Shows / Current Affairs
Current Affairs
A podcast of politics and culture, from the editors of Current Affairs magazine.
Episodes
- Current Affairs
Who Poisoned Flint? (w/ Jordan Chariton)
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…
- Current Affairs
What The DNC Was Really Like (w/ Kat Abughazaleh)
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…
- Current Affairs
Inside Atlanta's "Stop Cop City" Movement (w/ Jamie Peck)
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…
- Current Affairs
"This Is A War of Annihilation" - Mouin Rabbani on Gaza and Israel's Endgame
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…
- Current Affairs
Welcome to Chomsky-World (w/ Bev Stohl)
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…
- Current Affairs
How Do We Actually Dismantle Mass Incarceration?
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…
- Current Affairs
An Israeli Journalist Excoriates His Country's Destruction of Gaza
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…
- Current Affairs
What Keir Starmer Means for Britain (w/ Oliver Eagleton)
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…
- Current Affairs
How Dehumanization Happens (w/ David Livingstone Smith)
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…
- Current Affairs
Do Anarchism and Islam Go Together? (w/ Mohamed Abdou)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! In popular American stereotypes, Islam is a religion of submission, with right-wing politicians…
- Current Affairs
Why You Should Join a Club (w/ Rebecca and Pete Davis)
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…
- Current Affairs
Who Killed New York City? (w/ Jeremiah Moss)
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…
- Current Affairs
Why Did We Invade Iraq? (w/ Dennis Fritz)
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…
- Current Affairs
Understanding Biden's Foreign Policy (w/ Richard Beck)
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…
- Current Affairs
How to Read Nietzsche (And How The Left Should Feel About Him)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Interestingly, thinkers on…
- Current Affairs
How Fox News Turns People Terrified and Paranoid (w/ Kat Abughazaleh)
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…
- Current Affairs
Jeffrey Sachs on What's Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy
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…
- Current Affairs
What Biden's Changes to Asylum Mean For Immigrants
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…
- Current Affairs
How "Pharmacy Benefit Managers" Are Extorting Us (w/ Max from UNFTR)
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…
- Current Affairs
Why Everyone Feels So Rotten About the Economy (w/ Kyla Scanlon)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Kyla Scanlon is a leading online economics commentator and Bloomberg contributor, who regularly publishes…
- Current Affairs
Nuclear Countdown, or, Why We Need to Start Worrying and Stop the Bomb
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…
- Current Affairs
Why No One Gets To Retire Anymore (w/ Teresa Ghilarducci)
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…
- Current Affairs
The Authoritarian Nightmare Donald Trump Is Planning (w/ Radley Balko)
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…
- Current Affairs
What Americans Don't Know About Iran (w/ John Ghazvinian)
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…
- Current Affairs
Is It 1968 All Over Again? (w/ Charles Kaiser)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! With antiwar protests jeopardizing a Democratic president's reelection and an upcoming party convention…
- Current Affairs
The Toxic Legacy of Martin Peretz’s New Republic (w/ Jeet Heer)
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…
- Current Affairs
Jonathan Kozol on the Scandal of America's Apartheid Education System
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…
- Current Affairs
How Corporations Suck the Welfare State Dry (w/ Anne Kim)
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…
- Current Affairs
Why Thomas Sowell is a Terrible Economist (w/ Cahal Moran)
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…
- Current Affairs
Why Do We Have a "Viral Underclass"? (w/ Steven Thrasher)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Steven Thrasher is a professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the author of The Viral…
- Current Affairs
Is Trump an "Aberration" Or the Logical Conclusion of the Right-Wing Project? (w/ David Austin Walsh)
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…
- Current Affairs
What Will New Weight-Loss Drugs Do to Us? (w/ Johann Hari)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Bestselling author Johann Hari, whose Lost Connectionsand Stolen Focus have previously been discussed on…
- Current Affairs
Inside the MAGA Movement on the Ground (w/ Isaac Arnsdorf)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Who actually comprises the MAGA movement? Where do Trumpian politicians come from? How do they defeat…
- Current Affairs
How The Dollar Became America's Most Powerful Weapon (w/ Saleha Mohsin)
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…
- Current Affairs
In Praise of Excess (w/ Becca Rothfeld)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post. Her new essay collection, All…
