Shows / Current Affairs
Current Affairs
A podcast of politics and culture, from the editors of Current Affairs magazine.
Episodes
- Current Affairs
Lessons for Today's Movements from the Radical "Young Lords" (w/ Johanna Fernández)
Johanna Fernández is a historian of social movements who is the author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, a deeply researched history of one of the most…
- Current Affairs
How Right-Wing Propaganda Gives People "Brain Worms" (w/ Adam Glenn)
Adam Glenn is a Current Affairs reader who has produced a free online book called Brain Worms: How Right-Wing Propaganda Destroys Reason, Conscience, and…
- Current Affairs
Banishing the "Bootstraps" Mythology from American Life (w/ Alissa Quart)
Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of the new book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the…
- Current Affairs
How Come "Everyone Is Beautiful But Nobody is Horny"? (w/ R.S. Benedict)
R.S. Benedict is a speculative fiction writer whose popular 2021 essay "Everyone Is Beautiful But Nobody is Horny," published in Blood Knife, argued that the…
- Current Affairs
How the U.S. "War on Terror" Spread Islamophobia Around the World (w/ Khaled Beydoun)
Khaled Beydoun is a professor of law at Wayne State and the author of two books, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of Fear and The New…
- Current Affairs
Where "Effective Altruism" and "Longtermism" Go Wrong (w/ Émile Torres)
Émile P. Torres is an intellectual historian who has recently become a prominent public critic of the ideologies of "effective altruism" and "longtermism,"…
- Current Affairs
How to Manipulate The Public Into Believing Corporate Lies (w/ Jennifer Jacquet)
Jennifer Jacquet is not actually an evil corporate consultant. She's a professor in NYU's Department of Environmental Studies and deputy director of the…
- Current Affairs
How U.S. Foreign Policy Is Making War With China More Likely (w/ Van Jackson)
Van Jackson is a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals, a harsh critic of the infamous "Blob." His Un-Diplomatic newsletter is essential reading (and…
- Current Affairs
How to Spot Pseudoscience About Sex Differences (w/ Cordelia Fine)
Cordelia Fine is a psychologist and philosopher of science whose work brilliantly demolishes myths about the "nature" of differences between men and women…
- Current Affairs
How to Respond to The Right—Introducing Nathan's New Book!
Today on the podcast: Nathan takes a turn as the guest, to discuss his new book Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments. Get your…
- Current Affairs
What Living Under Jim Crow Was Like In New Orleans (w/ Adolph Reed)
“What I didn’t realize at the time was that what I was living through was the death paroxysms of the Jim Crow order.” — Adolph Reed Prof. Adolph Reed Jr. has…
- Current Affairs
Why Is The Internet So Broken? What Would a "People's Internet" Look Like? (w/ Ben Tarnoff)
Ben Tarnoff is the author of Internet For The People: The Fight For Our Digital Future. Today he joins to discuss what's wrong with the internet and how we fix…
- Current Affairs
Exposing the Corporate "Mindfulness" Racket (w/ Ronald Purser)
"When the individualized self bears sole responsibility for its happiness and emotional wellbeing, failure is synonymous with failure of the self, not external…
- Current Affairs
Understanding The Right's Never-Ending War to Destroy Social Security (w/ Alex Lawson)
Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works and the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. He has spent his career…
- Current Affairs
How To Hold The New York Times Accountable (w/ Margaret Sullivan)
How To Hold The New York Times Accountable (w/ Margaret Sullivan) Margaret Sullivan is one of the country’s most astute media critics. During her time as…
- Current Affairs
The Pseudoscience and Faux Feminism of Sobriety Memoirs (w/ Jennifer Dines)
“It’s not that hard to let yourself be led by something that doesn’t match up with your morals, when you’re desperate.” — Jennifer Dines Jennifer Dines is a…
- Current Affairs
The Dysfunctions of Our "Democracy" and How To Fix Them (w/ Tom Geoghegan)
Thomas Geoghegan is a labor lawyer and writer whose latest book is The History of Democracy Has Yet To Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over…
- Current Affairs
STAY WOKE: Vital Lessons From Black Musical History (w/ Samuel James)
“There’s an old adage ‘He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it.’ But what’s missing in that phrase is that there are the people who are in charge of…
- Current Affairs
The Entirely Predictable Collapse of FTX and the Future of Crypto Cons (w/ Stephen Diehl)
One of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, recently imploded spectacularly. Its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been called "the next Warren…
- Current Affairs
Why Socialism and Trans Liberation Need Each Other (w/ Shon Faye)
Shon Faye is the author of the book The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice is Justice For All, available from Verso. The title of the book is meant slightly…
- Current Affairs
How a Marine Became a Critic of U.S. Imperialism (w/ Lyle Jeremy Rubin)
Lyle Jeremy Rubin is a veteran of the U.S. Marines who served in Afghanistan. He is the author of the new memoir Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s…
- Current Affairs
Why The Market Is Not The Economy (w/ Nomi Prins)
Nomi Prins is one of the country's leading financial journalists, who has gone from working on Wall Street to exposing the inner workings of the economy and…
- Current Affairs
What Happens When McKinsey Shows Up?
