Current Affairs

Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of the new book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream . Her book looks at the cruelty of the myths of being "self-made" or "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."  In the first part of her book, Quart examines the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand, and Laura Inga...

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 disappearance of sex from movies is linked to wider cultural trends toward the celebration of militarism and violence, the shunning of hedonistic pleasure, a utilitarian disdain for frivolous things, and increasing social isolation. Today,...

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 Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. American Islamophobia is a definitive analysis of the roots and spread of anti-Muslim animus in the United States, but The New Crusades expands the analysis to look at how the same bigotry...

Émile P. Torres is an intellectual historian who has recently become a prominent public critic of the ideologies of "effective altruism" and "longtermism," each of which is highly influential in Silicon Valley and which Émile argues contain worrying dystopian tendencies. In this conversation, Émile joins to explain what these ideas are, why the people who subscribe to them think they can change th...

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 school's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. But you might think otherwise if you flipped open her book The Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World , a tongue-in-cheek handbook supposedly dir...

Van Jackson is a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals, a harsh critic of the infamous " Blob ." His Un-Diplomatic newsletter is essential reading (and its accompanying podcast essential listening), and his analyses of U.S. policy in the Pacific in Foreign Affairs are very useful for those who want to understand what is going on in the region. These include:  Great-Power Competition Is Bad...

Cordelia Fine is a psychologist and philosopher of science whose work brilliantly demolishes myths about the "nature" of differences between men and women. Prof. Fine has written three books, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences , and Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds . Today she joins for a c...

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 copy now!  Responding to the Right goes through arguments about abortion, minimum wages, trans rights, immigration, Big Government and much more and shows both why right-wing talking points are wrong and how to effectively defeat them. In Pa...

“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 been called (by Cornel West) “the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.” His new book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives is a departure from Reed’s previous work in political science, as it is a personal refle...

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 it. Ben helps us to think more clearly about how the ownership of the underlying infrastructure of the internet affects our experiences—not just platforms like Facebook and Twitter but the "pipes." Ben takes us through the history of how t...

"When the individualized self bears sole responsibility for its happiness and emotional wellbeing, failure is synonymous with failure of the self, not external conditions.” — Ron Purser Ronald Purser is a Professor of Management at San Francisco State University and the author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality . Prof. Purser’s book exposes how corporations ha...

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 working to try to save Social Security from Republican (and sometimes Democratic) attempts to "reform" (i.e., cut) it. Today, Alex joins to discuss: Why Social Security is a huge social democratic achievement and the fight it took to get it i...

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 Public Editor of the New York Times (essentially an ombudsman) Sullivan became widely respected for her willingness to call out the paper’s lapses, often to the considerable consternation of her Times colleagues. Sullivan criticized the paper’s r...

“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 Boston-based schoolteacher, poet, and essayist who has written an article for Current Affairs called " The Quit-Lit Pseudoscience and Faulty Feminism of Women’s Sobriety Memoirs ," which critiques the bestselling books targeted at women recove...

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 Again . MSNBC's Chris Hayes says of the book: " This book made me laugh out loud and also gave me glimpses of an entire horizon of possibility I hadn't seen before.” Indeed, while Tom's book examines the hopeless dysfunction of our political sys...

“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 keeping your history. And they can make you forget it. They can keep it from you. And then you’re doomed to repeat something that they want you to repeat.” — Samuel James Samuel James is a musician and storyteller from Portland, Maine, who sp...

One of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, recently imploded spectacularly . Its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been called "the next Warren Buffett" and was a Democratic megadonor as well as a major funder of the " Effective Altruism " movement. Overnight, Bankman-Fried saw his fortune and his company wiped out, and he is now under criminal investigation .  To explain what happened, a...

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 ironically, because part of Faye's argument is directed against talking about a "transgender issue" in the first place. Faye's book is a manifesto for a specifically socialist form of trans liberation, which she contrasts with the politics of l...

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 Unbecoming , which documents his evolution from a Young Republican patriot into a socialist critic of U.S. empire through direct exposure to the front-line realities of the U.S. “war on terror.” He shows how the “politics of overcompensation...

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 how it is rigged in favor of the powerful. Her books include Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World, and most recently Permanent Distortion: How Financial Markets Abandoned the R...

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 that work. But in the new book When McKinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm , Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe of the New York Times expose the hidden hand of McKinsey across the world. M...

The editorial team of Current Affairs is fascinated by the online learning platform MasterClass, on which A-list celebrities offer “classes” that are sometimes very cool but frequently of dubious educational value. We have previously taken and discussed the MasterClasses of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton . (We have not yet mustered the fortitude to sit through the Leadership Lessons From George...

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 Evil is War , which shows the true face of war and exposes the propagandistic narratives that help to sustain and escalate wars. Hedges, a veteran war correspondent, shows us the people who actually do the fighting and the dying, from thos...

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 "market fundamentalist" or "trickle-down." Nathan's article " The Only Thing Worse Than a NIMBY is a YIMBY " is scathing, and Current Affairs has published a public service announcement discouraging people from letting their friends become Y...

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 documentaries and written many books including Life Inc., Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, and most recently Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires . Today we talk about how Silicon Valley's elite are trying to shie...