- Current Affairs
What Would a Left Foreign Policy Look Like? (w/ Van Jackson)
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…
- Current Affairs
How Cars Make Life Worse (w/ Daniel Knowles)
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…
- Current Affairs
Debunking Popular Talking Points on Israel-Palestine (w/ Ben Burgis)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ben Burgis is a philosopher and occasional contributor to Current Affairs, who runs the Philosophy for…
- Current Affairs
Why We Need Solidarity Now More Than Ever (w/ Leah Hunt-Hendrix)
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…
- Current Affairs
How To Communicate Left Political Ideas to Gen Z (w/ Jessica Burbank)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jessica L. Burbank is a broadcaster and commentator who appears on The Hill's Rising, co-hosts the Funny…
- Current Affairs
Why We Don't Need Borders (w/ John Washington)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! John Washington is a journalist with Arizona Luminaria, whose new book The Case for Open Borders rebuts…
- Current Affairs
How Everyone Misunderstands Capitalism (w/ Grace Blakeley)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Grace Blakeley is one of the left's leading economic thinkers. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism…
- Current Affairs
Why Animal Liberation Is A Crucial Moral Issue For Our Time (w/ Lewis Bollard)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, and writes the…
- Current Affairs
How The Gains of 20th Century Feminism Are Under Threat (w/ Josie Cox)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic…
- Current Affairs
Inside The Chaos at Elon Musk's Twitter (uh, "X")
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Zoë Schiffer is the author of the new book "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter," which tells…
- Current Affairs
The Infamous, Blood-Soaked Legacy of Henry Kissinger (w/ Jonah Walters)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! The day Henry Kissinger died, Jacobin magazine released a book, which they had completed years before…
- Current Affairs
What The Labor Movement Can Do For You (w/ Hamilton Nolan)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Hamilton Nolan is a leading labor journalist whose new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the…
- Current Affairs
A Leading Philosopher Makes The Case for Degrowth (w/ Kohei Saito)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Marxist philosophers do not often write bestsellers, but as the New York Times wrote in a profile of…
- Current Affairs
Understanding the Genocide Case Against Israel (w/ Jeremy Scahill)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Originally aired January 29, 2024 There is an ongoing case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ)…
- Current Affairs
The Case for Limiting Wealth (w/ Ingrid Robeyns)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ingrid Robeyns is a professor at Utrecht University, where she specializes in political philosophy and…
- Current Affairs
How the "Squad" Discovered the Reality of Power in D.C. (w/ Ryan Grim)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ryan Grim is the Intercept's D.C. bureau chief and the author of The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a…
- Current Affairs
What Can the U.S. Learn From Canadian Politics? (w/ Ed Broadbent)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ed Broadbent was perhaps the best-known democratic socialist in Canada. He served for 14 years as the…
- Current Affairs
How George Santos Scammed Everyone (w/ Mark Chiusano)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Mark Chiusano of Newsday knows George Santos better than anyone else, having covered Santos’ political…
- Current Affairs
The Bill Gates Problem (w/ Tim Schwab)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist who's been reporting on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation…
- Current Affairs
A Climate Scientist on What We're Facing and What We Need to Do
Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Peter Kalmus is one of the country's most visible and engaged climate scientists. He is the author of Being…
- Current Affairs
On The Persistence of Racist Pseudo-Science (w/ Keira Havens)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Keira Havens is a science writer whose blog series "Box of Rocks" aims to identify and expose racist…
- Current Affairs
What Did the "Decade of Protest" Accomplish—And Why Did it Fail? (w/ Vincent Bevins)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Vincent Bevins is a journalist who has written for the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, and…
- Current Affairs
Current Affairs Presents: "American Radio"
Today we have a most unusual episode: a parody of American radio cliches, pieced together by Nathan. Using audio editing software, sound effects libraries…
- Current Affairs
Can The Concept of "Philanthropy" Be Saved? (w/ Amy Schiller)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Philanthropy is a problem. Lots of contemporary philanthropy is either useless (Rich people funding new…
- Current Affairs
Why The Luddites Were Right (w/ Brian Merchant)
Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! And if you like our work, please consider subscribing or donating to beautiful Current Affairs Magazine…