Current Affairs

Get new episodes at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Peter Kalmus is one of the country's most visible and engaged climate scientists. He is the author of Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution and works at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Dr. Kalmus has advocated civil disobedience as a necessary means of spurring action to stop the climate catastrophe. Dr. Kalmus wrote a scathin...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Keira Havens is a science writer whose blog series " Box of Rocks " aims to identify and expose racist pseudo-science. She joins us today to explain some of the fallacious reasoning that is used to rationalize social hierarchies, and how proponents of toxic ideologies manage to cast themselves as mainstream researchers. We talk about the intel...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Vincent Bevins is a journalist who has written for the Financial Times, Los Angeles Times , and elsewhere, and is the author of the acclaimed The Jakarta Method . His latest book, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution (PublicAffairs) is about the mass protests that took place around the world from 2010 to 2020. The boo...

Today we have a most unusual episode: a parody of American radio cliches, pieced together by Nathan. Using audio editing software, sound effects libraries, voice cloning technology, and "AI" music tools, he has created an absurdist soundscape satirizing media, politics, and commercialism. Filled with jingles, talk shows, news reports, and presidential speeches, it portrays the darkness lurking ben...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Philanthropy is a problem. Lots of contemporary philanthropy is either useless (Rich people funding new buildings for Harvard) or shouldn't have to happen in the first place (Nonprofits fulfilling crucial social roles that the state doesn't take care of in the age of neoliberalism). The standard left critique of philanthropy is that we should...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! And if you like our work, please consider subscribing or donating to beautiful Current Affairs Magazine .  Brian Merchant is the technology columnist for the Los Angeles Times and author of the new book Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech . Brian's book takes us back to early 19th century England, and the birth...

Today we have a documentary episode examining and analyzing the ongoing pro-Palestine uprisings at campuses around the country. We look at the horrifying facts on the ground in Gaza that have caused U.S. students to risk their academic careers in solidarity demonstrations. We discuss how universities have repressed the demonstrations an a manner disturbingly reminiscent of authoritarian states. We...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Astra Taylor is a filmmaker, writer, and activist whose latest book is The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart , based on her CBC Massey Lectures . Today she joins to discuss the themes of her lectures, which are build around the ideas of security and insecurity. What makes us actually "secure"? Security is a word that has...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Myisha Cherry is a philosopher at UC-Riverside whose book The Case for Rage: Why Anger Is Essential to Anti-Racist Struggle (Oxford University Press) argues that reason and emotion are not, as many people assume, opposites, but our emotions are often important expressions of our reason. We get angry when we our implicit framework for how the w...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Malaika Jabali is Senior News and Politics Editor at Essence magazine. She is also the only previous Current Affairs contributor whose writing for our magazine has won an award! Her exceptional piece " The Color of Economic Anxiety " won the 2019 New York Association for Black Journalists award for magazine feature. She has now published her f...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Today we take a dive into the world of "corporate bullshit" with Nick Hanauer, who has become an expert on spotting and debunking it. Nick is a businessman who became known for warning of the devastating social effects of plutocracy, and who now hosts the " Pitchfork Economics " podcast which presents sharp conversations with leading progressi...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/currentaffairs ! Dr. Luke Messac is an emergency physician and historian whose new book is Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine (Oxford University Press). Messac also wrote the article " Why Medical Debt Forgiveness Drives Are Not Enough " for Current Affairs. Messac's book looks at the entire history of medical debt, how hospitals wen...

Jonathan Taplin has had a fascinating career, from being a tour manager for Bob Dylan and the Band to a film producer for Martin Scorsese to running the Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California's communications school. In recent years, he has turned his attention to writing critically about the tech elite. His book Move Fast and Break Things: How Google, Facebook and Amazon Cornered...

Zeke Faux of Bloomberg News is the author of a fascinating and hilarious new book about the crypto world and the collapse of the Sam Bankman-Fried empire, Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall . In contrast with Michael Lewis, whose recent book Going Infinite also looks at Bankman-Fried, Faux sees the scamming and lying of the crypto world for what it is, and his book is high...

Nathan Thrall, the former Director of the Arab-Israeli Project at the International Crisis Group, is the author of two books on Israel and Palestine: The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine and most recently A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy , which focuses on the tribulations of a Palestinian father in the aftermath of a persona...

Political scientist Jerome Slater is the author of one of the best one-volume summaries of the background of the Israel-Palestine conflict, Mythologies Without End: The US, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1917-2020 (Oxford University Press). Slater argues in the book that the possibilities for a peaceful resolution to the conflict were consistently eroded by Israel’s refusal to withdraw to...

Michael Mann is a sociologist who has spent his life trying to understand how power works. His latest book, On Wars , surveys the entire history of warfare between human societies to try to understand why wars happen and how they can be avoided. It is the culmination of a decade-long effort by Mann to try to comprehensively understand the origins of war. (See the New York Times review of Mann's bo...

Several years ago, Garrison Lovely wrote an insider account of McKinsey & Co. for Current Affairs. At the time he published using a pseudonym, but he's now gone public with a cover story for a recent issue of The Nation , entitled " Confessions of a McKinsey Whistleblower ," where he recounts observations of the firm's work for ICE and the Riker's Island jail. Garrison joins today to tell us what...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Nick Dearden's Pharmanomics is an essential primer on how the pharmaceutical industry works, taking a tour across the globe to explain clearly why Big Pharma's profits come at the expense of public health. Dearden, an investigative journalist and director of Global Justice Now , destroys the argument that high drug prices are necessary in orde...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Allison Lirish Dean is a journalist and urban planner in North Carolina. She is the author of a recent piece for the Current Affairs print edition (and now available online ) critiquing the " Strong Towns " organization. Strong Towns is highly critical of suburban sprawl and many of its suggestions for improving our cities and towns are sensib...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Philip Ewell is a professor of music theory and the author of the new book On Music Theory, and Making Music More Welcoming for Everyone (University of Michigan Press). Ewell is one of the most "controversial" music theorists in the country, having sparked a major controversy in his field by criticizing the "white racial frame" that dominates...

Gary Younge spent three decades as a reporter and columnist for The Guardian , where he became one of the publication's most incisive and widely-read contributors. His new book, Dispatches from the Diaspora , collects some of the best of Gary's reporting and commentary. It is a unique collection of snapshots from the African diaspora, from Barbados to London to Ferguson to South Africa. Gary recou...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Originally aired 9/19/2023 Dozens of protesters in Atlanta have recently been hit with serious charges, including domestic terrorism and racketeering, stemming from protest activity over "Cop City," a proposed police training center in the forest outside the city. The Defend the Atlanta Forest movement has been occupying parts of the forest an...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! Kristen Ghodsee is Professor of Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of books like Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and, most recently, Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life . Today she joins to explain why she believes utopian thinking, and...

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs ! David Detmer is the author of the book Zinnophobia: The Battle Over History in Education, Politics, and Scholarship . David's book was published five years ago, after former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels became the president of Purdue University and immediately tried to ban Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States . Detmer, a Pur...