Current Affairs

Kristin Henning directs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She has worked as a public defender for juveniles in Washington, D.C. and is the author of the book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth .  In the book, Prof. Henning "explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and...

A UK court recently ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States. Assange faces serious charges over violating the Espionage Act, based on WikiLeaks' publication of classified United States government documents and video related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The prosecution has been condemned by a number of press freedom and human rights organizations, but...

Hillary Clinton has just released an online course on "The Power of Resilience" through the website MasterClass, where celebrities teach their skills. The course has made the news because in it, she delivers the speech she would have given had she won the presidency in 2016, which she did not. We were curious what else is in Hillary Clinton's MasterClass, so Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Na...

Prof. Aya Gruber teaches criminal law at the University of Colorado Law School. Her book The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration makes the case that many feminists have been too quick to push for more severe criminal punishments for crimes against women, and have as a result ended up legitimizing or even contributing to the expansion of mass incar...

Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy has been known for decades as a critic of Critical Race Theory, which was developed in part by his late colleague Derrick Bell. But Kennedy's critiques come from a position of intellectual respect, and over the years he has become more sympathetic to some of the central claims CRT makes about the pervasive and intractable nature of American racism. His...

Today Nathan is joined by Edward Niedermeyer, an investigative journalist whose book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors remains the definitive critical account of the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla. Edward is an auto industry expert whose work has been featured in the New York Times , Wall Street Journal , Bloomberg View , and elsewhere, and he currently hosts the Autonocast podcast abo...

In this contentious conversation, Nathan speaks to Prof. John McWhorter about his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Prof. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, regular New York Times contributor, and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast. His book argues that anti-racist social justice ideology is properly described as a "religion" and that its practitioners a...

Today's guest is molecular biologist Dr. Alina Chan, a fellow at the Broad Institute and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 . She has been one of the most prominent commentators on the origins of COVID-19 and has attracted controversy for encouraging more serious consideration of the possibility that the pandemic began through an accident at a virology lab. She has been cred...

Prof. Harvey J. Kaye is the author of books like Thomas Paine and the Promise of America , The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great , and most recently Take Hold Of Our History: Make America Radical Again . Running through his work is the argument that the social democratic left should draw more on the richness of the American radical tradition and tak...

Today Nathan is joined by legendary former Harper's editor Lewis Lapham. Lapham is the author of numerous books including Money and Class in America , Age of Folly , and Lapham's Rules of Influence . He currently edits Lapham's Quarterly . He also wrote and starred in the delightfully strange documentary/musical The American Ruling Class . He was called "without doubt our greatest satirist" by Kur...

Julia Serano is a PhD molecular biologist, writer, and musician whose books include Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity , Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism , and the surrealist novel 99 Erics . Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Salon, and elsewhere. Dr. Serano is a patient de...

Dean Preston represents District 5 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A tenants' rights attorney and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he was the first democratic socialist elected to the board in 40 years. Recently, a campaign by a group called the "YIMBYs" has accused Preston of denying housing to thousands of people . In this episode, we talk about why San Francisco has a...

Aziz Huq is an expert in constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school. He is the author of the book The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies , available from Oxford University Press. Prof. Huq's book focuses on the fact that constitutional rights are meaningless unless there are remedies for violations of those rights, and that while we ostensibly have the same rights as always, court...

Today's guest is Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Brown University. Prof. Loury has had a distinguished career—he was the youngest-ever tenured Black economics professor at Harvard and is known for coining the term "social capital." Prof. Loury is generally associated with political conservatism, but his books The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American Values actu...

Today's guest is Stephen Bright, one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the United States . Prof. Bright teaches at Yale Law School and Georgetown Law, but has spent most of his life working as an advocate for poor people accused of serious crimes. During his decades in charge of the Southern Center For Human Rights, he argued multiple times in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and represente...

In this, the second part of our look into the realities of abortion in the contemporary United States, Nathan talks to Prof. Diana Greene Foster, Director of Research at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) collaborative research group at UC-San Francisco. Prof. Foster is the author of the new book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Havi...

Carol Joffe is one of the foremost experts on reproductive rights in the United States. A professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, she has been studying and writing about the battle over abortion rights for decades and received lifetime achievement awards from the Abortion Care Network and the Society of Family Pl...

Andrew Cockburn is a veteran journalist who serves as the Washington Editor of Harper's magazine. His new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine, available from Verso collects his reporting on the military-industrial complex and the way the public coffers are looted by profiteers. He joined Nathan to discuss why he thinks the ever-bloating military has become an out-o...

Tara Isabella Burton is the author of Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. She joined Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson to discuss changing religious practices in the United States. Traditional organized religion has been on the decline for years, as more and more young people are identifying as nonreligious. But are we really? Tara's book looks at the way that new communities an...

Today Nathan is joined by Oxford University philosophy professor Henry Shue, author of Climate Justice and most recently The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now. Prof. Shue's new book is about the moral obligations conferred on people by the historical circumstances they find themselves in. The actions of living people have huge consequences for...

Ross Barkan, author of The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York, joins Nathan to discuss the career of the infamous ex-New York governor. We talk about: - How an un-charismatic and unpleasant bully made his inspiring journey from humble beginnings as the son of the governor of New York to become the governor of New York - How Cuomo managed to keep a blue state from actually...

Current Affairs editor and physician Dr. Lily Sánchez joins Nathan to discuss her new (and first) Current Affairs article, "Continuing The Pandemic Is A Choice." Lily explains: - the many things the U.S. could do differently if it was actually trying to get COVID-19 cases as close to 0 as possible - the weird lack of a serious public education and messaging campaign around vaccination - why having...

Ben Burgis is the author of the upcoming book: Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters, as well as the host of "Give Them An Argument" on YouTube. His previous book Give Them An Argument: Logic for the Left was covered in Current Affairs and he and Nathan have co-written before. In today's episode, Ben and Nathan discuss Hitchens' career, writings, and...

Lee McIntyre is a philosopher of science who serves as a research Fellow at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science at Boston University and an instructor in Ethics at Harvard Extension School. His new book, How to Talk to a Science Denier: Conversations with Flat Earthers, Climate Deniers, and Others Who Defy Reason, is about how we can actually successfully talk people out of dangerous...

Thom Hartmann is the #1 progressive talk radio show host in the country. Today, he joins Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the world of talk radio, as well as his book "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed The American Dream." Nathan asks why the right has been so dominant in talk radio, and how leftists can effectively counter them. We talk abou...