” which she argues systematically target poor Black mothers whose only parenting error is to be poor. Roberts is the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, which sums up over 25 years of her research into the subject. Roberts is also a 2024 winner of the MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the Genius Grant. Today, she joins to discuss her work.

This episode originally aired on November 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon who has served in conflict zones around the world. He authored a recent New York Times op-ed that surveyed dozens of medical professionals who had served in Gaza about their observations, including the targeting of children. He is also the organizer of the Gaza Healthcare Letters to the Biden administration. He joins today to discuss the level of harm that has been inflicted on Gaza civilians and why he and other professionals have concluded the Biden administration is supporting a major crime against humanity.Warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.A video of this episode can be found here."It's a disaster, and it's going to be multigenerational, with absolutely no question. Not only are these children traumatized, but they've been malnourished for a year. Their brains are not going to develop normally. And people often talked about the Palestinians just being serial killers and psychopaths and stuff. But if you wanted to make sure that there are people with serious problems, with serious difficulties concentrating, with serious difficulties understanding peaceful resolution of problems, now you've guaranteed it for an entire generation, in fact." - Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

This episode originally aired on October 29, 2024. Get new podcasts early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairsRight!Richard Seymour is one of the most learned and provocative leftist writers in the world. He has written books on subjects ranging from social media (The Twittering Machine) to British Labour politics (Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics) to liberal apologists for imperialism (The Liberal Defense of Murder) to the career of Christopher Hitchens (Unhitched). On whatever he writes about, Seymour is well-read and thoughtful, posing challenging ideas in elegantly-crafted prose. Today he joins to talk to us about "disaster nationalism," the apocalyptic brand of right-wing politics that Seymour says is on the ascent, and threatens to destroy liberal civilization as we know it. It's not necessarily an encouraging conversation, but Seymour encourages us to look honestly at the dark trends in right-wing politics in our time, and to be cognizant of the extent of the threat we face. Helping us understand what the right believes and what it might be capable of, Seymour's warnings could not be more timely as we get closer and closer to an election that might see Donald Trump returned to power."Reaction always thrives on the prospect of annihilation. ‘American carnage’, ‘white genocide’, ‘death panels’, ‘invasion’, ‘great replacement’, ‘Islamisation’, ‘treason’, ‘cultural marxists’, ‘scum’, ‘communism’. The erosion and threatened destruction of worlds of power resembling, from its ideological purview, civilisational collapse, defeat, devastation. With which it is both appalled and enthralled... Amid the decomposition of the old party system, the legacy media, and associated forms of public authority, political forces organising around the nation and its enemies have won the major battles of the last decade. What is more, incumbency has been incredibly forgiving of their failures, their political gains proving far less fragile than those of the Left... The phrase ‘disaster nationalism’ implies something disastrous, or exploitative of disaster, or in elective affinity with disaster, or opaquely drawn to, or hurtling toward, or yearning for disaster. It is all of this." — Richard Seymour

This episode originally aired on October 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Carolyn Dupont, a professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University, is one of the country's leading experts on the Electoral College. She is the author of the book Distorting Democracy The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today, which debunks defenses of the Electoral College and shows why it's harmful to democracy. She joins us today to help us better understand this peculiar system and to go through the arguments in favor of it. Prof. Dupont notes in particular that the "Electoral College" we have today bears little resemblance to the system the Founding Fathers actually set up, which means that we can't appeal to their "intent" in order to defend it. She explains how this system came into being, how it changed over the years, and how it fails at achieving its supposed purposes, like giving small states a voice.Listeners may be interested in the Current Affairs article by Alex Skopic on the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is one possible way to neutralize the Electoral College for good."This system increasingly returns results that threaten to undo the expressed wishes of a majority of voters, and these “misfires” profoundly damage the body politic... From its inception, Americans have disliked the Electoral College. In recent decades this dissatisfaction has shown up in polling, but it has manifested over the life of our nation in other ways. In the earliest days of our republic, even the men who helped create the Electoral College recommended key changes. Since then, more than 700 proposals to alter or abolish it have been introduced into Congress—more than on any other topic." - Carolyn Dupont, Distorting Democracy