McKinsey & Co. is the world's leading consulting company. But it also does a lot of work that's, well, pretty downright sinister, and it's very secretive about…
- Current Affairs
The Editors Take a MasterClass: Anna Wintour Edition
The editorial team of Current Affairs is fascinated by the online learning platform MasterClass, on which A-list celebrities offer “classes” that are sometimes…
- Current Affairs
Why Our Wars Never End (w/ Chris Hedges)
Chris Hedges, who appeared on this program a few months back after the publication of his book Our Class, returns to discuss his powerful new book The Greatest…
- Current Affairs
A Merciless Intellectual Brawl Between a YIMBY and a "Left NIMBY"
For some time, Nathan has been critical of the "YIMBY" (Yes In My Backyard) movement, which takes stances on housing policy that are sometimes classified as…
- Current Affairs
How Billionaires Plan To Escape The World They've Destroyed
Douglas Rushkoff is a media and tech critic who has been called "one of the world's ten most influential intellectuals" by MIT. He has hosted PBS Frontline…
- Current Affairs
How Giant Corporations Squeeze Every Last Penny Out of Writers and Musicians
Rebecca Giblin is a professor at the University of Melbourne and the co-author (with Cory Doctorow) of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content…
- Current Affairs
How to Save Sick Piglets While Avoiding Jail Time (w/ Wayne Hsiung and Matt Johnson)
Wayne Hsiung is a former law professor who was recently acquitted by a Utah jury after being charged with stealing two piglets from a factory farm, in a story…
- Current Affairs
How To Be A Smart Media Critic Who Knows Propaganda When They See It
Norman Solomon is one of the foremost progressive media critics, having founded the Institute for Public Accuracy and authored or co-authored many books on…
- Current Affairs
How Do You Create A Leftist Animated Cartoon That Is Actually Funny?
Shawn Vulliez and Aaron Moritz are the creators and hosts of the utopian leftist comedy podcast Srsly Wrong and also the creators of the new animated series…
- Current Affairs
Why You Don't Need To Worry About "Superintelligent AI" Destroying The World (But Artificial Intelligence Is Still Scary)
Some, including both geniuses like Stephen Hawking and nongeniuses like Elon Musk, have warned that artificial intelligence poses a major risk to humankind's…
- Current Affairs
The Exciting Rise of the New U.S. Leftist Movement (w/ Raina Lipsitz)
Raina Lipsitz is a journalist whose book The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politics profiles the young leftists who…
- Current Affairs
Why We Have To Teach Kids to Analyze and Debunk Propaganda
Sam Shain is a public school teacher whose book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awareness argues that K-12 students need to be equipped with…
- Current Affairs
How the "Economic Style of Reasoning" Came to Dominate Social Policy
Prof. Elizabeth Popp Berman is the author of Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy, which documents how a style of…
- Current Affairs
Vietnam Veteran W.D. Ehrhart on What Americans Still Don't Know About the War (Part II)
Today we return to our interview with Dr. W.D. Ehrhart, for the second part of a conversation on what Americans should know about the war in Vietnam. The…
- Current Affairs
Vietnam Veteran W.D. Ehrhart on What Americans Still Don't Know About the War (Part I)
Dr. W.D. Ehrhart is a Vietnam veteran, poet, teacher, and essayist who was active in Vietnam Veterans Against The War and has written multiple volumes of…
- Current Affairs
How to Spot Copaganda (w/ Alex Karakatsanis)
Alec Karakatsanis is one of the country's most forceful and persuasive critics of the criminal punishment system. Alec is the founder and executive director of…
- Current Affairs
Can The Minions Tell Us Anything?
"I will never again spend money on a Minion movie. ... I surprised myself. I went into this a huge fan of the Minions. And I thought 'Oh, they're so popular…
- Current Affairs
Palestine Part II: Rights and Crimes in the Conflict Today
In our previous episode on Palestine with Rashid Khalidi, we discussed the early history of the conflict. Today we speak with Noura Erakat, human rights lawyer…
- Current Affairs
The Enduring Moral Insight and Satirical Power of Charlie Chaplin and The Twilight Zone
Today we dive into old cinema and television, looking at the films of Charlie Chaplin and the television show The Twilight Zone, both of which have recently…
- Current Affairs
Sensible Thinking About U.S. Foreign Policy: Russia, China, and the Threat of World War
Branko Marcetic is a staff writer for Jacobin and the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden. He is also a leading heterodox commentator on U.S…
- Current Affairs
How Does the U.S. Exercise Power Around the World?
Vijay Prashad is a leading historian on the Global South and U.S. empire. His books include Washington Bullets, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the…
- Current Affairs
Why Is There an Israel-Palestine Conflict in the First Place?
Today, we see children killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes, but anyone who gets their understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict from news reports lacks…
- Current Affairs
Afghanistan Through Western Eyes
Current Affairs editor at large Yasmin Nair and editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson have both written articles that deal with the country of Afghanistan…
- Current Affairs
How Can We Deal With America's Gun Problem?
David Hemenway is a professor of public health at the Harvard School of Public Health. He is the author of Private Guns, Public Health which argues that there…
- Current Affairs
The Moral Atrocity of Factory Farming and Why We Can't Look Away
Current Affairs is proud to be a publication that takes animal rights seriously. From our lighthearted looks at manatees, ants, and cats, to our more serious…
- Current Affairs
Jeffrey Sachs On Why He Concluded COVID-19 Probably Came From a Lab (And Why Nobody Wants to Talk About It)
Prof. Jeffrey Sachs is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and the President of the UN Sustainable Development…
- Current Affairs
Why Children Make Such Good Philosophers
In this episode, we discuss the strange creatures known as children. Scott Hershovitz is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Michigan and…
- Current Affairs
The Life of Murray Bookchin / Revolution in Rojava
Janet Biehl is one of the leading libertarian socialist writers in the country. For several decades, she was the partner and collaborator of the late political…
- Current Affairs
How Much Is a Whale Worth? (w/ Adrienne Buller)
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…
- Current Affairs
The Wonderful World of Animal Senses and How They Expand Our View of The Universe (w/ Ed Yong)
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…
- Current Affairs
Have the Suburbs Ruined Everything? (w/ Bill McKibben)
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…
- Current Affairs
A Set of Progressive Economic Principles That Can Actually Win Elections
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…
- Current Affairs
A Neuroscientist Critiques the Dangerous "Populist" Pseudoscience of Yuval Noah Harari
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…
- Current Affairs
Cory Doctorow on The Wondrous World of the Early Internet & How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
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…
- Current Affairs
Debunking The Right's Bad History of Abortion Laws w/ Leslie Reagan
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…
- Current Affairs
Robin D.G. Kelley on the Importance of Utopian Visions for Social Movements
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…
- Current Affairs
The 20-Year Catastrophe of the War In Afghanistan
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…
- Current Affairs
Oxford and the Making of the British Ruling Class
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…