Current Affairs

In our last episode, we took a break from the depressing facts of the ecological crisis to simply marvel at the immense variety of experiences and sensations in the animal kingdom. Today we return to the tough stuff, although we begin with 30 seconds of whalesong to relax our spirits. Nathan's guest is Adrienne Buller of the progressive UK think tank Common Wealth, whose book The Value of a Whale: On The Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester University Press) is a thorough, devastating critique of market-based approaches to solving the climate crisis. The Value of a Whale is an essential primer for those who want to learn how to see through fraud and fakery in proposed climate policies. Buller shows how bad economic thinking has allowed corporations and governments to embrace pseudo-solutions that appear to address climate change but in fact do almost nothing. In this interview we discuss the futile (and dangerous) attempt to assign financial values to parts of the natural world (including whales), the harm done by using "cost-benefit analysis" and models of climate change that focus on its impact on GDP, and how we can tell real solutions to climate change from fake ones that are designed to avoid doing anything that would require sacrifices from rich Westerners. Adrienne's other book, Owning the Future (co-authored with Mat Lawrence), is available from Verso.

Ed Yong of The Atlantic is the author of the new bestselling book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which is about all of the fascinating ways in which animal senses differ from our own, and how they show the immense amount of information in the universe that is inaccessible to human beings. Ed's book gives us a glimpse of what the subjective experiences of other species are like, and they are incredible. Today we discuss how mind-expanding it is to empathize with creatures very different from ourselves. Ed's Atlantic writings are here and his book on microbes is here. The writings of Ed's colleague Marina Koren about space and the James Webb telescope are here. A recording of Carl Sagan talking about the "pale blue dot" is here.WARNING: THIS EPISODE BEGINS WITH TWO FULL MINUTES OF ANIMAL NOISES TO HELP US APPRECIATE THE MAJESTY AND VARIETY OF OTHER SPECIES

Bill McKibben is a legendary activist and writer whose 1989 book The End of Nature introduced the problem of global warming to a general audience. Since then, he has been one of the world's leading environmental activists, taking major roles in the fossil fuel divestment movement and the campaign against the Keystone pipeline. In his latest book, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, McKibben looks at the Middle America he grew up in and how, beneath its image of cheery prosperity, it was accumulating moral debts that have yet to be paid. McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he proudly told tales of the American Revolution as a tour guide on the town common. But he came to understand that Lexington was a far more complicated place than its mythology told him. While the town is a bastion of liberalism, and in his youth the residents came out to support Vietnam war protesters, at the same time it was deliberately keeping out affordable housing and making sure only the existing white residents saw the benefit of its skyrocketing property values. McKibben's book retells the history of his suburb and wrestles with its role in creating present crises. Today Bill McKibben joins us to discuss:The peaceful suburb of his childhood and how he came to discover its dark sideThe morally complicated role of the church in American historyThe debts that U.S. suburbanites have accrued through destructive carbon emissionsThe very disturbing sight on Paul Revere's famous "midnight ride" that is never mentionedWhy Jimmy Carter is underrated and the terrible path that America set itself on by electing Ronald Reagan in 1980Why Baby Boomers aren't all terrible and why we should involve older people in political activismNathan's article discussing Sam Walton's memoir is here. Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech is here. More on "where Mark hung in chains" can be read here. Find more about Third Act, McKibben's organization for older Americans looking to get involved in activism, here.

Things do not look good for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party right now. Polls show that nearly 3/4 of Americans, including a staggering 94% of people under 30, do not want Biden to run for reelection. Biden's prospects look slightly better when people are asked if they prefer him or Donald Trump, and for Biden that's apparently enough. The New York Times says the president has a favorite aphorism: "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." (This is the worst aphorism ever.) "The alternative to us is Christian Fascism" might be a platform that allows some Democrats to squeak back into office. After all, the existing alternative is Christian Fascism. But what kind of agenda could actually produce lasting majorities and enthusiastic public support? What would a real alternative to the GOP, one that put forward a positive and transformative set of ideas, look like? To answer this question, we are today joined by Alan Minsky, Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and Professor Harvey J. Kaye, author of The Fight for the Four Freedoms and Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. In a recent series of articles for Common Dreams, Kaye and Minsky have laid out the case for a 21st-century Economic Bill of Rights. They argue that if Democrats want to win, they should formally embrace the principles of the Economic Bill of Rights, which would make it clear to Americans exactly what people would be voting for when they are asked to vote. Kaye and Minsky's article series is here:A Call for All Progressive Candidates and Officeholders to Embrace a 21st Century Economic Bill of RightsWhy Should Progressives Embrace a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights? Because They Already Do (w/ Michael Brennan)The Time Has Come for Progressives to Rescue and Renew American DemocracyThe Economic Bill of Rights consists of the following: 1. The right to a useful job that pays a living wage, and to a voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining.2. The right to comprehensive quality health care.3. The right to a complete cost-free public education and access to broadband internet.4. The right to decent, safe, affordable housing.5. The right to a clean environment and a secure planet.6. The right to a meaningful endowment of resources at birth and a secure retirement.7. The right to sound banking and financial services.8. The right to recreation and participation in public life.For Kaye and Minsky, having a clear set of principles like this, and legislation ready to pass that will actually ensure the rights are granted, is a viable route to progressive electoral success that can deliver the kind of lasting political transformation last seen in the years of the New Deal. In this episode we talk about what the progressive left should borrow from FDR in order to stop the creeping advance of far-right theocracy in its tracks. A previous Current Affairs interview with Harvey Kaye specifically focusing on Thomas Paine and FDR can be heard here. More interviews with Kaye and Minsky about the Economic Bill of Rights can be found here. A relevant recent Current Affairs article about the New Deal era Works Progress administration can be read here.

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian whose books have been major bestsellers, praised by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. Harari not only offers a sweeping chronicle of the human past, but makes confident predictions about the human future. His visions of a future in which technology creates godlike humans has turned him into a kind of prophet, especially in Silicon Valley, though Harari insists he is a mere objective chronicler. Darshana Narayanan is a neuroscientist and journalist whose Current Affairs article "The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari," available in our March-April 2022 issue, shows that Harari's claim to broad-ranging expertise is dubious and the stories he tell often lack sufficient factual foundation. Narayanan argues that belief in these unsupported prophecies is dangerous and experts need to do a better job of spreading the true findings of their academic fields so that populist pseudoscientists don't become our go-to explainers of reality. Today, Darshana joins to discuss her article and Harari's work. We talk about:Why deterministic visions of the human future are both wrong and harmful, because they inhibit our sense of the possibleHow many of Harari's statements become meaningless upon scrutiny, such has the idea that lions are more "self-confident" than humansThe comparison between Harari and Jordan Peterson, both of whom fill a void where a true culture of public intellectualism should be (the Jordan Peterson article can be read here)How experts are strangely resistant to critiquing and engaging with "popular" books, meaning those books don't get rigorously fact-checked or refutedThe Sapiens diagram explaining the "economic history of the world" that Nathan makes fun of during this episode looks like this:

Pioneering blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has been an activist for online freedom since the early days of the history of the internet. He has long been one of the major voices opposing restrictive copyright and corporate domination, and a visionary defending a pluralistic online world where eccentricity and individuality are allowed to flourish. In books like Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (which, like all of his books, is available in full for free), Doctorow has shown what an internet created by the people, unconstrained by intellectual property law, Digital Rights Management, and monopolistic corporate gatekeeping, could be like. In this conversation, Doctorow joins to discuss the importance of a democratic internet, and his recent book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that many people misidentify the main problem with what is called "surveillance capitalism," assuming that the problem is that corporations are amassing to manipulate us the power through intrusive collection of Big Data. In fact, Doctorow argues, the problem is less about a particular thing these corporations can do to us and more about the fact that monopolistic tech companies are in control in the first place. This has important implications, because it means that we cannot just regulate what companies do with our data, we have to fundamentally redistribute power over the internet. In this conversation, we talk about how Wikipedia provides an alternative vision for a participatory internet where the rules are set by users and there is oversight over governance. We do not need better and more benevolent Zuckerbergs. We need what Doctorow calls the pluralistic internet.Cory Doctorow publishes a daily link blog at Pluralistic. His books can be found at his website, Craphound.com, and his archive of posts at Boing Boing is here. His upcoming book Chokepoint Capitalism (co-authored with Rebecca Giblin) can be pre-ordered here. A Current Affairs article about "surveillance capitalism" is here and Nathan's article about the magic of Wikipedia is here.

