Current Affairs

Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada is the author of the new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism , a bombshell exposé of how the burgeoning socialist movement in the British Labour Party was destroyed by false accusations of anti-Semitism, amplified in the British press. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of why, after such a promising take-off , Jeremy Corbyn's party lead...

Terri Friedline is an associate professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She's also a contributor to Current Affairs , where she published one of our most unusual pieces ever: a piece of speculative utopian fiction about the end of Wells Fargo . Terri is also the author of the excellent book Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System . Today, Terri...

Emily Hund is the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media . Today she joins to discuss how "influencing" turned from something bloggers did, organically, to a giant industry where powerful commercial interests try to manufacture authenticity. Influencers are a paradox, because they have to work very hard in order to appear real, and if they ever stop seeming r...

Today Norman Solomon returns to the program to discuss his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine . Norman is one of the country's leading progressive media critics. In this book, he talks about how the media helps construct a mental wall between the people of the United States and the victims of U.S. foreign policy. He talks about how the reality of...

Mark Paul is an economist who argues that there can be no meaningful freedom without economic freedom—by which he does not mean the libertarian idea of the freedom to exploit others. Mark's book The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rights explains how having a functional and free country will require establishing new rights: the right to employment, the right to housi...

Samuel Miller McDonald is a regular contributor to Current Affairs, where he has written about such disparate subjects as collectivism , the food system , Game of Thrones , cultural atrophy , ecofascism , His Dark Materials , the term "development," the history of oil , the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson , the future of cities , and the forests of Madagascar . In our latest issue, Sam takes on on...

Today on the podcast, we dive into the question of what kinds of musical borrowing constitute "influence" versus "plagiarism." In the news at the moment is a lawsuit against pop singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who is accused of lifting parts of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" for his song "Thinking Out Loud." We're going to listen to both songs, and you can decide what you think. But we're also goin...

Today we hear a little-told story, the story of how idealistic socialists around the world, starting around 1890, took over city governments. Prof. Sheldon Stromquist  is the author of the book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism (Verso), which looks at how leftists in places from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a small mining town in the Australian outback tried...

Julie Suk is a professor of law at Fordham University. Her new book After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about It is about why the law has not succeeded at eliminating patriarchy despite advances in formal gender equality. Suk acknowledges that legal feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped bring about equal protection under law, but shows that, just as "colorblind" racial polic...

Sophie Lewis is a radical critic of the family. In Lewis's books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family and Abolish The Family , she argues that families are expected to take on functions that should be the responsibility of society as a whole, and that the results are disastrous. Families "privatize care." People have to depend on their families to fund their schooling or to take care of th...

Lily Sánchez is the managing editor of Current Affairs , and also a physician. In a new article for the magazine, Lily draws on her experiences practicing medicine to discuss different conceptions of what health justice requires. She reviews an acclaimed book called The People's Hospital by Ricardo Nuila, which covers a public hospital that Lily also worked at. Nuila sees this hospital as a model...

Today we are joined by political philosopher Matt McManus of the University of Michigan. Matt has contributed to Current Affairs and collaborated with Nathan on articles about Douglas Murray and the right-wing disdain for college . At the time of this recording, Matt was reading Ron DeSantis' autobiography, which he has now written about for Jacobin . Matt has also written for CA about conservativ...

Jono Shaffer is a legendary labor organizer who was instrumental in the Justice for Janitors campaign. J4J successfully unionized Los Angeles janitorial workers under unbelievably difficult conditions—the janitors were undocumented and worked for contractors rather than buildings themselves, so they were easily fired. J4J built a movement that successfully pressured building owners to respect the...

Ben Clarkson is an illustrator and animator who has produced work for some of the best magazines in the country, including our own Current Affairs . Matt Bors is a leading political cartoonist and founder of The Nib . They have now teamed up to produce one of the wildest satirical comic books of all time, Justice Warriors . Set in a horrifying dystopia called Bubble City, where the rich live in a...

Naomi Oreskes is a historian of science at Harvard University. Erik M. Conway works as the historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Together they have just published The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market . We've talked a lot on this program about that failures of neoclassical economics and the myth of the pristine free market whose great...

Mehdi Hasan, who hosts The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC, is known as one of the most formidable interviewers in journalism. He has tangled with Blackwater's Erik Prince , John Bolton , Richard Dawkins , Paul Bremer , and many others. A video of a powerful speech he gave defending Islam at Oxford University has received 10 million views . He has now written a book on his methods, Win Every Argument: T...

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 vibrant and fascinating social movements of the 20th century. From their origins as a Chicago street gang in the early 60s, the Young Lords became an effective grassroots radical movement, the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panthers. T...

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 Democracy . Today he joins to discuss how (and why) to engage with conservative arguments (which Nathan does a lot as well ). The text of Adam's book usefully explains in plain language the flaws in right-wing philosophy, but the comprehensive bi...

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...