Current Affairs

The International Criminal Court in the Hague is the place where war criminals are supposed to be tried and punished. It embodies a vision of global justice in which war crimes are universally forbidden, intended to carry forward humanitarian principles. But so far, the court has only completed a handful of trials, and it has been heavily criticized for focusing on crimes committed in Africa while...

Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He has recently attracted a lot of (almost entirely negative) attention for a column and tweets arguing that mocking the deaths of anti-vaxxers is "necessary." Hiltzik joins to defend and explain his position to Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson, who believes that Hiltzik's stance is cruel an...

Judge Judy Sheindlin has long been one of the highest-paid TV stars, earning a staggering $47 million per year for her show, Judge Judy . She is universally known and loved nationwide for her acerbic, "take no BS" style of dispute resolution. "Who doesn't love Judge Judy?" asked Barack Obama .  Current Affairs editor-at-large Yasmin Nair does not love Judge Judy. In a new article for In These Time...

Sheryll Cashin is the author of White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality . She has been called "one of the most important civil rights scholars of our time." Her book "exposes the ways in which American policy decisions, from the early twentieth century to the present, have constructed a ‘residential caste system’ resulting in the entrapment of Black p...

Editors of Current Affairs recently took Hillary Clinton's "MasterClass" and had a deeply unpleasant time. But Bill Clinton, too, has a MasterClass, and as public interest journalists committed to understanding and explaining the political world, we felt obligated to take this one, too. To save you the $180 MasterClass fee, we tell you everything you'll learn from Bill Clinton's "Inclusive Leaders...

Today, in our last episode of the year, we present a hopeful discussion about what leftists can accomplish in power. Sam Bell is a Rhode Island state senator and Democratic Socialists of America member. The Boston Globe has called him " the most outspoken member " of the RI state senate, and he has tried to use his position to advance left policies in a state historically dominated by extremely co...

Today Nathan is joined by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, author of The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe. Under pressure from progressive Democrats, Joe Biden recently agreed to continue a pause on student loan payments. There has been a great deal of debate over whether Biden should consider canceling large amounts of student debt outright.  Mitchell has spen...

Kristin Henning directs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She has worked as a public defender for juveniles in Washington, D.C. and is the author of the book The Rage of Innocence: How America Criminalizes Black Youth .  In the book, Prof. Henning "explains how discriminatory and aggressive policing has socialized a generation of Black teenagers to fear, resent, and...

A UK court recently ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States. Assange faces serious charges over violating the Espionage Act, based on WikiLeaks' publication of classified United States government documents and video related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The prosecution has been condemned by a number of press freedom and human rights organizations, but...

Hillary Clinton has just released an online course on "The Power of Resilience" through the website MasterClass, where celebrities teach their skills. The course has made the news because in it, she delivers the speech she would have given had she won the presidency in 2016, which she did not. We were curious what else is in Hillary Clinton's MasterClass, so Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Na...

Prof. Aya Gruber teaches criminal law at the University of Colorado Law School. Her book The Feminist War on Crime: The Unexpected Role of Women's Liberation in Mass Incarceration makes the case that many feminists have been too quick to push for more severe criminal punishments for crimes against women, and have as a result ended up legitimizing or even contributing to the expansion of mass incar...

Harvard Law School professor Randall Kennedy has been known for decades as a critic of Critical Race Theory, which was developed in part by his late colleague Derrick Bell. But Kennedy's critiques come from a position of intellectual respect, and over the years he has become more sympathetic to some of the central claims CRT makes about the pervasive and intractable nature of American racism. His...

Today Nathan is joined by Edward Niedermeyer, an investigative journalist whose book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors remains the definitive critical account of the rise of Elon Musk and Tesla. Edward is an auto industry expert whose work has been featured in the New York Times , Wall Street Journal , Bloomberg View , and elsewhere, and he currently hosts the Autonocast podcast abo...

In this contentious conversation, Nathan speaks to Prof. John McWhorter about his book Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America. Prof. McWhorter is a linguist at Columbia University, regular New York Times contributor, and host of the Lexicon Valley podcast. His book argues that anti-racist social justice ideology is properly described as a "religion" and that its practitioners a...

Today's guest is molecular biologist Dr. Alina Chan, a fellow at the Broad Institute and co-author of Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19 . She has been one of the most prominent commentators on the origins of COVID-19 and has attracted controversy for encouraging more serious consideration of the possibility that the pandemic began through an accident at a virology lab. She has been cred...

Prof. Harvey J. Kaye is the author of books like Thomas Paine and the Promise of America , The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great , and most recently Take Hold Of Our History: Make America Radical Again . Running through his work is the argument that the social democratic left should draw more on the richness of the American radical tradition and tak...

Today Nathan is joined by legendary former Harper's editor Lewis Lapham. Lapham is the author of numerous books including Money and Class in America , Age of Folly , and Lapham's Rules of Influence . He currently edits Lapham's Quarterly . He also wrote and starred in the delightfully strange documentary/musical The American Ruling Class . He was called "without doubt our greatest satirist" by Kur...

Julia Serano is a PhD molecular biologist, writer, and musician whose books include Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity , Outspoken: A Decade of Transgender Activism and Trans Feminism , and the surrealist novel 99 Erics . Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, The Guardian, The Daily Beast, Salon, and elsewhere. Dr. Serano is a patient de...

Dean Preston represents District 5 on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. A tenants' rights attorney and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he was the first democratic socialist elected to the board in 40 years. Recently, a campaign by a group called the "YIMBYs" has accused Preston of denying housing to thousands of people . In this episode, we talk about why San Francisco has a...

Aziz Huq is an expert in constitutional law at the University of Chicago law school. He is the author of the book The Collapse of Constitutional Remedies , available from Oxford University Press. Prof. Huq's book focuses on the fact that constitutional rights are meaningless unless there are remedies for violations of those rights, and that while we ostensibly have the same rights as always, court...

Today's guest is Glenn Loury, professor of economics at Brown University. Prof. Loury has had a distinguished career—he was the youngest-ever tenured Black economics professor at Harvard and is known for coining the term "social capital." Prof. Loury is generally associated with political conservatism, but his books The Anatomy of Racial Inequality and Race, Incarceration, and American Values actu...

Today's guest is Stephen Bright, one of the best criminal defense attorneys in the United States . Prof. Bright teaches at Yale Law School and Georgetown Law, but has spent most of his life working as an advocate for poor people accused of serious crimes. During his decades in charge of the Southern Center For Human Rights, he argued multiple times in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and represente...

In this, the second part of our look into the realities of abortion in the contemporary United States, Nathan talks to Prof. Diana Greene Foster, Director of Research at the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health (ANSIRH) collaborative research group at UC-San Francisco. Prof. Foster is the author of the new book The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Havi...

Carol Joffe is one of the foremost experts on reproductive rights in the United States. A professor in the Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology & Reproductive Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, she has been studying and writing about the battle over abortion rights for decades and received lifetime achievement awards from the Abortion Care Network and the Society of Family Pl...

Andrew Cockburn is a veteran journalist who serves as the Washington Editor of Harper's magazine. His new book, The Spoils of War: Power, Profit, and the American War Machine, available from Verso collects his reporting on the military-industrial complex and the way the public coffers are looted by profiteers. He joined Nathan to discuss why he thinks the ever-bloating military has become an out-o...