The Nation Podcasts

Paris Marx is joined by Doug Gordon and Sarah Goodyear to discuss the many ways cars have negatively affected society, how tech companies seek to entrench those problems, and what can really be done to improve mobility in our communities. Doug Gordon is a TV producer and writer. Sarah Goodyear is a journalist and author. They are the co-hosts of  The War on Cars  and co-authors of  Life After Cars...

Democratic candidates won everywhere they ran on Tuesday – Abagail Spanberger and a Democratic state legislature in Virginia, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Gavin Newsom’s redistricting proposition in California, and of course Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Trump didn’t even campaign against any them. John Nichols has our analysis. Also: Greil Marcus comments on the new film about Bruce Springste...

Danny and Derek welcome journalist and author John Lechner to discuss his book,  Death is Our Business: Russian Mercenaries in the New Era of Warfare . The conversation cuts through the mainstream narrative of the Wagner Group to explore the true history of Yevgeny Prigozhin, from his start as a product of post-Soviet "gangster capitalism" in 1990s St. Petersburg to his ascent as Vladimir...

It can be tempting to look away from the Supreme Court. The cases are complicated, the traditions archaic, and these days the decisions are almost always devastating and the reasoning often perverse. But alas, the Court is too important to ignore, particularly as John Roberts and his five ultra- conservative colleagues have turned it into a rubber stamp for Donald Trump. Luckily, we at The Nation...

Donald Trump claims he wants to be the peace president and has even lobbied for a Nobel Peace Prize. But his foreign policy has been wildly contradictory. While the United States is clearly retrenching from many parts of the world, violence against hemispheric neighbors is increasing. I talked to Trita Parsi, co-founder and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraf...

Host Shilpi Chhotray is joined by Tennessee State Representative Justin J. Pearson, a fierce advocate taking on corporate power — from Big Oil to Big Tech. You may know him as one of the two Black representatives who was expelled for demanding gun reform on the House floor after The Covenant school shooting in Nashville. But long before becoming one of the youngest members of the Tennessee legisla...

What’s spookier than international relations? This week in the news roundup: Trump tours Asia to talk trade deals (1:28), a Thai-Cambodia accord (7:11), and to meet with Xi (8:45); the RSF captures of Al-Fashir in Sudan with reports of mass killings (12:19); Gaza sees the deadliest day of Israeli bombardments since the ceasefire began (17:19); the PKK makes more concessions in talks with Ankara (2...

Paris Marx celebrates the 300th episode of Tech Won’t Save Us by sharing his reasons to push for digital sovereignty and get off US tech. On top of explaining how that dependence gives the US governments and its tech companies power over us, Paris also provides tips of alternative services to consider migrating to. Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redc...

Voters can take a stand against Trump’s candidates in next Tuesday’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, and New York City – and move toward redistricting that favors Democrats. Harold Meyerson explains. Also: a new art exhibit in Los Angeles, called ‘Monuments,’ displays ten decommissioned Confederate monuments alongside the work of 19 artists responding or relating to th...

Alex Aviña is back on the podcast, this time to talk about the evolution of ICE and the U.S. security state. They discuss the convergence of the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the war on migrants; the transformation of the border into a domestic counterinsurgency project; ICE’s roots in settler colonialism; the role of whiteness and assimilation in immigration politics; the use of surveillan...

On Friday, the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth announced the US was sending an aircraft carrier to bolster its attacks on Venezuelan boats (which the Trump administration alleges, without evidence, are trafficking drugs). I spoke to international relations scholar Van Jackson (whose work can be found here ) about the motives for this new war as well as the muted opposition to it from D...

On October 14, Donald Trump announced that the United States had blown up a boat off the coast of Venezuela, killing six people on board. It was the fifth such US strike on a vessel in the Caribbean in the last six weeks. In total, 27 people have been killed in the attacks. Trump has claimed that the bombings are part of a fight against drug cartels. But there is no legal basis for this campaign....

Solving the climate crisis isn’t about reinventing the wheel or the latest tech scheme — it can be as simple as growing food and building community.  Host Shilpi Chhotray chats with Leah Penniman, farmer, educator, and co-founder of Soul Fire Farm, about the intersection of land, food justice, and racial equity. Leah shares how Afro-Indigenous farming practices offer solutions to the climate crisi...