This episode originally aired on October 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Osamah Khalil of Syracuse University is the author of A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden, a vital history of the wars of the last 50 years. Prof. Khalil shows how, from the Vietnam war to the present day, American leaders (and American pop culture) conjured a "world of enemies" in which force was preferable to diplomacy. A cast of rotating villains (from Ho Chi Minh to Saddam Hussein to Hamas) are treated as existential threats to freedom and democracy, and because they are monstrous they cannot be negotiated with and can only be destroyed. Prof. Khalil joins today to discuss his work, which argues that our militaristic attitude toward the rest of the world has also come to characterize domestic political discourse."American militarism has not been limited to foreign battlefields. Politicians and policymakers have insisted that Americans are engaged in an existential struggle against foes seen and unseen, foreign and domestic. Thus, militarism has seeped into everyday American life as the United States has not settled for defeat or victory but for war as a permanent state." - Osamah F. KhalilThose who value this conversation will also probably want to check out The Myth of American Idealism, out now from Penguin Random House.

This episode originally aired on October 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Recently, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul made an argument for aggressively policing subway fare evasion. To explain why a major new crackdown is necessary, she cited "broken windows theory," which she said that progressives refuse to admit "works." She explained that allowing minor crimes "invites graver forms of crime," which is why we need to make sure laws against seemingly minor crimes are enforced. This is the core of the argument made in The Atlantic in 1982 by two political scientists, who argued that when a community allows small offenses (like broken windows) to go unpunished, soon the whole place is going to hell in a handbasket.But the broken windows theory was a fraud. The writers of the original article did not produce evidence that it was true, and indeed there hasn't been evidence produced since to show that it's true. Joining us today is Bernard Harcourt of Columbia Law School, who wrote the first book critical of broken windows policing, The Illusion of Order: The False Promise of Broken Windows Policing(2004). At the time the book was written, "broken windows" was credited with having produced major crime reductions across the country. Today Prof. Harcourt joins to explain how this theory became so popular. One reason, he says, is that it appealed to both liberals and conservatives: liberals because policing "order" was seen as an attractive alternative to mass incarceration, conservatives because it advocated aggressively keeping unruly poor people in check. But the evidence for the theory just wasn't there, and Prof. Harcourt explains that it ended up serving as the intellectual foundation for outrages like the mass stopping and frisking of young Black men."The broken windows theory and order-maintenance policing continue to receive extremely favorable reviews in policy circles, academia, and the press. Ironically the continued popularity of order-maintenance policing is due, in large part, to the dramatic rise in incarceration. Broken windows policing presents itself as the only viable alternative to three- strikes and mandatory minimum sentencing laws. Order-maintenance proponents affirmatively promote youth curfews, anti-gang loitering ordinances, and order-maintenance crackdowns as milder alternatives to the theory of incapacitation and increased incarceration. ... [But] decades after its first articulation in the Atlantic Monthly, the famous broken windows theory has never been verified. Despite repeated claims that the theory has in fact been "empirically verified" , there is no reliable evidence that the broken windows theory works."The evidentiary problems with broken windows are also discussed in Nathan's recent essay about The Atlantic.

This episode originally aired on September 26, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have recently been pushing vicious racist fake news about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are stealing and eating people's pets and destroying the town. But why are there Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio in the first place? What role has U.S. foreign policy played in driving Haitians from Haiti? Today, we are joined by Jonathan Katz, one of the leading journalists writing about U.S. imperialism and a specialist in Haiti. Katz tells us about the history of U.S. relations with Haiti, common misconceptions about the country, and the deeper meaning of the Springfield pet-eating scare, and how it fits with longstanding racialized narratives about threatening Haitians.The former Port-au-Prince bureau chief for the Associated Press, Katz is the author of the books The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster and Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. His newsletter can be found here.It is not a matter of whether the United States should get involved in Haiti following the first presidential assassination there in more than a century. The United States is already deeply involved. The questions are how that involvement helped, at a minimum, to set the stage for the crisis now enveloping a nation of 11.5 million people and what to do with that reality from here on out...Ever since Haiti won its independence from France in a slave revolution that culminated in 1804, the mere idea of a republic run by self-liberated Black people has sent shivers through the white world. -Jonathan Katz, "U.S. Intervention in Haiti Would Be a Disaster—Again," Foreign Policy (2021)