Prof. Leslie Reagan is the probably the country's leading expert on the history of abortion laws. Her award-winning book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 is the most comprehensive available history of the era of criminalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, and Prof. Reagan is quoted regularly in the press for her knowledge of US abortion history. Her book on abortion law is distinguished by the fact that it focuses not just on the text of laws, but on the enforcement process, i.e., the lives of women who sought abortions. She exposes how criminalized abortion, even when it does not prosecute those getting abortions, is a horror for women and creates an intensive regime of the surveillance and policing of pregnancy. In this episode, we look at some of the history that the right chooses to ignore, including:How Samuel Alito's view that there is "no tradition" of allowing abortion is completely historically ignorant.Why The Economist is completely wrong to say that "there is no documented case in America of a woman being prosecuted for seeking an abortion since 1922." First, there is, and the outrage over one such prosecution helped fuel the movement that brought about Roe (see newspaper headline above). Second, even when doctors are the ones prosecuted, women could be arrested and coerced into giving testimony and subjected to intrusive interrogations by the state.The horrifying realities of what criminalized abortion meant, including sexual coercion by unlicensed abortionistsHow, even in the era of criminalized abortion, abortion was widespread and there was a divergence between the "public morality" of law and the actual practices indulged in, a fact that undercuts the idea of America as a historically anti-abortion countryHow legalization was a way to bring law in line with actual social practices, and how Roe was not a spontaneous departure from law, but the result of a social movement that sought to expose what women knew but had not been able to sayWhy Roe v. Wade was not a radical opinion, and in fact disappointed feminists, but came out of the Court's acceptance of the fact that criminalizing abortion was incompatible with any reasonable notion of liberty (though men of the Court appeared to care more about the liberty of doctors than women)This is the third in our series of episodes on abortion in America. Part I, in which Carole Joffe explained the "obstacle course" that (even pre-Dobbs) faced those seeking abortion, is here. Part II, in which Diana Greene Foster discusses the empirical evidence that abortion makes women's lives better off, is here. For an explanation of why Samuel Alito's legal reasoning was garbage, see here. For a discussion of how the abortion decision delegitimizes the court, see here. For the perspective of a doctor on how the decision will force medical practitioners to act unethically by withholding necessary care, see here. For more on the case of Shirley Wheeler, see here.

Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of American History at UCLA. His classic study Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination is about to be re-released in a 20th Anniversary Edition. The book looks at how, throughout Black history, movements against oppression have been inspired by (and produced) grand visions of alternate possibilities for what life could be. Kelley shows how radicals have, in circumstances of grinding oppression, managed to expand our minds as to what is possible. Kelley's book looks at communism, surrealism, Pan-Africanism, and even funk and jazz music, to show the colorful and marvelous dreams that have kept social movements alive. His book is invaluable for leftists, because it shows how in addition to our critiques of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, we can present inspiring and creative new cultural practices. The revolution needs poetry, dance, and fiction, and Kelley shows us that movement activists have always been dreamers as well as doers.The Movement For Black Lives' "Vision for Black Lives" Agenda can be found here. More about the great Black Surrealist Ted Joans can be found here. Franklin Rosemont's book Dancin' In The Streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos In The 1960s is another useful resource. The Times review of Kelley's Thelonious Monk can be found here.

The war in Afghanistan was a calamity from the start and four US presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden) have deceived the American public about it as they wrecked the country. This is the inescapable conclusion one gets from reading Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's bestselling book The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (Simon & Schuster). Whitlock obtained internal government records showing that U.S. officials at every level knew that the war lacked coherent objectives and that it was costing untold Afghan and U.S. lives with little benefit to anyone. As the Pentagon Papers did for Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers exposes the way U.S. officials manipulated public perception and buried inconvenient facts over the course of a 20-year quagmire. Today on the podcast, Whitlock joins to explain the revelations contained in this "secret history" and recount the true facts of a military mission that has ended with the Taliban back in power and the country in ruins. The Washington Post report by Susannah George on the starvation of the Afghan people is here. The 2001 story about the U.S. rejecting a Taliban offer to turn over Osama bin Laden is here.

Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper's book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK argues that in order to understand how power works in the UK, you have to examine Oxford University, where most of its prime ministers are educated. The university has long functioned as the springboard to power for aspiring UK politicians, and Kuper takes us inside this insidious clubhouse, delivering a "searing critique of the British ruling class." Kuper argues that Brexit, far from being a "populist" revolt, would not have been possible without Oxford-educated Tory elites who were in search of a grand political project. Kuper discusses the disturbingly reactionary culture of the Oxford that nurtured Boris Johnson (as well as its low intellectual standards), and explains why—although certain improvements have been made—he believes the university should stop teaching undergrads altogether in order to diversity the pool of backgrounds of those who end up in British politics. The clip at the beginning is taken from the 1981 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, which Kuper says many Oxford students in Thatcher-era Britain watched and consciously tried to emulate. The Guardian's review of Chums is here. Nathan's own article on the life and career of Boris Johnson is here.

Molly White is the world's foremost critic of cryptocurrency, according to a recent profile in the Washington Post. A veteran Wikipedia editor and software developer, White documents the frauds and catastrophes in the so-called "Web3" space on her website Web 3 Is Going Great. Molly actually drafted the Web3 Wikipedia entry, and joins today to explain whether it is anything more than a buzzword and how we can make sense of the bizarre ecosystem of cryptocurrency, Web3, blockchain, etc. We discuss:The popularity of the Web3 buzzwordThe bizarre culture around cryptocurrency including the Fyre Festival-like "Cryptoland" island that some proponents tried to buildHow the critics of cryptocurrency are maligned and treated as stupidHow the uncritical endorsement of crypto projects by celebrities and politicians is causing ordinary people to be swindled out of their moneyThe failure of Congress to properly regulate the sector including the dangerously pro-crypto framework put forth by senators Gillibrand and LummisWhy blockchain is not going to improve Wikipedia, and why technology can't solve deep structural economic problems more generally"I think a lot of my criticisms of crypto come down to that: A lot of these projects are seeking to find technological solutions to what are truly social and political problems." — Molly WhiteMolly's writings can be found here. The open letter to Congress that she co-signed is here. Here commentary on the "Cryptoland" video (and a link to the video itself) is here. The celebrity crypto ads feature Matt Damon, LeBron James, Spike Lee, and Larry David. Note that in fine print at the end of the LeBron ad, one can see the ominous warning "Before deciding to trade cryptocurrencies, consider your risk appetite." Though the line is not quoted in this program, the Spike Lee commercial features the "do your own research" exhortation that Molly discusses. Here is the clip of senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Cynthia Lummis plugging the idea of investing retirement savings in cryptocurrency. The honey badger video, for those who want to take a trip down memory lane, is here."I put a lot of time into trying to figure out whether this was just an elaborate parody or not. But I believe they were in fact trying to build a real crypto island." — Molly White

