Current Affairs

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...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !  Nuclear weapons are always lurking there in the background, out in remote places where we don't have to think about them, but ready to be fired at any time. Journalist Sarah Scoles was interested to find out more about the people who maintain the system of nuclear weapons. What do they do and how do they explain it to themselves? In a very re...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist at the New School for Social Research and the author of Work, Retire, Repeat , which shows how the possibilities for having a comfortable and dignified retirement are slipping away. We begin with a news story about a 90-year-old veteran who was pushing shopping carts in the Louisiana heat to make ends meet. P...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Radley Balko is one of America's leading journalists on policing and criminal punishment. His book The Rise of the Warrior Cop is a remarkable expose of the militarization of local police forces around the country. Recently, Radley has produced several excellent essays on the authoritarian promises of Donald Trump and those in his circles. Rad...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! John Ghazvinian is the leading historian of U.S.-Iranian relations, the author of the indispensable study  America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the Present. His book shows how opportunities for positive relations between the U.S. and the Iranian people have been repeatedly squandered. From installing and propping up one of the world's most abu...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! With antiwar protests jeopardizing a Democratic president's reelection and an upcoming party convention in Chicago, 2024 has some eerie echoes  of one of the world's most tumultuous years: 1968. Perhaps by revisiting that year we can better understand our own time. To see what lessons it holds, we turn today to Charles Kaiser, the author of th...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jeet Heer has written two major essays about the intellectual legacy of the New Republic magazine’s 70s-2000s heyday. The first, from 2015 , excavates the magazine’s history of racism and its role in Clinton-era “welfare reform” and in pushing Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve into public consciousness. The second piece, p...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jonathan Kozol is one of the leading critics of the U.S. education system, having written a series of widely acclaimed books across a 60-year career, including Savage Inequalities, The Shame of the Nation, and Letters to a Young Teacher. Today he joins to discuss his new book An End to Inequality: Breaking Down the Walls of Apartheid Education...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Anne Kim's book Poverty For Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America's Poor gives a partial answer to an enduring question: how come we spend so much trying to solve poverty but poverty persists? One major reason, Kim argues, is that parasitic for-profit industries suck a lot of the money out of antipoverty programs. The privatization of...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Thomas Sowell may be the best-selling economics writer of our time. For decades, the Hoover Institution pundit has published books and columns introducing economic concepts to a popular audience. He has been acclaimed as a genius and maverick whose insights are ignored by the academy because they discomfort progressives. But Dr. Cahal Moran, w...