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!This week The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers The World was finally released! The book, co-written by Noam Chomsky and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson. Today, Nathan joins managing editor Lily Sánchez and associate editor Alex Skopic to discuss the book and introduce Prof. Chomsky's views on U.S. foreign policy, explaining why he finds Chomsky's warnings so important for our time. An article Nathan wrote further introducing the subject matter of the book can be found here.This book is a huge deal for us here at Current Affairs, so please help us by spreading the word about it and encouraging those you know to buy it!This book is in many ways an attempt to distill Chomsky's vision and critique of U.S. power. That major theme is that in U.S. political discourse, many of the criticisms of U.S. foreign policy share a certain premise. You can criticize U.S. foreign policy, but only within a certain spectrum. He points out that even critics of U.S. foreign policy argue that the United States makes mistakes, but it doesn't commit crimes. We have numerous examples of this in the book. Basically, when you talk about the Afghanistan War, it’s said, well, that didn't go well, but it was a well-intentioned war. In the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, he says it was a war begun by good men for noble reasons, but it was just a tragedy. In the case of the Iraq War: we meant well, we meant to bring democracy, and it's a shame it ended up a catastrophe. And Chomsky has always argued that a lot of U.S. policy does not consist of idealistic mistakes. In fact, oftentimes, the things that are horrifying about it are either intentional results of the policy, or at least are well understood to be likely consequences of the policy that are just ignored by policymakers. — Nathan J. Robinson

This episode originally aired on September 20, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Today on Current Affairs, it's our second-ever musical episode! We're joined today by Danny Bradley, who has written many songs for Current Affairs. Today, we listen to a few of those and Danny plays us some other favorites of his live on the air, including his new tune about a manosphere-influenced "Hopeless Romantic." Danny and Nathan also discuss what makes for good musical satire, why folk music is wonderfully socialistic, and why Danny once wrote a song called "Fuck The Guardian."A playlist of all the songs Danny has made for Current Affairs is here.

This episode originally aired on September 17, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Today on the program, Malaika Jabali returns to discuss the issues that were left out of the first presidential debate, and why Democrats should not embrace right-wing framings of issues even if they think doing so is electorally pragmatic. Malaika is the author of It's Not You, It's Capitalism. Nathan's recent piece "What Doesn't Get Said" also addresses many of these issues. This episode is also available in video form on our YouTube channel. Nathan's book "Superpredator: Bill Clinton's Use and Abuse of Black America" goes into depth about one of the most infamous periods in which Democrats decided the best way to win elections was to talk like conservatives. A recent Current Affairs article by Alex Skopic on Harris's Dick Cheney endorsement is here.

This episode originally aired on September 13, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Jordan Chariton of Status Coup News is a leading investigative journalist and the author of We The Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans, a major expose of one of the most outrageous scandals of our time, the Flint water crisis. Chariton has spent extensive time on the ground in Flint even as the mainstream media lost interest and moved on, and he joins today to explain why every one of us should understand this story of the poisoning of a city, which was not an accident and for which there has still been no justice."Infuriatingly, our mainstream national media ignores most of this and peppers us nonstop with the political horserace and political tribalism (and an unhealthy dose of sensationalism and conflict). We are, of course, living through extraordinary times with seemingly endless calamities erupting domestically and internationally. It’s hard to stay focused on one city’s crisis when we’re being hit constantly with one disaster after the next... But if there is just one thing you take away from this story, I hope it is this: please, don’t forget Flint. If we allow the poisoning of our fellow man and woman to simply fade away into the ether . . . don’t be shocked when it comes to your neighborhood next." - Jordan Chariton, We The Poisoned

