Current Affairs

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Steven Thrasher is a professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide . He has also recently been present at the Columbia protests over Gaza. He joins today to discuss what he saw at the protests, before moving on to discuss his concept of the "viral u...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today we talk to David Austin Walsh , a postdoc at Yale and the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right , a new book about the history of the U.S. right wing. Walsh is particularly interest in what the boundaries are (if any) between "mainstream" conservatism and the "far right." He goes back to the time of W...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Bestselling author Johann Hari, whose Lost Connections and Stolen Focus have previously been discussed on this program, returns today to discuss his new book Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs . New weight-loss drugs have proved remarkably effective, but invite a whole host of questions. Fi...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Who actually comprises the MAGA movement? Where do Trumpian politicians come from? How do they defeat "establishment" Republicans on the local and state level? How much is organized from above? What's the role of Steve Bannon in all this? In  Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement's Ground War to End Democracy, Isaac Arnsdorf of the Washing...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! When we think of American power, we often think of missiles, guns, and tanks. But operating in the background is an incredibly powerful weapon whose use often goes unnoticed: the dollar. In her new book Paper Soldiers: How the Weaponization of the Dollar Changed the World Order, Bloomberg News correspondent Saleha Mohsin explains how the dolla...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for the Washington Post. Her new essay collection, All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess , draws together and expands on some of her best work. It covers subjects including Marie Kondo and minimalism, the films of David Cronenberg, the novels of Sally Rooney, and the new sexual purita...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! We know the left is, generally speaking, anti-war and anti-imperialist. But if a left-wing government ever took power in the U.S., what would its foreign policy look like? How would it deal with, say, human rights abusing governments? Would it shun them? Sanction them? Would a leftist government send weapons to the victims of aggression? What...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Daniel Knowles is a reporter for The Economist (yes, that one) . His book Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse argues that cars are a problem, and shows all the ways in which we could have more satisfying, sustainable, affordable lives with fewer cars. That's a tough sell in a car-loving country like the U.S.A., where we love our giant-ass tr...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ben Burgis is a philosopher and occasional contributor to Current Affairs , who runs the Philosophy for the People Substack and hosts Give Them An Argument. Today, Ben joins to respond to common arguments made to justify the policies of Israel and the United States in Gaza. "Israel has a right to defend itself," "Palestinian violence is the ro...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” ― Eugene V. Debs "Are you willing to fight for someone you don't know as much as you're willing to fight for yourself?" —Bernie Sanders Political philosophy is full of talk about liberty and justice. Bu...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Jessica L. Burbank is a broadcaster and commentator who appears on The Hill's Rising , co-hosts the Funny Money podcast, and now hosts her own online news program called Weeklyish News . Jessica is also big on TikTok , where she produces remarkable short videos communicating left political and economic ideas, such as this one on the power rela...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! John Washington is a journalist with Arizona Luminaria , whose new book The Case for Open Borders rebuts common anti-immigrant argument and shows that a world in which people can freely move from one territory to another will not create a "crisis" but will in fact benefit everyone. Today he joins to discuss the bipartisan rhetoric about immigr...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Grace Blakeley is one of the left's leading economic thinkers. In her new book, Vulture Capitalism , Blakeley explains how capitalism really works and gives a crucial primer on the modern economy. She joins today to explain why conceiving of "free markets" and "government planning" as opposites is highly misleading, because our neoliberal "mar...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Lewis Bollard directs the farm animal welfare program at Open Philanthropy, and writes the organization's farm animal welfare research newsletter. In the newsletter, Bollard has argued that animal welfare is a crucial moral issue and tried to explain the dissonance between people's stated compassion for animals and their willingness to tolerat...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Journalist Josie Cox is the author of the new book Women Money Power: The Rise and Fall of Economic Equality , a history of the 20th century women's movement that documents the remarkable courage of the women who gave us suffrage, abortion rights, and greater equality across many dimensions of social and economic life. Today she joins to discu...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Zoë Schiffer is the author of the new book "Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk's Twitter," which tells the full story of how the richest man in the world took over a major piece of the 21st century "public square." Schiffer does not take a nostalgic view of pre-Musk Twitter, showing that the company was in many ways poorly run and Twitter it...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! The day Henry Kissinger died, Jacobin magazine released a book, which they had completed years before, called The Good Die Young: The Verdict on Henry Kissinger. In the book, edited by René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, a group of foreign policy experts trace Kissinger's career from continent to continent, showing the human conseq...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Hamilton Nolan is a leading labor journalist whose new book The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor is both a study of recent labor organizing in our time and a strong case for why unions are vital to the health of the country. Hamilton goes around the country, from South Carolina to Las Vegas to New Orleans, show...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Marxist philosophers do not often write bestsellers, but as the New York Times wrote in a profile of today's guest, Kohei Saito's work has unexpectedly taken Japan by storm: "When Kohei Saito decided to write about “degrowth communism,” his editor was understandably skeptical. Communism is unpopular in Japan. Economic growth is gospel. So a bo...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Originally aired January 29, 2024 There is an ongoing case in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) brought by South Africa against Israel, which alleges that Israel's conduct in Gaza constitutes a serious breach of the Genocide Convention. The Court recently issued a preliminary ruling allowing the case to go forward and requiring Israel t...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ingrid Robeyns is a professor at Utrecht University, where she specializes in political philosophy and ethics. She's the author of Limitarianism: The Case Against Extreme Wealth , a new book which argues for rational limits on how much money a single person can amass. Today on the podcast, Dr. Robeyns joins to explain how the super-rich keep e...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ryan Grim is the Intercept' s D.C. bureau chief and the author of The Squad: AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution . Ryan's book chronicles the rise of the "Squad" in Congress, but also chronicles the entire recent history of left politics in the United States including the Bernie Sanders campaigns and the legislative fights under Biden....

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Ed Broadbent was perhaps the best-known democratic socialist in Canada. He served for 14 years as the head of the country's New Democratic Party, after beginning his career as a political theorist. Broadbent's new book Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality (written in collaboration with, among others, Current Affair...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Mark Chiusano of Newsday knows George Santos better than anyone else, having covered Santos’ political career from its start to its recent ignominious end. His new book The Fabulist: The Lying, Hustling, Grifting, Stealing, and Very American Legend of George Santos documents the full rise and fall of our country’s most infamous lying legislato...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Tim Schwab is an investigative journalist who's been reporting on Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation since 2019. His work has appeared in The Nation , the Columbia Journalism Review , and the British Medical Journal . He's also the author of a new book, The Bill Gates Problem: Reckoning with the Myth of the Good Billionaire , which compiles m...