Alex Vitale is one of the country's foremost experts on policing and criminal punishment. He is a professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center, where he coordinates the Policing and Social Justice Project. His book The End of Policing is a comprehensive critique of U.S. police and argues that nearly everything useful done by police can be done better by other institutions. (The book was published in 2017 but recently got an unexpected boost from U.S. senator Ted Cruz.) Prof. Vitale joined to discuss how the recent shooting in Uvalde (and the disastrous police response) and the successful recall of San Francisco's "progressive prosecutor," Chesa Boudin, should inform our thinking about police and punishment. We discuss: Why Ted Cruz thought of The End of Policing as "critical race theory"How the Uvalde shooting shows why policing can't be relied on to protect students from violenceWhy criticizing policing as an institution actually shows that individual police themselves are not the problem, because they are being asked to solve problems that the tools of police are inadequate to solveHow this was also evident in the San Francisco prosecution conflict: reformer Chesa Boudin was held responsible for problems that a prosecutor's office cannot solve (a problem that Prof. Vitale thinks shows the limits of the progressive prosecutor strategy on its own)How district attorney Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, another public defender pursuing a reformist mission, avoided being ousted like BoudinWhy we need to stop talking about stopping crime as if the question is "more policing" or "less policing," instead of talking about how to replace policingWhy Matthew Yglesias' criticism of The End of Policing is silly and wrongHow those of us committed to opposing the existing criminal punishment system can show that we actually care more about preventing violent crime than those pushing for more policingThe Scientific American article on Denver's Support Team Assistance Response (STAR) program is here: "Sending Health Care Workers instead of Cops Can Reduce Crime." The terrible Matthew Yglesias review of The End of Policing that Prof. Vitale responds to is here, and the article on it in Current Affairs by Alec Karakatsanis is here. The idea of "simultaneous overpolicing and underpolicing" that Prof. Vitale critiques is discussed here by Jenée Desmond-Harris. The interview with Rosa Brooks that Nathan mentions is here and the John Pfaff article debunking some misconceptions about the public response to progressive prosecutors is here. Derecka Purnell's book Becoming Abolitionists can be purchased here.

Hugh Ryan is a writer and curator who unearths and preserves lost queer history. His books When Brooklyn Was Queer and The Women's House of Detention both tell stories of LGBTQ life before Stonewall, showing the vibrant and diverse lives of queer people in the United States in the early 20th century that have been left out of history textbooks. The New York Times calls When Brooklyn Was Queer "a boisterous, motley new history… an entertaining and insightful chronicle.” Writer Kaitlyn Greenidge says of Hugh that he is "one of the most important historians of American life working today" and The Women's House of Detention "resets so many assumptions about American history, reminding us that the home of the free has always been predicated on the imprisonment of the vulnerable." In this episode, we discuss how important stories get forgotten, and Hugh tells us the story of the Women's House of Detention in New York City, and why its ignominious history makes a strong case for prison abolition.

Celeste Lay is a professor of political science at Tulane University and the author of Public Schools, Private Governance: Education Reform and Democracy in New Orleans, which discusses the New Orleans charter school experiment. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans has switched to an all-charter system, essentially abolishing public schools, as part of one of the most radical experiments in "education reform" anywhere. Prof. Lay discusses the politics that made this change possible, shows what the lack of democratic accountability for schools has meant for New Orleans, and evaluates the reform experiment. In this episode we discuss what happened and why, and what we know about whether the "all charter" system actually served children and communities. We also talk about the question of why democracy matters: what happens when you take it away? How does it change an institution? What does "private governance" of public institutions mean in practice? A New Orleans charter school sponsored by Capital One in a school building previously named for Thurgood Marshall (The Lens)

The architect Christopher Alexander died recently. As the (surprisingly good) New York Times obituary described him: [Alexander] believed that ordinary people, not just trained architects, should have a hand in designing their houses, neighborhoods and cities, and proposed a method for doing so in writing that could be poetically erudite, frustratingly abstract and breathtakingly simple... Mr. Alexander was a fierce anti-modernist who found traditional and indigenous structures — the beehive-shaped huts of North Africa, for example, or medieval Italian villages — more aesthetically pleasing than highly designed contemporary ones, which he saw as ugly and soulless.Alexander has long been an inspiration here at Current Affairs and his work has been mentioned in a number of articles. (1) (2) (3) (4)In this interview, Nathan talks to his old friend, city engineer and planner Daniel Ohrenstein, about why they both love Alexander's writing and how Alexander can help us think more clearly about what's wrong with contemporary architecture and how to build beautiful places. A transcript of this interview, with lots of photos including some of Alexander's own built work, appears here."What emerges from A Pattern Language is a vision of life and how it should be. A society where people are mixing and aren’t isolated. There’s a good saying: when the revolution starts, everyone should know where to go. And if you think about your town, what is the public square? Having a center or public square where people gather is part of being in a real city. Having civic life means having these public spaces. And in these spaces, you can have carnivals, you can have old people and young people playing chess outside. What makes an idyllic city? It’s certainly one that has social engagement. Another suggestion in A Pattern Language is animals everywhere. I was at Whole Foods the other day and I got startled by a sandhill crane. It came up to me and squawked. That kind of interaction is important. Like: Don’t forget there are other beings that inhabit the planet." — Daniel Ohrenstein

The bestselling novels of Sally Rooney have been subject to endless chatter. She has been hailed as the great millennial novelist by some, her work called "extraordinarily lucid, gorgeous and nuanced." (Washington Post) On the other hand, there are those who say that "Rooney and her readers hope to bask in the self-congratulatory glow of their supposed egalitarianism without ceding any of their accolades." Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Lily Sánchez, and Nathan J. Robinson decided to sit down with Rooney's books and figure out where they stand, whether they "hate" Rooney or are part of the "cult."

One of the most fascinating and thought-provoking books of our time is Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics (Verso) by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. The book asks the question: how could we actually have a future for Earth that is both green and socialist? The authors dive into the history of attempts to plan the economy, unearthing useful insights from neglected thinkers like Otto Neurath (developer of the very cool Isotype system). They combine utopian fiction and serious scientific analysis to offer a vision of what humans might be capable of if we put our know-how to work. It's very rare these days to have serious scientific thinkers trying to imagine the path to radical futures, so Pendergrass and Vettese have given us a wonderful gift that all leftists should debate and discuss. The book has an eclectic mix of influences, as the authors write:Half-Earth Socialism draws on ecology, energy studies, epidemiology, biogeography, Chilean cybernetics, history, eighteenth-century philosophy, Soviet mathematics, the socialist calculation debate, Hayekian epistemology, cutting-edge climate modelling, feminist sci-fi, and the forgotten tradition of utopian socialism.Vettese and Pendergrass have even designed a free computer game to go along with their book, in which YOU can attempt to plan the entire global economy, reducing emissions and the destruction of life while keeping the population happy. It's like SimCity but with the whole world, and instead of your task being to build a city it's to maintain a viable eco-socialist global government. GOOD LUCK!

Daisy Pitkin has been in the labor movement for two decades and is the author of the new book On the Line A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union, which tells the story of an effort to unionize an industrial laundry in Arizona. It's a moving account of the difficult grinding work of putting together a labor union under the most hostile imaginable conditions.In this episode, we discuss:The world of industrial laundries—hot, dangerous places hidden from public view, where workers toil in unhealthy conditions for unbelievably low payThe realities of union organizing: what it actually takes to make a campaign successfulThe difference between "top down" and "bottom up" organizing and why it mattersHow successful union fights change people's lives and give them a sense of their own powerHow the stories we tell about labor struggles often distort the truth and are too "individualistic" in their focusFinally, why moths feature heavily in Daisy's bookKim Kelly's Fight Like Hell, mentioned in the episode, can be purchased here. The book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is an excellent introduction to the real story of Rosa Parks. The story of the Uprising of 20,000 can be found here.

Anatol Lieven is an international relations expert and journalist who serves as a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His books include Russia and Ukraine and most recently Climate Change and the Nation State. His commentaries on the Ukraine war have appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, and elsewhere. Anatol is a highly experienced reporter with a thorough knowledge of the region, and in this conversation he explains what he thinks is left out of mainstream discourse in the United States around the war. He explains Russia's motivations and shows the most obvious path to peace. He also discusses the risks of nuclear escalation that could come from a U.S. policy that pushes Russia past red lines. Anatol's explanation of the current state of the war and what happens next is clarifying and intelligent, and anyone wanting to have a better understanding of what is actually going on needs to read Anatol's work.Anatol's major Nation feature from before the war, "Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem In The World" can be read here.Anatol's latest Guardian piece making several of the arguments discussed in this episode is here.The delusional Daily Beast article that comments on "how little Putin and his spokespeople mention NATO in public justifications" is here.The Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that we must "show we can win a nuclear war" is here.An article Nathan wrote mentioning several of the Cold War movies discussed in this episode is here.Our previous episodes with Katrina vanden Heuvel and Noam Chomsky cover some of the same issues.