This episode originally aired on September 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Today Kat Abugazaleh of Mother Jones and Zeteo News returns to the program to tell us what the DNC in Chicago was like. How did the Harris campaign try to court influencers and creators? How were the influencers treated differently than the press, and what responsibility does a "creator" have, given that they're not journalists but are also not formally with the campaign? How did the Harris campaign deal with the Palestine solidarity movement? Kat, who was on the ground in Chicago at the convention, tells us what political conventions are really like and how it differs from the spectacle presented on television."[The creators] were treated a lot better than pretty much everyone else there. We had our own designated workspace that had free drinks. It was like nine bucks to get a soda there, but in the creator workspace, we had free beer, wine....There was a giant thing on the wall that said, "Creators for Kamala Harris.... There was a lot of incentive to be a cheerleader... It was definitely way more privilege than was given to any other place covering [the convention]." - Kat Abughazaleh

This episode originally aired on September 8, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Jamie Peck is a writer, podcaster, and activist who has been involved with the "Stop Cop City" movement. Her recent presentation about the movement can be seen here. In it she explains what the "Cop City" plan in Atlanta is, how a movement to resist it came together, and the vast, alarming repression that that movement has been met with. Today, Jamie joins to tell us why the fight over Cop City in Atlanta affects all of us, and how the resistance movement successfully joined environmental activists and BLM activists, plus reformers and radicals, in a way that provides a template for good left organizing that pursues a "diversity of tactics."Our previous interview on this topic with the ACLU's Christopher Bruce, which focused on the criminal legal case, can be found here.

This episode originally aired on September 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Mouin Rabbani of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs is one of the most sober-minded, thoughtful, and morally clear analysts of the Israel-Palestine conflict. You may have seen him in action on the debate he participated in a few months back on the Lex Fridman program. Today, Mouin joins to answer questions about the Israel-Palestine conflict. What is Israel's "endgame"? Does it want a war with Iran? Why does Mouin believe Israel's actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide? Is the Biden administration actually seeking a ceasefire? Note that this conversation was recorded a couple of weeks ago, so some facts have changed. Mouin's latest article "The Charade of Gaza Cease-Fire Talks," can be read here.

This episode originally aired on August 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Bev Stohl ran Noam Chomsky's office for over two decades. In her wonderful book Chomsky and Me(OR Books) she discusses the sometimes chaotic, never boring inside of Chomsky-world, with thousands of correspondents and visitors from around the world descending on a cramped MIT office laden with books and papers. She joins today to talk about her decades working with the most-cited living intellectual and keeping his life organized. She addresses the question so many have wondered: how did he manage to answer everyone's emails, in addition to publishing over 100 books and giving thousands of lectures?My mind's eye lit up with images of Noam’s body hunching, hands hammering out thesis drafts, editorial letters, articles, statements of solidarity, petitions, lectures, professional correspondence, recommendation letters, arguments, and email. For decades. On countless keyboards. On manual and electric typewriters, then word processors, then progressively streamlined and ergonomically correct wireless keyboards, all the way to the smaller keys of his compact laptop, none of which cramped his fingers or hurt his wrists. His body, unlike mine, seemed to be built for endless typing. - Bev Stohl, Chomsky and Me

This episode originally aired on August 20, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!It's long been recognized that the U.S. criminal punishment system is aberrational, cruel, and broken. Our prison population is outrageously large. But how do we actually begin to dismantle the system? Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo have edited a vital guide to this question, showing that it's more difficult than it sounds, because so many different institutions (legislatures, courts, prosecutors' offices, police, public defense), each play a role in creating the outcome. In Dismantling Mass Incarceration, they go through each part of the system to discuss how it works, how it contributes to the problem, and paths we can take to fix it. The book features contributors from Angela Davis to our own Nathan J. Robinson, with the essay "Can Prison Abolition Ever Be Pragmatic?" Today, the editors join us to explain what's so wrong with criminal punishment, abolitionist vs. reformist approaches to thinking about it, and how we move forward.

