The Nation Podcasts

On this episode of American Prestige , Udi Greenberg, associate professor of history at Dartmouth, is back on the podcast to talk about the state of politics within Israel. We discuss the major factors driving domestic politics, the ruling coalition, ultra-Orthodox military exemption, the “centrist” faction, Yoav Gallant, the politics around national security, Israeli media narratives about Gaza,...

On this episode of The Time of Monsters , Jeet Heer and Nora Loreto on how political disarray in Canada’s political elite in the face of MAGA taunting. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of American Prestige , Danny and Derek return to the newsroom for the first time in 2025! This week for our news roundup: the transition process continues in Syria (1:48) as the US government beginning relations with the new Syrian leadership (7:11), but fighting continues between Turkey and the SDF (10:25); in Lebanon, the IDF faces a withdrawal deadline (13:48) and the parliament...

On this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us , Paris Marx is joined by Will Tavlin to discuss how the Netflix model transformed film into the Typical Netflix Movie and how the company uses claims about data to deceive the public. Will Tavlin is a New York-based writer who has written for n+1, Bookforum, and the Columbia Journalism Review. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-...

On this episode of Start Making Sense : Trump’s ‘dictatorship on day one’ will feature executive orders to deport undocumented residents. Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law & Policy at UCLA Law School, will explain the legal strategy to be deployed by the sanctuary states and cities, Also: Not everything is about Donald Trump. The Geneva Freeport, for example –...

On this episode of American Prestige , Danny and Derek speak with Colette Shade, who just released her debut collection of essays Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything (Essays on the Future That Never Was) . They discuss the fine line between ordinary nostalgia and lamenting the decline in material conditions, the advent of the internet and how it shaped a generation, how the millenials who grew up...

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, David Klion and Matt Duss on a popular right-wing fabulist. Has former president Barack Obama secretly been running the American elite — including the media and wide parts of the government — for nearly 20 years? Has he been doing so on behalf of a subversive agenda to empower Iran and undermine American exceptionalism? That’s the argument made by David Sam...

The endlessly elusive Bob Dylan seems an unlikely candidate for a Hollywood biopic. John Powers, Critic-at-Large on NPR’s “Fresh Air,” talks about how the new movie “A Complete Unknown” captures a defining moment in his career -- and in American culture . Also: Our holiday reading guide: Dozens of books about Trump were published at the end of his first term, some selling millions of copies. Now t...

Bob Dylan fans have been puzzled and troubled by his Christmas album ever since he released it in 2009. To help figure out what Dylan was doing, we turn to Sean Wilentz. He’s the official historian at BobDylan.com, and he also teaches history at Princeton. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

On this episode of American Prestige, our last news roundup before the holidays —but stay tuned for other fun AP programming! This week: in Palestine-Israel, yet more Gaza ceasefire talks (1:33) and two new reports on Israeli conduct in the Strip (6:54); in Syria, reports of reprisal attacks (12:18), the US fails to broker a Turkey-SDF ceasefire (16:23), and Israel occupies the country's south...

Hotel and restaurant workers in Los Angeles won a $30 minimum wage last week, Disneyland workers are getting $233 million in back pay, and Wisconsin public employees regained collective bargaining rights. Harold Meyerson reports on some victories in the class struggle in America. Also: a special feature: novelist Rachel Kushner reports on the world of Nostalgia Drag Racing, where people make machi...

On this episode of American Prestige , Danny speaks with Andrew deWaard, assistant professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, about his book Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture . The two discuss how the falling rate of profit shapes the modern media landscape, the increased drive toward consolidation in entertainment companies, the big movers like private equity firms, h...

On this week's American Prestige news roundup: 2024 is officially the hottest year on record (0:57), particularly because the Arctic is no longer a carbon sink, but rather a net carbon emitter (2:40); regarding the situation in Syria, an update on the political transition (5:16), renewed fighting between the SDF and Turkish proxies (10:56), and Israel makes a land grab for an extended "buf...

On this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, Paris Marx is joined by Amanda Mull to discuss the data-informed decisions that are changing the way we all experience air travel, mostly for the worse.  Amanda Mull is a senior reporter and Buying Power columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Kamala Harris lost not because Democratic voters switched to Trump, Steve Phillips shows, but because of a massive failure of the Democrats to turn out their base.  Also: In a new episode of “The Children’s Hour,” Amy Wilentz reports on “Lives of the In-Laws” – Ivanka’s and Tiffany’s – and comments also on the rise of Eric’s wife Lara, and about the latest schemes of Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner...

On this episode of American Prestige , Danny and Derek speak with Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post, about his series on US sanctions for the Post , "The Money War". They talk about the function of economic sanctions for the US and how that's changed over time, broader cases like Iran to targeted ones like Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg, how sanc...

Matthew Yglesias, a very  influential journalist  and  proprietor of the Slow Boring substack , has emerged as a divisive figure within the Democratic party. To admirers, he’s a compelling advocate of popularism, the view the Democratic party needing to moderate its message to win over undecided voters. To critics, he’s a  glib attention seeker  who has achieved prominence by coming up with clever...

On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, host Paris Marx is joined by Cam Wilson to discuss Australia’s plan to ban under-16s from social media, the interests driving it, and whether it’s the right approach to tackle the harms of those platforms. Cam Wilson is associate editor at Crikey . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

“Our worst enemy right now is not Trump himself, but fatalism about our ability to stop him.” That’s what David Cole says – he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU, after 8 years and hundreds of lawsuits against the first Trump administration. Also: Project 2025,the Heritage Foundation’s famous 900 page book, is partly “"too dumb to accomplish anything at all”--that’s w...

On this episode of American Prestige , hosts Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner are joined by Ben Fong of Arizona State University for a two-part discussion of his book  Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Bing e . In this episode, the group covers everything from coffee to opiates to antidepressants, how they interact with capitalist society, the CIA, commodity fetish...

For this week's edition of The Time of Monsters podcast, we're posting a talk that host Jeet Heer  gave at Carleton University  earlier this November on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem...

On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us , Paris Marx is joined by MV Ramana to discuss the tech industry’s push to have nuclear energy power its data centers and why the reality of nuclear power isn’t as great as its promoters often make it seem. MV Ramana is a Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University...

Matt Gaetz dropping out as Attorney General nominee was a major setback for Trump, which exposes his vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Harold Meyerson reports on the divide in the Senate, and then between the MAGA movement and Republicans on Wall Street and in the corporations. Also on this episode of  Start Making Sense : Trump’s plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants is terrible, but t...

On this episode of American Prestige , Anton Jäger, historian of political thought, returns to the program to speak with Danny about "the big picture" in the wake of the US election. They discuss the crisis of liberalism, the state of the left, where capital is in its own historical cycle, how the reactions to this election compare with that of 2016, hyperpolitics, empire, the view from Eu...

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Jeet Heer is joined by Branko Marcetic to discuss media narratives that misrepresent what happened. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy