Current Affairs

This episode originally aired on October 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Recently, New York Times columnist Pamela Paul made an argument for aggressively policing subway fare evasion. To explain why a major new crackdown is necessary, she cited "broken windows theory," which she said that progressives refuse to admit "works." She explained that allowing minor crimes...

This episode originally aired on September 26, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Donald Trump and J.D. Vance have recently been pushing vicious racist fake news about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, claiming they are stealing and eating people's pets and destroying the town. But why are there Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio in the first place? What role...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! This week The Myth of American Idealism: How U.S. Foreign Policy Endangers The World  was finally released! The book, co-written by Noam Chomsky and Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson. Today, Nathan joins managing editor Lily Sánchez and associate editor Alex Skopic to discuss the book and introduce Prof. Chomsky's views on U.S...

This episode originally aired on September 20, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today on Current Affairs , it's our  second-ever  musical episode! We're joined today by Danny Bradley , who has written many songs for Current Affairs. Today, we listen to a few of those and Danny plays us some other favorites of his live on the air, including his new tune about a manospher...

This episode originally aired on September 17, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today on the program, Malaika Jabali returns to discuss the issues that were left out of the first presidential debate, and why Democrats should not embrace right-wing framings of issues even if they think doing so is electorally pragmatic. Malaika is the author of It's Not You, It's Capital...

This episode originally aired on September 13, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jordan Chariton  of Status Coup News is a leading investigative journalist and the author of We The Poisoned: Exposing the Flint Water Crisis Cover-Up and the Poisoning of 100,000 Americans , a major expose of one of the most outrageous scandals of our time, the Flint water crisis. Chariton...

This episode originally aired on September 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today Kat Abugazaleh  of Mother Jones and Zeteo News returns to the program to tell us what the DNC in Chicago was like. How did the Harris campaign try to court influencers and creators? How were the influencers treated differently than the press, and what responsibility does a "creator" ha...

This episode originally aired on September 8, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jamie Peck is a writer, podcaster, and activist who has been involved with the " Stop Cop City " movement. Her recent presentation about the movement can be seen here . In it she explains what the "Cop City" plan in Atlanta is, how a movement to resist it came together, and the vast, alarming...

This episode originally aired on September 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Mouin Rabbani of the Middle East Council on Global Affairs is one of the most sober-minded, thoughtful, and morally clear analysts of the Israel-Palestine conflict. You may have seen him in action on  the debate  he participated in a few months back on the Lex Fridman program. Today, Mouin jo...

This episode originally aired on August 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Bev Stohl ran Noam Chomsky's office for over two decades. In her wonderful book Chomsky and Me (OR Books) she discusses the sometimes chaotic, never boring inside of Chomsky-world, with thousands of correspondents and visitors from around the world descending on a cramped MIT office laden with...

This episode originally aired on August 20, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! It's long been recognized that the U.S. criminal punishment system is aberrational, cruel, and broken. Our prison population is outrageously large. But how do we actually begin to dismantle the system? Premal Dharia, James Forman Jr., and Maria Hawilo have edited a vital guide to this question,...

This episode originally aired on August 15, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Gideon levy is one of Israel's leading dissident journalists. His new book  The Killing of Gaza: Reports on a Catastrophe  is perhaps the harshest condemnation of Israel's war on Gaza from any Israeli. Levy joins us to explain why he believes his fellow Israelis are brainwashed into thinking Pa...

This episode originally aired August 7, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Keir Starmer took the place of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the UK Labour Party, and recently became the UK Prime Minister after Labour resoundingly defeated the Conservatives. Does this mean that Starmer has a mandate from the British public? What does Starmer stand for, anyway? How will he gove...

This episode originally aired on August 2, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! David Livingstone Smith  is one of the leading scholars of dehumanization in the world, the author of books like Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others , On Inhumanity: Dehumanization and How to Resist It , and Making Monsters: The Uncanny Power of Dehumanization . He jo...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! In popular American stereotypes, Islam is a religion of submission, with right-wing politicians demagoguing about the supposed authoritarianism and repressiveness of Islam. But scholar Mohamed Abdou argues in  Islam and Anarchism that, in fact, there is a great deal of overlap between Islamic religious teachings and anarchist philosophy, and t...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today on the Current Affairs podcast, we're joined by two filmmakers, one of whom will be well known to longtime podcast listeners. Pete Davis founded the Current Affairs podcast and served as its original host. Pete and his sister Rebecca Davis have made a new documentary called Join or Die , which looks at the decline of civic life in Americ...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jeremiah Moss (pseudonym of Griffin Hansbury ) is the author of two books, Vanishing New York: How a Great City Lost Its Soul and Feral City: On Finding Liberation in Lockdown New York . Jeremiah's blog  Vanishing New York  has documented the disappearance of precious city institutions from delis to newsstands to theaters. Jeremiah's photograp...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Dennis Fritz is the author of the new book  Deadly Betrayal: The Truth About Why the United States Invaded Iraq (OR Books) , which dives into the historical record to understand the Bush administration's motivations for launching one of the most disastrous criminal wars of our era. It's well-known by now that the stated justifications (the sea...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Richard Beck  is a senior writer for N+1 magazine and the author of the forthcoming book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life . His recent article " Bidenism Abroad " in the New Left Review is a vitally useful analysis of Joe Biden's record internationally. He discusses the continuities and breaks from Trump's foreign policy. He joins...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Interestingly, thinkers on both the right and left have found inspiration in Nietzsche, and his ideas show up everywhere from the anti-democratic elitism of H.L. Mencken to the liberatory politics of the Black Panther Party. There is an ongoing debate over whether Ni...

Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Kat Abughazaleh  has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documenting some of the most deranged stories to appear on the network. Somebody has to keep track of what's going on in the right's media ecosystem, and we're glad that Kat performs this valuable public s...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jeffrey Sachs  is an economist at Columbia University and the author of the book A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism , which argues that both Democratic and Republican presidents are worsening global instability. He joins today to explain his critique of American foreign policy. First, we ask Prof. Sachs how he went from being...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is the Policy Director of the American Immigration Council and a leading expert on U.S. immigration law. He has testified before Congress several times and frequently appears as a public commentator on immigration issues including  recently on the Chris Hayes podcast . He joins today to explain exactly how U.S. immigrati...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Max (just Max) is the host of Unfucking the Republic  (UNFTR), one of our favorite podcasts. UNFTR publishes intensively-researched deep dives into some of the most important issues in the world. One of their most recent investigations is into Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), an insidious cartel that has wormed its way deep into the basic str...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Kyla Scanlon  is a leading online economics commentator and Bloomberg contributor, who regularly publishes TikTok  explainers helping people understand the economy. Her new book In This Economy? is meant to help laypeople understand the economic forces around them that are so determinative in the outcomes of our lives. Scanlon is the one who c...