This episode originally aired on August 15, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Gideon levy is one of Israel's leading dissident journalists. His new book The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe is perhaps the harshest condemnation of Israel's war on Gaza from any Israeli. Levy joins us to explain why he believes his fellow Israelis are brainwashed into thinking Palestinians are terroristic and inhuman, and the hideous consequences of that ideology. He also explains that the U.S. could have stopped the war, and is therefore culpable for everything that has happened to Gaza.How dare Israelis speak about a moral difference, or the moral values of the Israeli army, when this is the outcome? How can you say the Israeli army is doing anything possible to prevent it, when you know that the majority of victims in this war—there are no questions—are innocent people? Even Israel admits it. It’s not like a Hamas claim. There’s no doubt about it. No doubt about it that in no other war were 250 journalists killed. In no other war were over 500 medical teams killed. So many figures which leave this argument so hollow. - Gideon Levy

This episode originally aired August 7, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Keir Starmer took the place of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the UK Labour Party, and recently became the UK Prime Minister after Labour resoundingly defeated the Conservatives. Does this mean that Starmer has a mandate from the British public? What does Starmer stand for, anyway? How will he govern? How did he rise so fast in British politics? How did he manage to crush the left wing of the Labour Party?We are joined today by one of the UK's leading experts on Starmer's life and career, Oliver Eagleton, the author of The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right. Eagleton tells us everything we need to know about the UK's new prime minister.For more, read Alex Skopic's recent Current Affairs article "Keir Starmer Is A Disgrace To The British Labour Party."“Starmer has not presented a unified, consistent ideology, hence the confusion over what he ‘stands for’. But he does have a project – a vision, of sorts – and a coherent strategy to achieve it, which is yet to be analysed in detail... We must rather uncover the more durable aspects of his thought-world and assess their relevance to the present conjuncture... “What kind of politician is he? Why was he perceived by many former Corbyn supporters as the optimal candidate to take the helm, yet subsequently unable – or unwilling – to fulfil the hopes he inspired? How can we explain his success in remaking the party along with his struggle to command public confidence? To what extent does he represent a meaningful alternative to the Conservatives?" - Oliver Eagleton, The Starmer Project

This episode originally aired on August 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!David Livingstone Smith is one of the leading scholars of dehumanization in the world, the author of books like Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It, and Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization. He joins us today to discuss how the dehumanization process works and why it's so dangerous when we start to use dehumanizing language, which we can do without noticing it. Prof. Smith warns that while the point seems obvious, many of the worst atrocities are committed by those who are fully convinced they are on the side of the good and righteous, and any of us can become a dehumanizer. We discuss examples from the treatment of Palestinians as animals to the worst historical genocides to parts of the American right treating leftists as "unhuman" enemies of civilization. Prof. Smith explains how the process works and how we can resist it.Read Nathan's article on the Unhumans book here. Israeli journalist Gideon Levy tells us more about the dehumanization of Palestinians here.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!In popular American stereotypes, Islam is a religion of submission, with right-wing politicians demagoguing about the supposed authoritarianism and repressiveness of Islam. But scholar Mohamed Abdou argues in Islam and Anarchismthat, in fact, there is a great deal of overlap between Islamic religious teachings and anarchist philosophy, and that by melding the two of them we can produce a philosophy that offers guidance for principled anti-authoritarian struggle. Today Prof. Abdou joins to debunk popular misunderstandings of Islam and to explain why he thinks the reconciling of anarchist and Islamic teachings offers us a new liberatory philosophy.“Anarcha-Islām can help diasporic Muslims under Euro-American assimilation as well as Muslims in predominantly conservative societies such as Egypt to begin again the transnational radical recreation and re-imagination of their subjectivities and social justice orientations in a way that is conducive to Islām’s post-9/11’s confrontations with a Euro-American 'Age of Terror.'" - Mohamed Abdou, Islam and Anarchism

