Current Affairs

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 sensible. But Allison argues that in its disdain for "government" and its rejection of important progressive notions of fairness, Strong Towns ultimately aims up pushing an approach to planning that will maintain existing unjust inequalities. Allison's critique has implications beyond this particular organization, though. It also illuminates the different possible approaches to thinking about how to make better places, and Allison articulates a clear progressive agenda for planning. If, like me, you’re a progressive and distressed about the state of our cities, you will like a lot of what Strong Towns has to say. But its appro

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 in music theory. Ewell argued that much of mainstream music theory has been build around unstated assumptions about which kinds of music are sophisticated/interesting/worthy of academic study. Today he joins to explain how the idea of white supremacy translated into normative conceptions about music, why it's a mistake to think he's trying to "cancel Bach," and how music theory can be made, in the words of his title, more welcoming for everyone, meaning that it will break free of its narrow focus on a tiny group of European composers. A great YouTube video by Adam Neely featuring Ewell, discussing the themes of this c

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 recounts meetings with Maya Angelou, Angela Davis, Desmond Tutu, and other greats, as well as highlighting lesser-known stories like the life of Claudette Colvin. Gary recounts historic moments he witnessed and reported on, such as being in South Africa when Nelson Mandela ascended to the presidency and seeing the reaction to Barack Obama's election on Chicago's South Side. Today Gary joins to discuss some of the events and people he covers in his book, and to expand on some of his unique opinion pieces (such as his "defense of Uncle Tom" and his case for tearing down all statues).“I sign off from this column at a dispiriti

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Originally aired 9/19/2023Dozens 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 and clashing with police and construction companies, and prosecutors have now come down hard on the protests. In Current Affairs, Nathan recently wrote that the indictment is both preposterous and terrifying. Preposterous because it criminalizes behavior that should obviously not be prosecuted (like buying a tarp, or being an anarchist). And terrifying because it will encourage prosecutors around the country to aggressively pursue dissidents. We are joined today by one of the leading legal experts on the case, Christopher Bruce of the Georgia ACLU. Christopher explains the background, the risks, and shows why all America

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 studying the utopian experiments that people have engaged in across history, can help us figure out what life ought to be like and how to change the world for the better. From Charles Fourier to Star Trek, Ghodsee takes us on a fascinating tour of attempts to dream up and build mini-paradises. We discuss where utopias go right and where they go wrong.The Liza Featherstone review of Ghodsee's book in Jacobin is here. The angry Wall Street Journal review is here."Imagination is more important than knowledge,” said Albert Einstein in 1931. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulat

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 Purdue professor and former student of Zinn, set out to understand the remarkable hostility ("Zinnophobia") that Howard Zinn's work has been met with, not just among Republican politicans but also among some of Zinn's historian colleagues. Were they right that People's History is a bad work of history?Today, Detmer joins to discuss Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, and the criticisms that have been made of Zinn. We talk about Zinn's life and work and what made it so distinct from previous histories. Detmer explains Zinn's theory of what the role of a historian was. We discuss the backlash and go through

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Matthew Desmond's bestselling book Poverty, By America poses a straightforward question: Why is there any poverty at all in such a wealthy country as the United States? Surely we could solve the problem of poverty if we were committed to doing so. Desmond points a finger at those who profit from poverty and argues that there is no justification for our inaction. Desmond, a leading sociologist whose work has won the Pulitzer Prize and the MacArthur Fellowship, tries to understand what makes poverty so persistent and what it would take to "abolish" it forever. Today he joins to give a brief explanation of his ideas.“Lift the floor by rebalancing our social safety net; empower the poor by reining in exploitation; and invest in broad prosperity by turning away from segregation. That’s how we end poverty in America.” — Matthew Desmond“How many artists and poets has poverty denied us? How many diplomats and visionaries? How many political and spiritual leaders?

"I’m pretty sure that some of my colleagues have signed on to my bill because they wanted me to stop talking about periods on the floor of the House." — Grace MengGrace Meng represents the 6th District of New York in the United States Congress. She recently reintroduced her Menstrual Equity for All Act, which aims to dramatically expand free access to menstrual products across the country. She joins today to discuss the problem of period poverty and what it would take to solve it. A transcript is available here. "When I’m talking about this issue, most people—men or women—do not necessarily prioritize this issue, and many are even surprised to learn about it." — Grace Meng

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Lorne Stockman is the research co-director at Oil Change International, which is dedicated to exposing the harms caused by fossil fuel use and advocating for a green transition. Today Lorne joins us to rebut some common nonsense conservative talking points on climate change, to explain how a transition to 100% renewable energy can happen, and to give a clear assessment of how much progress we've made so far and how much is left to go. It's a crucial conversation for understanding where we're at in the fight against the climate catastrophe, and you may be surprised to hear that there is actually some good news. We discuss such topics as: Why Vivek Ramaswamy is full of crap when he says that continued fossil fuel use is essential for human prosperityWhy Vivek Ramaswamy is also full of crap when he suggests that fossil fuel energy can simply be used to cancel out the damage caused by climate changeWhy many other things said about fossil fuels and climate chan