Cryptocurrencies have been hyped in Super Bowl ads and promoted by everyone from Bill Clinton to Glenn Greenwald to Spike Lee to Larry David to New York City mayor Eric Adams (who has pledged to turn the city into a "crypto hub"). But times are tough for crypto. As the New York Times reports, “the crypto world [recently] went into a full meltdown... in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.”One of cryptocurrency’s most vocal skeptics is Nicholas Weaver, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. Weaver has studied cryptocurrencies for years. On today's episode, Prof. Weaver explains why he views the much-hyped technology with such antipathy. He argues that cryptocurrency is useless and destructive, and should “die in a fire.”Nicholas Weaver's YouTube lecture on crypto can be found here.Nathan's take on cryptocurrency is here and his take on NFTs is here.The writings of crypto skeptic Stephen Diehl make an excellent supplement to this interview.A slightly cleaned-up transcript of this interview can be read here.Note: Prof. Weaver's audio is of mixed quality for the first portion of the podcast but gets better as the episode goes on. Edited by Tim Gray.

Kate Raworth is an economist at Oxford University whose book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist is a radical attempt to rethink foundational concepts in economics and create a new framework for a sustainable economy that does not depend on "infinite growth." Prof. Raworth shows how the ideology that growth needs to be "maximized" causes catastrophic ecological destruction while not even building an economy that serves human needs. She goes beyond critique of the dominant paradigm, however, and actually works out some new models that help us think more clearly about what the goals of economics should be and can replace simplistic neoliberal ideas with more sophisticated and realistic models of the way the world works. This conversation offers a useful introduction to Prof. Raworth's revolutionary ideas, which help us think more clearly about what matters and how to balance competing human and ecological needs in the 21st century. Raworth's Doughnut, a diagram that helps us think about the targets for economic policy, which should aim to make sure the economy produces neither too little nor too much. The article Nathan mentions about the term "development" is here. The episode with Jonathan Aldred discussing the moral assumptions built into economics is here. The books of Mariana Mazzucato, which Prof. Raworth recommends, are here. Prof. Raworth's TED talk, in which she succinctly explains some of her core ideas, is here. CORRECTION: In the program, Nathan mentions a proposed highway expansion in Houston, which he says "is turning an 8-lane highway into a 12-lane highway," as an illustration of the insanity of continued highway expansion. In fact, the highway will be up to 24 lanes.

A recent article in Vanity Fair about the National Conservatism Conference profiles figures on the "New Right," including Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, and a deeply unpleasant individual called Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin/Moldbug is an advocate of "neoreactionary" politics and explicitly believes in ending democracy and instituting a dictatorship in the United States. J.D. Vance, who may well be a U.S. senator soon, admits in the Vanity Fair profile that he is an admirer of Yarvin's thinking. For a long time, "neoreactionary" thought dwelled mostly in the darker corners of the internet, but we may well soon see these ideas become more mainstream as the American right becomes increasingly extreme and hostile to the democratic process.Today on the podcast, author Elizabeth Sandifer joins to discuss "neoreaction": what its tenets are and why it is both incredibly stupid and incredibly terrifying. Sandifer is the author of Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right. Sandifer's book profiles some key neoreactionary thinkers and is a witty demolition of their horrible ideas. In this episode, Sandifer explains the core of neoreactionary philosophy, including some of the more bizarre ideas to percolate through this ecosystem such as the "basilisk" of the title. We discuss why these ideas catch on and the threat they pose. The photograph above is of Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin, who looks precisely like what you'd expect a sinister pro-dictatorship pseudointellectual named Moldbug to look.

Santa Claus is the mayor pro-tem of North Pole, Alaska. Yes, he's real, and he's a democratic socialist running for Congress in the special election against Sarah Palin. Current Affairs is honored to be joined by a man falsely thought to be a mere myth. In fact, when parents tell their children there is no Santa, they just don't want kids to know that the real Santa is a leftist who believes love is more important than presents.Note from Nathan: Apologies for the absence of new podcast episodes over the last week. I had to defend my PhD dissertation this week and it took all of my energy away! Good news is that's done and I am Dr. Robinson now. Many magnificent new podcasts coming soon so stay tuned!! Thank you so much for all your support we have great stuff planned for the next months.

Tom Wetzel's forthcoming book Overcoming Capitalism: Strategy for the Working Class in the 21st Century (AK Press) is both a primer on the basic left critiques of capitalism and a handbook for creating a new economic system. Wetzel explains in clear, accessible language why exploitation, waste, and environmental destruction are built into the capitalist model and then explores possible alternative economic structures and shows how we might get there. He probes important questions like "What is the role of electoral politics?" "What kinds of unions do we need?" and "What cautions does the history of Marxism-Leninism offer us?" In the best libertarian socialist tradition, Wetzel is a critic not only of domination and hierarchy in the contemporary capitalist economy, but of attempts to bring about socialism through authoritarian institutions. He explains the importance of democracy and why it must guide everything we do. Overcoming Capitalism is an important contribution to the literature of the left, the product of over a decade of research and writing, and today Tom Wetzel joins us to explain the basics of his ideas.

Jennifer Taub is a law professor whose book Big Dirty Money: Making White Collar Criminals Pay is about the double standard in American law that harshly punishes street crime while giving a free pass to corporate criminals. Taub tallies up the immense costs of corporate wrongdoing from fraud to wage theft and exposes how CEOs commit acts of destructive criminal wrongdoing with complete impunity. But Taub isn't just bemoaning the corruption of the justice system—she also shows how we can change it, and her book is a manifesto for action as well as an indictment. As the San Francisco Chronicle writes, Taub "proposes straightforward fixes and ways everyday people can get involved in taking white-collar criminals to task." Prof. Taub joins Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson and online editor Lily Sánchez to talk about how corporate criminals get away with it and why we don't need to resign ourselves to a two-tiered justice system.

Tariq Ali is the author of two dozen books and his career as a public intellectual and activist stretches back to the 1960s. His new book Winston Churchill: His Times, His Crimes is an effort to demolish the "Churchill myth" that has been built up since the Thatcher years. Ali demonstrates that Churchill was: - Not actually popular among the British public, who threw him out of office immediately at the end of World War II, and voted in the socialist Labour government instead- A virulent white supremacist whose core political beliefs were the violent maintenance of the British empire abroad and the suppression of class struggle at home- Not actually an opponent of fascism on principle, having highly praised Mussolini. Churchill saw the threat that Hitler posed to Europe but would happily tolerate far-right governments to stop the spread of Bolshevism- Responsible for hideous colonial atrocities such as the Bengal famineAli's book is not just a myth-busting biography of Churchill, but a history of imperialism and the British working class movement, and a case study in how falsified myths are used to justify the maintenance of the existing social order. Today, everyone from Boris Johnson to Volodymyr Zelensky invokes the Churchill of legend, but we need to understand the Churchill of historical fact, and face up to the horrors of the British empire and the way that powerful countries rationalize their misdeeds with appealing self-righteous rhetoric and the turning of morally repugnant rulers into saintly icons. A review of Ali's Winston Churchill has been published in Current Affairs here. Footage of the British public booing Churchill and chanting "We Want Labour!" can be found here.

Chris Mullin served from 1987 to 2010 as a Labour MP in the British parliament. During that time, he kept a daily diary of his observations, which has since been published in three acclaimed volumes. The diaries trace the rise and fall of Tony Blair's "New Labour." Mullin himself was associated with the party's left (he edited Tony Benn's book Arguments for Socialism and was the only member of Blair's government to vote against the Iraq war) but found himself trying to tread carefully to use the powers of government effectively. His diaries raise valuable questions about how an ordinary person trying to do good in government can negotiate the thorny ethical dilemmas that come with being close to power.Mullin is also the author of the novel A Very British Coup (adapted into a popular miniseries), about what happens when a socialist government takes power in the UK, and is known in Britain for his crusading journalistic effort to free the wrongly accused Birmingham Six, a case from the 70s that is still making headlines to this day.In this conversation, we talk about the frustrations of navigating bureaucracy, the catastrophe of Blair's support for the Iraq war, and whether a socialist government would indeed face the kind of existential threats that Mullin has written about in his fiction.Edited by Tim Gray.