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Today on the Current Affairs podcast, we're joined by two filmmakers, one of whom will be well known to longtime podcast listeners. Pete Davis founded the Current Affairs podcast and served as its original host. Pete and his sister Rebecca Davis have made a new documentary called Join or Die, which looks at the decline of civic life in America, focusing on the work of Bowling Alone author Robert Putnam. The film dives into history to show how, in days before our present epidemic of loneliness and atomization, Americans joined tons of local clubs, ranging from choirs to bowling leagues to the Elks. Putnam argues that these organizations are foundational to having a functional democracy.In today's episode, we discuss why bowling leagues can have political importance. We also discuss the late, great Jane McAlevey, who makes a powerful appearance in the film (one of her last public appearances) to make the case that unions are exactly the kind of civic organization that is good for both its members and the society at large.In keeping with the spirit of Join or Die, you can host your own screening of the film in your town and invite people to come watch and discuss it!

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Jeremiah Moss (pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury) is the author of two books, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul and Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York. Jeremiah's blog Vanishing New York has documented the disappearance of precious city institutions from delis to newsstands to theaters. Jeremiah's photography has previously appeared in Current Affairs. The New York Times, in its review of Moss' first book, says that "He begins no thought with 'on the other hand.' For Moss there is only one hand, and it is the hand of menacing greed and self-interest." You can see why he's our kind of guy. (The Times thought he was too hard on the rich, writing that "There is a case to be made that the enormously high price of living in New York (and Boston, and San Francisco) has had a positive ripple effect.")Today Moss joins to explain what gives a city a soul and why he believes New York has lost a large piece of its own soul. He discusses what neoliberalism has done to culture and the effects of gentrification on beloved institutions. We discuss why "nostalgia" is actually healthy, why old, broken-down things can be good, and why people with money shouldn't be able to buy their way out of the inconvenience of living in a place with other people.There is nothing nostalgic about fighting to preserve the economic and cultural diversity of a city. It has more to do with the present and future than it does with the past. Right now people are being evicted from their homes and businesses. Right now the city is choking on chain stores. Do we really want a future New York with nothing but Starbucks, banks, and luxury towers, where no one but the most affluent can afford to live? It's not regressive nostalgia to worry about that. It's forward-thinking anxiety. ... I am absolutely nostalgic about the lost city—and why not? Pete Hamill called nostalgia "far and away the most powerful of all New York feelings." But those feelings don't invalidate the facts about hyper-gentrification and its part in the long history of Elites trying to strangle the wild and progressive city. Those feelings don't change the fact that New York is being systematically reconstructed to embrace a small segment of humanity and exclude the rest.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Dennis Fritz is the author of the new book Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq(OR Books), which dives into the historical record to understand the Bush administration's motivations for launching one of the most disastrous criminal wars of our era. It's well-known by now that the stated justifications (the search for weapons of mass destruction) were lies, because Bush officials misrepresented the available intelligence and misled the public about what the evidence said.But that raises the question: Why did they launch the war? Was it a war for oil? A war to secure our position in the Middle East? A sincere attempt to fulfill the dream of spreading democracy across the world? A war to punish Saddam Hussein's defiance? Fritz, who worked in the Pentagon during these years, has written "a detailed insider account of how a Pentagon cabal strategized to manipulate intelligence, pressure the United Nations, force a Congressional authorization for the use of force through political threats, and scare the American people after 9/11 into supporting an attack on Iraq." Ben Cohen describes the book as "a gutsy tell-all story about the bald-faced lies that led us to the disastrous invasion of Iraq.” Fritz joins us today to explain how the public was convinced to support a war of aggression, giving us lessons that are vital to learn if we are to avoid being drawn into future wars.Dennis Fritz heads the Eisenhower Media Network, an organization of ex-military officials who offer critical commentary and analysis on the military-industrial complex.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Richard Beck is a senior writer for N+1 magazine and the author of the forthcoming book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. His recent article "Bidenism Abroad" in the New Left Review is a vitally useful analysis of Joe Biden's record internationally. He discusses the continuities and breaks from Trump's foreign policy. He joins today to discuss what Biden and his administration have thought they were trying to do, and what they have actually done."American hegemony certainly lives on for now in Europe, where compliant nato allies continue to fall over one another in their rush to hollow out social services and buy American arms. And the us may be able to retain economic dominance in a relative sense even if it never manages to reverse the slowdown in global growth, so long as its own economic power weakens less than that of its rivals. But after Gaza, America can no longer credibly claim global ‘hegemony’ ... Biden’s support for Israel, motivated both by strategic considerations and what appears to be a real inability on his part to see Palestinians as fully human, flies in the face of both American and global public opinion. Europe may hold on to America’s coattails for a while yet, but in the rest of the world, continued American supremacy will be based primarily on coercion." - Richard Beck

