Current Affairs

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...

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...