Mark Vonnegut MD has been a pediatrician for over 30 years. He is the author of the books The Eden Express: A Memoir of Insanity, Just Like Someone Without Mental Illness Only More So, and most recently The Heart of Caring: A Life in Pediatrics. His new book is a collection of observations from his life treating children in the American healthcare system. In it, he shows how the for-profit private insurance industry has destroyed doctors' ability to provide effective care for patients, and he explains what he sees as necessary for doctors to treat patients well. His book is both an aggressive indictment of a profit-driven system and a vision for compassionate, empathetic care. Dr. Vonnegut shows that to reconstruct our healthcare system, we will need single-payer financing, but we will also need a form of medicine that centers the needs and feelings of patients, and in which medical care is administered free of meddlesome bureaucracy and out of a genuine desire to help people get better. In this conversation, Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson and online editor Lily Sánchez (who herself happens to be a pediatrician) discuss Dr. Vonnegut's hopes for a humane alternative to the contemporary practice of medicine. Edited by Tim Gray.

Justine Medina is a member of the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union and a packer at the JFK8 warehouse in Staten Island. The ALU recently won a historic victory, defeating Amazon's multi-million dollar union-busting campaign to make JFK8 the first unionized Amazon warehouse in the country. It was a victory many thought impossible. But Amazon underestimated the ALU and through persistent organizing work, the union pulled off an astonishing victory that is expected to be a game-changer for Amazon workers around the country. Justine's commentary "How We Did It" can be read in Labor Notes. In this conversation, we discuss how a group of dedicated Amazon workers, organizing independently of any major union, managed to pull off a stunning triumph for the labor movement. We talk about the lessons that others can take from the ALU's example.Find out how you can support the Amazon Labor Union here. Special thanks to Micheal "Airlift Mike" Ziants of Airlift Productions for narrating the trailer. Trailer edited by Tim Gray. Music: "The Descent" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: by Attribution 3.0Justine is the one in the glasses.

Angie Schmitt is a transportation writer and planner whose book Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America examines the shocking and disturbing growth in pedestrian deaths on the streets of the United States. After declining for 20 years, pedestrian deaths began climbing drastically again around 2010: These gruesome tragedies are preventable—in Europe, deaths are declining rather than increasing—and in Angie's book, she discusses all of the factors contributing to the problem. These include:The proliferation of big trucks and SUVs with huge blind spots and killer front endsGentrification pushing poor people into the suburbs, where not having a car means having to walk to work across busy six-lane roads and take your life in your handsThe lack of any serious US national investment in making our roads safe and laws written by the oil industry (for instance, many state constitutions prohibit using gas tax money to build sidewalks)A lack of good public transitA culture of "blaming the pedestrian" that sees accidents as a result of walkers' foolishness rather than bad planningThe fact that the victims of these accidents tend to be poor people, old people, and people of color, whose lives are less valued and who navigate worse infrastructureAngie's book is filled with important information about an overlooked crisis. It's a serious issue of racial justice and shows the American class divide at its ugliest: rich people in giant trucks mow down poor people of color who have no choice but to dodge traffic. It's a dystopian tragedy, made all the worst by how avoidable it is. Instead of ensuring that everyone could navigate the built environment safely, America has shifted blame onto victims (as we can see in the concept of "jaywalking," which punishes pedestrians for crossing streets even when there are no crosswalks nearby). Angie lays out why we need to care more about this injustice and how we can address it at relatively little expense. Nathan accidentally used the wrong microphone so his audio is worse than usual. Apologies.

Noam Chomsky is "arguably the most important intellectual alive," the founder of modern linguistics, one of the most cited scholars in history, and the author of over 100 books. He is currently laureate professor at the University of Arizona and professor emeritus in the MIT Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. He recently co-authored the book Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance and is soon to release The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.Prof. Chomsky is one of the foremost experts on U.S. foreign policy, and today we discuss one of the most serious imaginable topics: the threat of world war and the path to reducing the threat of nuclear weapons. We begin by discussing the Hiroshima bombing and the dawn of the nuclear age, before discussing the present escalating tension with Russia and the means by which the U.S. can maintain peace and avoid a catastrophic global conflict. We also discuss the ways that Americans avoid confronting the suffering inflicted by their country on others around the world, the stories that the powerful tell themselves to rationalize atrocities, and the common thread running through Chomsky's work on foreign policy: an insistence that the U.S. confront the truth about its actions and that our moral condemnation of our enemies' crimes be matched with an equally intense scrutiny of our own. No topic could be more important than the threat of global warfare, and nobody in the world is more knowledgable about it. It is a great privilege to welcome Prof. Chomsky back to the Current Affairs podcast for this vital conversation. The books on the British empire that Prof. Chomsky cites are Legacy of Violence by Caroline Elkins and Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor.The 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident is discussed here.The Daniel Ellsberg anecdote that Nathan cites at the beginning is from The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner.The interview Prof. Chomsky cites with veteran diplomat Chas Freeman is here.The interview in which Carter national security advisor Zbignew Brzezinski discusses the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is here. In it, he says: "We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would [...] Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war." Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime, a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire." The war killed an estimated 1 million Afghan civilians.For more on how Biden administration policies are starving Afghanistan, see here and here.The John Stuart Mill essay that Prof. Chomsky refers to is 1859's "A Few Words on Non-Intervention."A helpful list of over 1000 books Prof. Chomsky has cited in his work can be found here.The previous Current Affairs interview with Noam Chomsky can be viewed here.

Finance expert Grace Blakeley is a staff writer for Tribune magazine. She has served as economics commentator for the New Statesman and as a fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research's Centre for Economic Justice. She is the author of two books, Stolen: How to Save the World from Financialization and The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism, and editor of the book Futures of Socialism. Blakeley's writings argue that the finance sector has taken on an outsized role in the economy, with terrible results for working people. She shows how the profits of financiers have become more important than satisfying human needs, and analyzes the history of capitalism to expose the forces driving the increase in inequalities of wealth and power. In her latest book, she shows how the pandemic has worsened these tendencies. Importantly, Blakeley also provides solutions, showing what it would mean to "democratize the financial sector" and why we should be confident that it's possible. In this conversation, Blakeley explains for non-finance experts how the "financialization" of an economy works and why it causes crises.

Prof. Aviva Chomsky teaches history and Latin American studies at Salem State University and has authored and edited numerous books including Central America’s Forgotten History, A History of the Cuban Revolution, and Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.Her latest book Is Science Enough? Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice tries to answer, in a clear and accessible way, the questions about what we ought to do to deal with the climate catastrophe. Prof. Chomsky takes the position that conversations about The Science often overlook important issues of justice, and the political and economic changes that will be necessary to prevent the worst suffering from climate change. She goes through proposed policy responses to the situation and shows what it will actually take to respond effectively and prevent the problem from spiraling out of control. Is Science Enough? is a useful primer for anyone who wants to go beyond the facts of IPCC reports and think seriously about the choices we now face. It's a book grounded in a desire to give people the practical knowledge they will need to take action. (It also answers the question of whether driving a Prius does anyone any good.) Edited by Tim Gray.

Jonathan Aldred is an economist at Cambridge University, but he is a fierce critic of the mainstream of his discipline. In his books The Skeptical Economist and License to be Bad: How Economics Corrupted Us, Prof. Aldred argues that while economics poses as a value-free form of scientific inquiry, it contains many buried assumptions that have deeply pernicious implications. Aldred's books offer excellent, clearly-written explanations of what economics is and how many of its most popular concepts bias our thinking about the world and rationalize selfishness and amorality.

Laurie Penny is a journalist and activist who has authored seven books including Unspeakable Things: Sex, Lies and Revolution, Bitch Doctrine: Essays for Dissenting Adults, and most recently Sexual Revolution : Modern Fascism and the Feminist Fightback. Penny has been a finalist for both the Orwell Prize and the National Magazine Award. In today's conversation, we discuss the "sexual revolution" of Penny's new book, which they call "an exercise in pointing out the obvious," namely that relations between the genders have changed rapidly over the past decade. Penny argues that from the MeToo movement to the decline in birthrates to the trans rights movement, we are seeing a wave of pushback to the dominance of traditional heterosexual masculinity. Women are demanding more of men, refusing to accept the inevitability of harassment and hierarchy, and Penny argues that this is an important fact in explaining the rise of the radical right, which is in part comprised of men who feel threatened by this loss of power. In our conversation, we talk about Penny's concept of "sexual neoliberalism," which they use to describe the way that sexual relations are treated as freely-made contracts, without any analysis of the underlying power dynamics.

Eric Blanc's book Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strikes and Working-Class Politics is about the remarkable 2018-2019 educators' strikes that began in red states. It shows how successful labor struggles can be waged even in the seemingly unlikeliest of places and is a useful case study of one of the most important fights of our time. In the time since these strikes, however, educators have struggled. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that fights over school funding were sidelined, as teachers had to fight just to keep their classrooms free of coronavirus, and try to keep up teaching in an impossible situation. With the pandemic's severity having subsided now, it may be the case that we once again start seeing the kind of labor activism among educators that we saw in 2018-19. Certainly, that is the case in Minneapolis, where public school teachers are currently in a major strike. Eric has written about this strike for the Nation magazine, and it forms the basis of our discussion in this episode. We talk about why the Minneapolis action is happening (and why it's happening in Minneapolis instead of another public school system), the history of educators' organizing, the possibility that what's going on in Minneapolis will spread, and the factors that determine whether striking educators will succeed or fail.

Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing religious faith in the world—by one estimate it obtains around 35,000 new converts per day globally. It now has over 600,000,000 adherents. Elle Hardy is a journalist who has contributed previously to Current Affairs and has traveled the world to speak with Pentecostals from South Korea to London to Nigeria to South Africa. Her book Beyond Belief: How Pentecostal Christianity Is Taking Over The World (Oxford University Press) documents the rise of this faith and what it means for the rest of us. The Sunday Times says of Beyond Belief: "Hardy is a first-class reporter. [...] Beyond Belief makes for an often gripping story, full of twists and turns."In this conversation, we discuss what Pentecostalism is, why it's attracting so many people, and the political changes that are likely to result from its continuing growth. Elle shows that many of the working poor around the world are attracted to Pentecostalism because it offers both meaning and material gains—but it also pushes a reactionary social agenda that attacks LGBT people and is linked to the rise of far-right "populists" like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Duterte. To understand how to stop the far right, it may well help to understand the sources of Pentecostalism's appeal. We discuss:- Why "speaking in tongues" is part of the Pentecostal tradition—and what people think they are doing when they do it- Why some preachers in Appalachia still perform "snake handling"—and frequently get bitten- Where Pentecostalism came from (spoiler: Los Angeles) - Why Pentecostalism is spreading like wildfire across the entire world- The link between Pentecostalism and Donald Trump - What the "seven mountains" are and why certain Christian Dominionists want to conquer them

Across the United States, over the last few years, democratic socialists have been running for office in numbers not seen for a century. The Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns may not have been victorious, but socialists have run for city councils, state legislatures, and even judgeships and won. In this special 90-minute audio documentary, Current Affairs talks to members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who have reached elected office about how they campaigned, why they won, and how they have been able to use the power of their office to advance a progressive agenda.This presentation is meant to inspire those who wonder how you can effectively change things without compromising your principles. It touches on questions like: What kind of backgrounds do socialists who make it to office come from? How do they pitch their political views to voters? How do you assuage the fears of constituents who are, for example, worried about violent crime? What are the first things that happen to you when you become a state legislator? How can coalitions function effectively? How does corporate lobbying actually work? What do you do if you're in the minority and can't pass legislation? What kind of opposition will you encounter from the "party establishment"? Can you actually succeed at meaningfully changing public policy? Local and state offices are extremely important, and more within reach than federal office, but their activities are often unknown to the average person. This program peels back the curtain and shows how the "sausage" is made in state government and how leftists can be effective there.Elected officials featured in the program:Sara Innamorato (Pennsylvania State Representative)Nikil Saval (Pennsylvania State Senator)Vaughn Stewart (Maryland State Delegate)Emily Gallagher (New York State Representative)Robert Peters (Illinois State Senator)Franklin Bynum (Houston Criminal Court Judge)A transcript of the full interview with Robert Peters was published in Current Affairs here.Edited by Tim Gray.

Katrina vanden Heuvel is the editorial director and publisher of The Nation magazine, as well as a columnist for the Washington Post. She is also the president of the American Committee For U.S.-Russia Accord and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Katrina has been studying, working in, and writing about Russia for decades. In columns leading up to the invasion of Ukraine, Katrina was warning that failures of diplomacy were leading toward disaster. In this conversation, we discuss what she believes those failures were. Katrina is no defender of Putin's regime, but she does believe that opportunities were missed to de-escalate the crisis, and that Western policy choices stretching back to the 1990s have made Russia's present aggression more likely. We also discuss the terrifying threat of nuclear weapons and the prospects for getting rid of them, and why it's critical to avoid further militarizing the world. Katrina's writings on Russia are both deeply-informed and uncompromisingly progressive, and she shows how those of us on the left can combine solidarity with the victims of Putin's war with strong critiques of American foreign policy. Katrina's recent columns on Russia and Ukraine:What A Sensible Ukraine Policy Would Look Like (Jan. 4, Washington Post)Stop The Stumble Toward War With Russia (Jan. 18, Washington Post)The Exist From The Ukraine Crisis That's Hiding In Plain Sight (Feb. 1, Washington Post)A Path Out of the Ukraine Crisis (Feb. 15, Washington Post)Putin's Invasion (Feb. 24, The Nation)We Must End The War on Ukraine—and Put an End To Perpetual Wars (March 1, Washington Post)War and Peace in Ukraine (March 3, The Nation)Some of the people and writings referred to in the conversation:An excellent Behind the News interview with Anatol Lieven, whose work Katrina cites, can be read here.Stephen F. Cohen's book War With Russia? can be bought here.Voices of Glasnost can be bought here.John Mearsheimer's 2015 prediction that Ukraine would get "wrecked" as a result of the West leading it down the "primrose path" is here. His article expanding on his thesis is here.An article by Jack F. Matlock, the last U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union, on how NATO expansion worsened tensions with Russia, can be found here.Patrick Cockburn's column on why Putin's war is a disastrous blunder is here. The Current Affairs conversation with him is here.Nathan's article on prospects for World War III is here."There's a history to everything and the history right now is very hard to speak about, as blood flows, with images of bombardment and barbarism. But I think history will be important for what emerges, and what is possible to mediate and lead to a cease-fire." — Katrina vanden Heuvel

Carolyn Chen's book Work Pray Code: When Work Becomes Religion In Silicon Valley is about how something disturbing is happening in Silicon Valley: people are becoming so totally devoted to their work that their relationship to their companies is a kind of religious devotion. Prof. Chen interviewed scores of employees at tech companies and found that traditional ties of family, church, and community are disappearing in favor of ties to the company. Corporations are providing a site where people find meaning, some even saying that they became their "true selves" on the job, or describing a "conversion" experience. In this interview, we discuss the implications of this kind of extreme devotion to for-profit companies. A certain class of high-paid workers who might once have viewed a job as something you did to earn a living, so that you could go and enjoy your life, view serving the company as the very purpose of life itself, the source of meaning and joy. It is a far cry from Marx's description of "alienated" workers who must sacrifice a piece of themselves to get their daily bread. These workers think that life on the clock is better than life off it—and so they aren't particularly interested in civic participation.