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Interestingly, thinkers on both the right and left have found inspiration in Nietzsche, and his ideas show up everywhere from the anti-democratic elitism of H.L. Mencken to the liberatory politics of the Black Panther Party. There is an ongoing debate over whether Nietzsche is best categorized as a reactionary or a champion of personal liberation. Today we are joined by Daniel Tutt, whose book How To Read Like a Parasite: Why The Left Got High on Nietzsche offers a stinging critique of Nietzsche's core philosophical ideas, while arguing that we still ought to read and engage with them. Tutt explains why people of all political stripes have been so captivated by Nietzsche, what's valuable in his philosophy, and how we should read philosophers whose social and political visions we deplore. Warning: this episode is somewhat dense with philosophical terminology and social theory, though we try to keep it as light as we can.“Nietzsche’s thought must be read as giving ideological support to a social order where both joyful affirmation and anarchic celebration are experienced at the same time as a cruel and brutal defense of rank order. This makes Nietzsche’s thought a Janus face which must be understood in its highs and lows. But we will argue that if Nietzsche’s reactionary thought is brushed over, ignored, or de-emphasized, then he performs a certain victory over the left that can and often does compromise any socialist or Marxist approach to changing the world. Moreover, his philosophy must be read as a comprehensive and esoteric strategy of reaction that has at its very center a political agenda. ” - Daniel Tutt

Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public service. Examples of her work include videos about Mike Huckabee's indoctrination program, the "right-wing Amazon", Tucker Carlson's post-Fox career,Conservapedia, and her weekly Fox roundups. We can laugh at the right's media, but its effects are alarming. Introducing Fox News to a market turns people more conservative and many people have disturbing stories of how their relatives have had their minds poisoned by the stream of hatred and paranoia that Fox transmits into their brains. See our Current Affairs profile of Rupert Murdoch for more.Today Kat joins to talk about how right-wing propaganda works. What is the typical story? Why is it effective? How can we fight this stuff? How is the right trying to ensure that its messages go unchallenged? Kat tells you everything you didn't know about the right's media apparatus and gives us some practical advice for how we can combat it.

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Jeffrey Sachs is an economist at Columbia University and the author of the book A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, which argues that both Democratic and Republican presidents are worsening global instability. He joins today to explain his critique of American foreign policy. First, we ask Prof. Sachs how he went from being seen as an exemplar of the U.S. intellectual establishment (the neoliberal "Dr. Shock") to one of the foremost critics of that establishment. Sachs rejects the characterization and argues that he has been consistent in applying a vision for social democracy across his career. We then turn to some of the most pressing dilemmas in the world today from the war in Ukraine to tensions with China and Prof. Sachs explains why he believes U.S. policy is worsening the prospects for global peace.Prof. Sachs' previous appearance on the program can be listened to here.Washington seems of a single mind these days: more funding for wars in Ukraine and Gaza, more armaments for Taiwan. We slouch ever closer to Armageddon. Polls show the American people overwhelmingly disapprove of U.S. foreign policy, but their opinion counts for very little. We need to shout for peace from every hilltop. The survival of our children and grandchildren depends on it. - Jeffrey Sachs