Rest assured, no one on the AP team has any undeclared tattoos. In this week’s news roundup: In Israel-Palestine, Gaza’s so-called ceasefire holds after another weekend of Israeli strikes (1:36), the International Court of Justice (ICJ) orders Israel to allow more humanitarian aid (8:16), and reports emerge of a plan to partition Gaza (11:48) as J.D. Vance arrives in Israel and the Knesset advance...

Paris Marx is joined by Joanne McNeil to discuss the proliferation of delivery bots and robotaxis and how they recycle disproven claims about how technology will improve transportation. Joanne McNeil is a freelance writer and the author of Wrong Way and Lurking: How a Person Became a User . Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

No Kings Day on Oct. 18 was the largest peaceful protest in American history. Rebecca Solnit comments, and refutes Republican statements about violence on the left. Her most recent book is “Orwell’s Roses.” Also: the fight to control the LA police: a decades long effort that culminated in 1992, after the Rodney King riots, when longtime police chief Darryl Gates was forced out. Danny Goldberg comm...

Danny and Derek speak with historian Fara Dabhoiwala, author of What Is Free Speech? The History of a Dangerous Idea , about the complex history of one of liberalism’s proudest ideals, and how it largely emerged from hypocrisy and self-interest. They trace its 18th-century birth in the polemics of corrupt British journalists, its exclusion of women and colonized peoples, the U.S. founders’ rejecti...

"Are Trump and Trumpism best understood as the consolidation of an elite economic program, as a nostalgia-­laced brew of prejudice and rage, or as a coherent, forceful new style of authoritarian rule—and if it’s the latter, why is this happening now?" That's the question that historian and Columbia professor Kim Phillips-Fein asks in her latest piece for The Nation , which you can read...

The fragile ceasefire negotiated between Israel and Hamas hasn’t ended the violence, but it has for now lessened it. But even if the ceasefire holds, the need for a political solution to Palestinian dispossession remains. To discuss the issue of accountability, I spoke to Yousef Munayyer, who is the head of the Palestine/Israel Program and Senior Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC. We talked abou...

For the first time in over a century, the Klamath River flows free again—thanks to the vision, courage, and determination of the Yurok Tribe.  In this episode of A People’s Climate , Shilpi Chhotray talks with Amy Bowers Cordalis, a member of the Yurok Tribe and leader in the largest dam removal project in U.S. history.  From devastating fish kills and lost salmon runs to confronting corporations...

Lead might be in our protein supplements, but Danny and Derek bring you the news free of most heavy metals. This week: the ceasefire in Gaza begins with prisoner exchanges (1:38), but controversy arises over deceased captives (5:30), plus Israeli violations and Hamas clashes with armed factions (9:35), and a summit in Sharm El Sheikh (14:36); a United Nations report shows a record-breaking spike i...

Paris Marx is joined by Chris Gilliard to discuss how tech CEOs are pushing a new generation of AI-powered smart glasses by promising they’ll be stylish and indispensable to workers in a desperate attempt to convince us we should want their luxury surveillance gadgets. Chris Gilliard is the co-director of the Critical Internet Studies Institute and is working on a book called Luxury Surveillance ....

Saturday is the second No Kings Day – it should be the biggest single day of protest in American history, with more than 2,500 events planned. Leah Greenberg will explain the preparations – she’s co-founder of Indivisible, the group that called the first No Kings day, June 14 – five million people participated in that one, held the same day as Trump’s birthday parade – the one no one came to. Also...

Danny and Derek speak with sociologist Charles Derber about how American society is tearing itself apart, as explored in his book Bonfire: American Sociocide, Broken Relations, and the Quest for Democracy . They discuss the decline of civic trust, the rise of atomized “me” culture, the tech-driven Gilded Age, neoliberalism and loneliness, Silicon Valley’s alliance with the national security state,...

Few movies have ever been as timely as Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film  One Battle After Another , which traces the battle between revolutionary resistance groups trying to protect immigrants and an authoritarian government run by racists. There are scenes from the movie that feel like they are being played out right now on the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and Portland. Although it presents...