Ryan Cooper is the managing editor of The American Prospect and co-host of the Left Anchor podcast. He is the author of the new book How Are You Going to Pay For That: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics (St. Martin's Press), which exposes the faulty economic assumptions that are used to convince Americans that they can't afford generous social democratic programs. In the book—and in this episode—Ryan shows how to argue with libertarians and neoliberals who believe that the private sector drives the economy and that government is necessarily wasteful, inefficient, and parasitic. Ryan exposes the fallacious ideas underlying the prioritization of private property rights over the common good, and provides a blueprint for sensible policies on climate, labor, health care, and welfare. He shows that when it comes to funding collective social needs, we can absolutely "pay for that." Ryan's book is insightful and thorough and demolishes many of the bad ideas that prevent us from solving urgent problems. (It is also blurbed by Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson," who calls Cooper "one of the most reliably well-informed and thoughtful political commentators in the country.") An episode should have come out Tuesday but it was Mardi Gras and Current Affairs is based in New Orleans. As is well-known, all attempts to do work on Mardi Gras are destined to fail. We apologize for letting the debauchery of Carnival interfere with the regular production of quality podcasts. A previous episode with Ryan Cooper in which he talked about huge deadly trucks is here. The article Nathan wrote about climate change as a giant act of theft and pillage is here.

Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent for The Independent for over 30 years and has become known for his combination of a deep knowledge of the region and a healthy skepticism toward the propaganda of governments. His books The Age of Jihad (Verso) and War In The Age of Trump (OR Books) collect his extraordinary on-the-ground dispatches from Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria in the decades since 9/11 and provide a rich understanding of the devastating wars of the last years, filled with the perspectives of the ordinary people trying to survive these conflicts. When Foreign Affairs awarded Cockburn its Journalist of the Year award, the contest judges said of his work:“Patrick Cockburn spotted the emergence of ISIS much earlier than anybody else and wrote about it with a depth of understanding that was just in a league of its own. Nobody else was writing that stuff at that time, and the judges wondered whether the Government should consider pensioning off the whole of MI6 and hiring Patrick Cockburn instead. The breadth of his knowledge and his ability make connections is phenomenal.”In this episode, we discuss what Cockburn has learned during his decades as a foreign correspondent about how to sift through competing narratives and arrive at something approximating the truth. We talk about how propaganda works, what Americans still don't understand about the Middle East, and why the quality of reporting on regional conflicts has declined over the last decades as news organizations have stopped providing necessary support for deep critical journalism. We also discuss the reissue of Cockburn's memoir The Broken Boy (OR Books), about his childhood during the Cork polio epidemic of 1956, which like his other work is a story of everyday people who find themselves caught up in the tides of history and having to struggle through as best they can. (The title of this episode refers to a 1976 essay by Cockburn's late brother Alexander, "How To Be a Foreign Correspondent," which skewered the kinds of hack war reporters that Patrick Cockburn has spent a career trying to be different from.)

Bill Gates has long cultivated a reputation as the Good Billionaire, giving away vast sums of money toward global health and education initiatives through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For many years, the Gates Foundation was rarely criticized at all in the mainstream press, its work considered unambiguously good. The shine has come off Gates a bit recently, thanks to the negative publicity surrounding both his divorce and his staunch defense of corporate intellectual property rights over vaccines during the pandemic. Prof. Linsey McGoey of the University of Essex was one of the earliest major critics of the Gates Foundation's work, and her 2015 book No Such Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy is a stinging criticism of "philanthrocapitalism." McGoey's book goes through the history of business tycoons trying to save the world through charity, beginning with Andrew Carnegie in the 19th century. McGoey explains clearly why charitable giving, though it may look like an unambiguous positive, has a number of major downsides including:- The lack of democratic accountability for what private foundations choose to fund (see the Gates foundation's funding of school privatization schemes)- The refusal to consider solutions that threaten the sources of the foundation's wealth or call into question the broader hierarchy of wealth and power- The funding of things that look good on paper and flatter the billionaire donor but aren't actually what people in need are asking forThese criticisms have been made by the left since the time of Oscar Wilde's "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," but McGoey brings them up to date by showing clearly how even an organization like the Gates Foundation, that presents itself as having a benign commitment to health and education, is actually insidious.In this conversation, Prof. McGoey and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss the career of Gates, the problems with billionaire charity, and the reasons philanthrocapitalists often escape serious criticism. They also discuss Prof. McGoey's work in the field of "ignorance studies." In The Unknowers: How Strategic Ignorance Rules The World, Prof. McGoey studies the way institutions carefully exclude ideologically inconvenient information, creating a kind of useful ignorance. The article that Nathan and Rob Larson wrote about Bill Gates is here. The piece on billionaires' memoirs is here."Charity creates a multitude of sins." — Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism"

Yanis Varoufakis is the former Finance Minister of Greece, professor of economics at the University of Athens, co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, and member of the Greek Parliament. The Guardian describes him as "a motorcycling, leather jacketed former academic and self-styled rebel who took pleasure in winding up the besuited political class." He calls himself an "erratic Marxist," and has written economics textbooks, a memoir, and popular explainers of economic ideas. But now he has produced a novel: Another Now: Dispatches From an Alternative Present. Another Now is not a typical work of fiction. It is a novel of ideas, more like one of Plato's dialogues than an airport potboiler. Varoufakis draws on the tradition of leftist utopian fiction seen in 19th century works like William Morris' News From Nowhere and Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward. Those books tried to show readers a plausible depiction of what a socialist society might look like. In Another Now, Varoufakis is doing something similar: he shows us what our existing 21st century world might look like if the economy operated very differently and capitalism was done away with. He imagines a different timeline in which Occupy Wall Street had won and Wall Street itself had been consigned to the dustbin of history.But it's not quite right to describe this work as "utopian." Varoufakis is trying to do something extremely pragmatic: to show, using his academic training in finance and economics, that things that seem impossible are actually quite technically feasible. The attack on socialists generally is that their schemes are unworkable, and that without big banks and a class of wealthy capitalists, there could not be a dynamic, innovative economy. Varoufakis uses this story to show that this isn't true, and to explain in detail the concrete workings of a possible post-capitalist economy.If you're not used to novels that contain long descriptions of alternative banking systems, Another Now may be a challenging read. But it's exciting because it tries to seriously answer the question: "What would a realistic alternative to the capitalist economy look like?" In Varoufakis' "other now," the fruits of society's labor are not owned by capitalists, but by the people who do the work. There is some inequality, but there is a "democratic economy" in which corporate tyranny has been eradicated. Banks are public, not private, and poverty is eliminated. It is said that these days, the cramping of our imaginations has meant that it is "easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism." Varoufakis invites us to imagine the end of capitalism in our own time. The medium of fiction has allowed Varoufakis to include characters who are highly skeptical about whether this economy is possible, and who have to be convinced over time to believe in it. Another Now wants to speak to critics of the socialist project, and to show that the seemingly most insurmountable obstacles to eliminating capitalism (maintaining innovation and incentives, financing new projects, etc.) are actually easily solved problems. The most substantial difficulty is the creation of a political movement with the power to bring the necessary changes about.Another Now poses a serious challenge to capitalist dogma and offers an inspiring vision that should energize the left. In this conversation, Varoufakis and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson discuss the novel and why a well-functioning socialist economy is more feasible than people assume. Warning: it gets a little bit heavy on the economics and it may be useful to read up on the history of the socialist calculation debate before diving in. The phrase "Astonishingly, There Is An Alternative!" is taken from Another Now, where it is a counterpoint to Margaret Thatcher's infamous dictum "There Is No Alternative."The interview Nathan did with the authors of People's Republic of Walmart is available here.

Victor Pickard is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. His book Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society is about the problem of misinformation: people not knowing what's going on in the world, or thinking they know what's going on but actually believing in propaganda or bullshit (see, e.g., Joe Rogan). There has been a lot of chatter about the problem of "fake news" and how it can be stopped, with many proposing that social media companies need to do more regulation of the internet and "content moderation." Victor thinks that this conversation misses something crucial: the need for well-funded public interest journalism. He believes that we cannot escape the "misinformation society" without changing the way that journalism is produced, since (regulated or not) the private market is incapable of fulfilling the public need for truthful information about topics that matter. In a democracy, where the citizens themselves are in charge of making important decisions, it's vital that we find a way to fund the production and dissemination of quality journalism.In this conversation, we discuss:- The catastrophic collapse of public interest journalism, and the "news deserts" across the country where there is no local journalism - Why, even as we recognize the effects of that collapse, we shouldn't romanticize the newspapers of old, because the profit motive has always corrupted journalism- How the need for for-profit media organizations to constantly and obsessively "chase clicks" makes it impossible for them to produce quality work - The alarming consequences of having news organizations that ignore climate and international news in favor of cheap, entertaining political "horse race" coverage- The distortions in public understanding that result from a situation where the truth is paywalled but the lies are free- Why Victor thinks we're "doomed" if we rely on commercial media for the news, and why you don't need to be a "conspiracy theorist" to see how the profit motive makes corporate media less likely to accurately depict the state of the world- What a public model for journalism might look like, and why city governments should fund publicly owned municipal newspapers

Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City, named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicles Prof. Brooks' experiences as a reserve police officer with the Washington D.C. Metropolitan Police Department. As an academic raised in a socialist household (her mother is a former Current Affairs podcast guest), Prof. Brooks wanted to get a better understanding of how police saw themselves and the sources of dysfunction in the system. In this episode we discuss:- How police officers are trained to fear the populations they police- The limits of police training: what police are taught (e.g., how to handcuff suspects) and what they're not (e.g., anything about racism)- How police officers are often called on to perform "social work" responsibilities that they are ill-equipped to handle, and why arresting and jailing people becomes an all-purpose tool- What it means to say that the problems with policing are "systemic" and why individual good-hearted officers cannot hope to change the fundamental nature of the institutions they work within- Explanations of polling that indicates that poor communities want more policing: they're offered a false binary where the only choice is more police or nothing- How many problems do not necessarily originate within the institution of policing itself but with lawmakers and with the United States itself- The problem of militarized institutions more broadly, which Prof. Brooks has explored in her previous book How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything- Why it's going to be more difficult than just "defunding" police: we need institutions that actually care for people properly, and we haven't built them yet"Much of what the average patrol officer does [every day] doesn't need to be done—and really should not be done—by a person with a gun and a badge and a uniform." — Rosa Brooks

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of many bestselling nonfiction books. He began his career as a war correspondent, and was a reporter for the New York Times for fifteen years, reporting from over 50 countries. He has written books on religion, culture, poverty, and war. For the last ten years, Hedges has been teaching a class in a New Jersey state prison. His latest book, Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in An American Prison, is about his experiences as an educator among the incarcerated. It is a searing indictment of the way the humanity of prisoners is denied, but it is also a moving testament to the way that culture and curiosity can flourish even in conditions of extreme deprivation. Hedges' class, all of whom were serious offenders, studied drama and wrote a play together. His book chronicles the development of that play, Caged, which was eventually performed to sold-out audiences in Trenton. In this episode, we discuss both Hedges' time reporting on war and his experiences as an educator in prisons. There are connections here: both the battlefield and the prisons are places of terrible human deprivation and suffering—suffering that is imposed by violent institutions based on stories about why it is justified and necessary. Hedges has dedicated his journalistic career to going to the places that most people prefer not to go, seeing the things we prefer not to see, and forcing us to confront them. We talk about:- The petty cruelties of prison officials and the thirst for knowledge among the incarcerated- How evil institutions are created by perfectly normal people who think they are doing good- How those we think of as killers and criminals, whether in battle or in the criminal punishment system, are often more similar to ourselves than we might like to admit- How even in a seemingly morally simple case, World War II (the "good war"), America' s actions were more morally ambiguous than it is comfortable to think about- How the realities of violence and suffering are kept carefully hidden from a population that would rather not question simple stories about who the world's evildoers areOur Class is available from Simon & Schuster. War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning is available from PublicAffairs. Caged is available from Haymarket Books.

Megan Tobias Neely is a sociologist whose book Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street takes a deep look inside the world of hedge funds, those small boutique investment banks that play with a sizable chunk of the world's wealth. Neely's book draws on her observations from time working in a hedge fund as well as from dozens of interviews with professionals in the industry. In this conversation, we discuss:- How hedge fund managers justify their value to society and why there are reasons to doubt them- The internal culture of firms and how they resemble feudal kingdoms- Popular myths, such as the idea that the "only thing that matters is whether you make money for investors" and "the firm is horizontal and non-hierarchical" - How people with degrees in astrophysics and artificial intelligence find themselves using their skills to make money for rich people rather than doing what they love- How super-wealthy men convince themselves that their decisions are based on objective reason when they are often based in stereotypes and prejudice- How a savvy actor with access to capital can actually take advantage of these blind spots through "perception arbitrage"The Bloomberg article by Matt Levine that Nathan cites is here. The review of Ray Dalio's Principles is here.

Phil Torres is a scholar of "global catastrophic risk," meaning that he studies the various ways in which terrible things could happen to humanity: nuclear war, global warming, asteroids, killer robots, pandemics, etc. His books include The End: What Science and Religion Tell Us About the Apocalypse and Morality, Foresight, and Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks. Both are available free on his website. His upcoming book is Human Extinction: A History of Thinking About the End of the World.On today's episode, Phil joins to talk about how we can think rationally about the risks we face as a species, and figure out what to prioritize. Over the last decade or so, many more scholars have turned to thinking seriously about global catastrophic risks, trying to determine what threats we need to address. As Phil discusses, it's in many ways a good thing that more people are taking catastrophe seriously. As we can see from the COVID-19 pandemic, often we overlook these things until it's too late, and failures of preparation lead to millions of avoidable deaths.But Phil has also become critical of some of the popular ways of thinking about "existential risk." Institutions like the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford and the Center for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge have sprung up, and and many in Silicon Valley have started taking an interest in these questions. Certain tendencies associated with the "rationalist" or "effective altruist" movements claim to be interested in "existential risk," but Phil argues that they end up drifting into a kind of techno-utopianism rather than thinking seriously about how to stop the real harms that we face in the near future. Phil has argued, including in an article for Current Affairs, that while you may often hear people like Elon Musk talking about "existential risks to humanity" and about our "long term future," when you closely examine what they mean by this, it turns out to be a bizarre and dangerous secular theology. Phil, who was previously aligned with the effective altruist and rationalist movements himself, has become stingingly critical of those he sees as misusing rationalism and thereby taking the study of catastrophe in a deeply concerning direction. (He wrote a popular article last year for Salon about the New Atheists, in which he documented the ways in which many of them present right-wing prejudices as mere "reason.")In this conversation, Phil explains why he became interested in "global catastrophic risk," how he came to reject some of the mainstream approaches to studying it, and what he thinks the most important threats facing humanity are. There could not be a more important subject, and Phil Torres is one of its most serious and reflective scholars.The song at the beginning is "I Wish We'd All Been Ready" from the 1972 Evangelical Christian horror film A Thief In The Night (about which you can read a Current Affairs article here.) Edited by Tim Gray.

George Monbiot has been working on issues of climate and environmental justice for three decades. A columnist for The Guardian, George's books include Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, Out of the Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis and How Did We Get into This Mess? Politics, Equality, Nature. His latest essay collection This Can't Be Happening "calls on humanity to stop averting its gaze from the destruction of the living planet, and wake up to the greatest predicament we have ever faced." As a public communicator on climate change, George has experienced deep frustration in trying to convey the urgency of the crisis to a media and and political establishment that refuse to confront reality or accept the need for drastic changes to the status quo. That frustration was captured well, he says, by the recent Netflix satire Don't Look Up, which is about scientists who are unable to convey the importance of stopping a planet-destroying comet from crashing into Earth. In fact, the film is such an accurate allegory for the climate crisis that one scene in directly parallels a recent incident in his own life: the scientist played by Jennifer Lawrence, trying to get the hosts of a celebrity-obsessed TV morning show to take the problem seriously, breaks down in frustration. George has been on a very similar morning show himself to discuss climate change, with very similar results. Watching Don't Look Up, George writes in a column for The Guardian, "made me see my whole life of campaigning flash before me." On today's episode, George joins Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson for a discussion of why it's so difficult for climate scientists and activists to get their message across, and what we need to face up to when it comes to the climate crisis. George's work is not hopeless or apocalyptic, and is built around solutions and the determination to work for a better world. But to reach that world, we need to first look up, and start talking and behaving differently, demanding a political response that is proportionate to the magnitude of the problem. We can deal with this crisis but it requires willpower and focus.