Current Affairs

This episode originally aired on February 6, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Dr. Genevieve Guenther, the founding director of End Climate Silence, thinks a lot about one of the most important questions of our time: How we can combat climate change denial and actually bring about the transformations to our energy systems that will halt runaway climate catastrophe. She h...

This episode originally aired on February 3, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Rob Larson is Current Affairs' In-House Economist. He is also the author of Mastering the Universe: The Obscene Wealth of the Ruling Class, What They Do with Their Money, and Why You Should Hate Them Even More .  Rob covers the grotesque contrast between the lives of the rich and poor in this...

This episode originally aired on February 1, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today we are joined by Flint Dibble , who last year attempted the ambitious task of explaining science and critical thinking to Joe Rogan . Rogan has been a promoter of the pseudo-archaeology of a man named Graham Hancock, who argues that mainstream archaeologists are covering up the evidence...

This episode originally aired on January 15, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/currentaffairs ! We are joined today by  Dr. Adam Gaffney,  the former head of Physicians For a National Health Program, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and the author of the book To Heal Humankind: The Right to Health in History.  Adam is one of the most articulate and effective champions of...

This episode originally aired on January 7, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today, Nathan is joined by Malaika Jabali as co-host along with Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, authors of the book  Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a Dangerous Idea. They join us in the wake of the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. The alleged killer's manifesto said...

This episode originally aired on December 30, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Adam McKay is a writer and film director who has made some of the most successful comedy films of our century, including Anchorman (No. 6 on Time Out's top 100 comedy films of all time), Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys . In the last decade, his more dramatic and political...

This episode originally aired on December 12, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Musa al-Gharbi  is a sociologist with a unique, albeit controversial, take on the idea of "wokeness," laid out in his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite . Essentially al-Gharbi argues that among elites, a kind of social justice language has come to be...

This episode originally aired on December 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authent...

This episode originally aired on December 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Zohran Mamdani represents the 36th District in the New York State Assembly. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he is currently running for mayor of New York City, hoping to unseat the controversial Eric Adams, who is facing federal corruption charges. Mamdani is running on a pla...

This episode originally aired on November 26, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Brian Kateman is the head of the Reduceitarian Foundation  and the author of the book Meat Me Halfway: How Changing the Way We Eat Can Improve Our Lives and Save Our Planet , which has an accompanying documentary . Brian has thought a lot about how to persuade people to help improve animal we...

This episode originally aired on November 18, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !  Garrison Lovely wrote the cover story  for Jacobin magazine's  special issue on AI , which explained how leftists should think about the risks posed by the new technologies. He also recently  wrote for the New York Times about AI safety, and has written for Current Affairs about psychedelic...

This episode originally aired on November 15, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Is our “child welfare” system successfully helping protect kids from neglect and abuse? Or is it inflicting widespread trauma through unnecessary, unjustifiable family separation? Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been one of the count...

This episode originally aired on November 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon who has served in conflict zones around the world. He authored  a recent New York Times op-ed that surveyed dozens of medical professionals who had served in Gaza about their observations, including the targeting of children. He is also the organizer of th...

This episode originally aired on October 29, 2024. Get new podcasts early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairsRight ! Richard Seymour is one of the most learned and provocative leftist writers in the world. He has written books on subjects ranging from social media ( The Twittering Machine ) to British Labour politics ( Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics ) to liberal apologists for imperiali...

This episode originally aired on October 22, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Carolyn Dupont, a professor of history at Eastern Kentucky University, is one of the country's leading experts on the Electoral College. She is the author of the book Distorting Democracy The Forgotten History of the Electoral College—and Why It Matters Today , which debunks defenses of the El...

This episode originally aired on October 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Osamah Khalil of Syracuse University is the author of A World of Enemies: America’s Wars at Home and Abroad from Kennedy to Biden , a vital history of the wars of the last 50 years. Prof. Khalil shows how, from the Vietnam war to the present day, American leaders (and American pop culture) con...

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...