Current Affairs

🦩 This episode originally aired on February 21, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Joe Biden is gone, but we are now living with the consequences of Biden's presidency, and it's important in this moment to look back over the last four years and try to understand what exactly happened to get us to this point. Was Biden's presidency doomed from the start? Which of the many...

🦩 This episode originally aired on February 26, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland of The Majority Report have spent years tracking the rise of the far right, the decay of liberal institutions, and the Democratic Party's refusal to meet the moment. They join Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to talk about what Trump and the con...

🦩 This episode originally aired on March 18, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Peter Beinart is one of the most important Jewish intellectuals writing about Israel today. A professor, journalist, and former liberal Zionist, Beinart has undergone a profound personal and political transformation over the course of his career. In this episode, he joins Current Affairs edito...

🦩 This episode originally aired on March 5, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Dr. Cornel West is one of the most electric and morally serious voices in American public life. A philosopher, theologian, activist, and jazzman of the intellect, West fuses the prophetic traditions of Black Christianity with a ferocious critique of capitalism, empire, and nihilism. His books—f...

🦩 This episode originally aired on March 14, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! Francesca Fiorentini is a comedian, journalist, and host of The Bitchuation Room. She joins Nathan to discuss her viral showdowns on Piers Morgan Uncensored, why compromising with the right is a losing strategy, and why the left-wing resistance should be bold and aggressive—but also fun. 0:00–...

🦩 This episode originally aired on March 11th. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/Current Affairs! Dr. Omar Suleiman is a distinguished Islamic scholar, civil rights activist, and President of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research. He joins Nathan to discuss the deep roots of Islamophobia in American politics and the moral consequences of U.S. foreign policy—particularly the genocide in Ga...

This episode originally aired on February 10, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Eric Blanc is the author of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big , which covers the recent wave of unionization drives in America and summarizes the lessons we can learn from them. Eric shows that today's new unions have succeeded against inc...

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...