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is the Policy Director of the American Immigration Council and a leading expert on U.S. immigration law. He has testified before Congress several times and frequently appears as a public commentator on immigration issues including recently on the Chris Hayes podcast. He joins today to explain exactly how U.S. immigration law works at its most basic level, what makes our system so cruel and dysfunctional, and what changes to enforcement by both the Trump and Biden administrations have meant for those seeking to enter the United States."As legal immigration has become increasingly inaccessible, and our asylum system increasingly backlogged, people around the world are getting the message that the only realistic way they will ever be able to come to the United States is through the southern border. Yet despite this challenge, policymakers continue to focus only on the U.S.-Mexico border itself, rather than addressing the broader problems with plague both our legal immigration system and our humanitarian protection systems. Policymakers of both parties have focused the majority of their attention on finding news way to crack down at the border, rather than making the broader fixes necessary to avoid yet another failed crackdown that may temporarily reduce arrivals but fail to solve the underlying problems." - Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, testimony to Congress

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Max (just Max) is the host of Unfucking the Republic (UNFTR), one of our favorite podcasts. UNFTR publishes intensively-researched deep dives into some of the most important issues in the world. One of their most recent investigations is into Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), an insidious cartel that has wormed its way deep into the basic structure of the American healthcare system. Today Max joins to explain what PBMs are, why they're hurting small pharmacies, and what needs to happen to curtail their influence. Nathan discusses the case of a family-owned pharmacy in his own hometown, Davidson Drugs in Siesta Key, Florida, which shut down after 65 years and blamed PBMs in part for making it impossible to continue operating.The video version of UNFTR's report is here. A written version is here. The NYT ran an article on the subject a couple of days ago as well."Most people probably haven’t heard of the term Pharmacy Benefit Manager (PBM). But in the healthcare industry, PBM has become a four letter word, unless, of course, you are one. In which case, you’re killing it right now. And you have been for about 20 years. PBMs aren’t anything new. In fact, they’ve been around since the 1960s. But over the last two decades, these administrative organizations have become so big and unwieldy that they drive hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue each year. Just how big have PBMs gotten in the past few years? Big enough that the three largest ones are all in the top 15 largest companies in the United States." - "Pharmacy Benefit Managers, The American Drug Cartel," UNFTR

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!Kyla Scanlon is a leading online economics commentator and Bloomberg contributor, who regularly publishes TikTok explainers helping people understand the economy. Her new book In This Economy?is meant to help laypeople understand the economic forces around them that are so determinative in the outcomes of our lives.Scanlon is the one who coined the term "vibecession" to describe the disjunction between certain "objective" economic indicators and people's "subjective" feelings about the economy. Some people have theorized that the public is simply being misled by negative media coverage into thinking the economy is worse than it actually is. But as she explains in this conversation, it's not so simple to disentangle the "subjective" from the "objective" in economics, and just because the "vibes" don't match the standard predictions, doesn't mean they're illegitimate or unfounded.The year 2008 was very impactful for everyone. A lot of kids (myself included) saw their caregivers battle against uncontrollable economic forces. There were job losses, home foreclosures, a decimation of household wealth; almost no one was left unscathed (except the bankers who had caused the crisis). The younger generations were furious as they witnessed a system fail in a way they couldn’t comprehend. Economic stability, job stability, financial stability—all of those were big question marks. An image of parents holding their heads in their hands at the dining room table as they tried to figure out how to pay the mortgage is seared into the minds of many. It was a systemic failure that resulted in economic inequality and social disparities, and it didn’t seem as though the consequences were there for those who had caused it. The Golden Age of Grift had begun, and the first rug had been pulled. It was a world of fraud and deceit. Around this same time, social media started to pop up. For the first time ever, everything was broadcasted to the world, and feelings became assets that could be traded for likes and retweets. - Kyla Scanlon, "In This Economy?"

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