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Jag Bhalla is a contributor to Current Affairs who has also written for Scientific American and Big Think. His pieces for our magazine have frequently focused on debunking popular narratives about climate change and arguing that anything resembling a just future will require a fundamental change in the distribution of global wealth and consumption. Read his articles here:‘Climate Optimism’ Is Dangerous and IrrationalWe Can’t Have Climate Justice Without Ending Computational ColonialismThe 1% Are Many Times Worse Than The Rainforest WreckersWhite-Collar War Crimes and For-Profit Famines Taming the Greedocracy Today Jag joins to explain some of the core ideas underpinning his work in Current Affairs, showing how the assumption that the Global South doesn't matter is buried in U.S. climate discourse and explaining some of the bad math that allows for the rationalization of heinous injustices. Climate change is not just going to be “apocalyptic,” it’s already

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Alex Bronzini-Vender has contributed several articles to Current Affairs, about progressive politics in the U.S. today. In his first, "Progressives Aren’t Hurting the Democratic Party—In Fact, They’re The Only Thing Saving It," he looks at his home state of New York. Bronzini-Vender argues that, contrary to the narrative that tough-on-crime Democrats are more "electable," the most progressive Democrats are in fact scoring the most important political victories and inspiring voters. In Alex's second article, "Moderates, Not Leftists, Have Created the Crises in Democratic Cities," he looks at the right-wing narrative that "leftism" has caused crises of homelessness and disorder in American cities. Is the conservative storytelling on American cities the product of ignorance, malice, or both? I couldn’t tell you—but the reason it’s irresistibly appealing to conservatives of both Democratic and Republican stripes is quite clear. For Republicans, leftist-induced

Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Today we are joined by Stephen Bright and James Kwak to discuss their new book The Fear of Too Much Justice: Race, Poverty, and the Persistence of Inequality in the Criminal Courts. The book is a comprehensive primer on the problems with the American criminal court system, from the power of prosecutors to the underfunding of public defenders to the biases of judges to the obstacles to getting a wrongful conviction overturned. Bryan Stevenson calls it "an urgently needed analysis of our collective failure to confront and overcome racial bias and bigotry, the abuse of power, and the multiple ways in which the death penalty's profound unfairness requires its abolition." The authors are leading experts on the system, and Prof. Bright has successfully argued Supreme Court cases challenging racial discrimination in jury selection. (Listeners might remember Prof. Bright from his previous appearance on the program, which specifically focused on the right to counse

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 redistribute wealth and income rather than depending on the largesse of the bourgeoisie, who have far too much damned money. But Amy Schiller, in The Price of Humanity, goes beyond this critique, and argues that we can engineer a better concept of philanthropy. First, she argues that we need a social democratic welfare state, so that the meeting of basic needs is not the domain of philanthropy (no more GoFundMes for medical care). But then we also need to go beyond a basic living wage to instead have a "giving wage," meaning we should all earn enough to be able to give some of it away. The things we support through giving should be special projects that aren't funded by

Thom Hartmann is America's #1 progressive radio host and the author of the "Hidden History" series of books. His latest, The Hidden History of American Democracy: Rediscovering Humanity’s Ancient Way of Living, encouragingly argues that democracy is the most natural form of organization. Drawing from examples from the animal kingdom to the Iroquois confederacy to Thomas Paine, Hartmann lays out a vision of what it would mean to have an actual democracy. He counsels against pessimism, though he is conscious of the ways in which the present American system is rigged and undemocratic. Today he joins to explain what the study of history can teach us about the possibilities for our future."The more unequal a society becomes, the more difficult it is to maintain a functioning democracy, as we've seen in the United States in the years since the Supreme Court legalized political bribery, and as a result, Congress changed the rules of capitalism and taxation to favor the morbidly rich. While democracy may be the resti

Tara Isabella Burton is a novelist and the author of the new nonfiction book Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians, a history of the rise of the idea of a curated self. Tara's book looks at the transition from seeing human beings as made by God to being made by our own individual wills. From Renaissance painters to the famous dandy Beau Brummell to Thomas Edison to contemporary Instagram influencers and reality television stars, Tara looks at those who have carefully manufactured the picture of themselves that they show to the rest of the world. Today she joins to discuss whether, in becoming free to "self-make," we have in fact truly been liberated, and what unseen forces shape people's ideas of the selves they ought to become.“[T]he seemingly liberatory promise that we can create ourselves has, as often as not, been warped into an excuse to create, implicitly or explicitly, two classes of people: those who are capable of shaping their destinies (and who thereby deserve their su

Current Affairs has recently launched a new project: the Current Affairs News Briefing, a twice-weekly digest of important (and often neglected) news stories. We're really tired of having to sift through a mountain of clickbait and ads every morning to "find the news," so we're putting together our own alternative, which relays the things that matter most in the distinctive CA style. We think fans of our magazine and podcast will enjoy it!The News Briefing's chief researcher and writer is Stephen Prager, who joins Nathan on the podcast to discuss the question: What's wrong with the US news media? We talk about the lack of foreign coverage, the endless trivia and fluff, the failure to pay attention to things that majorly affect people's lives, and what the media's priorities ought to be. Then we discuss our own approach to trying to remedy some of this through the news briefing. This new project is still young, so we welcome your suggestions and tips at briefing@currentaffairs.org. What do you wish for from yo

Benjamin Y. Fong is the associate director of the Center for Work & Democracy at Arizona State University and the author of the new book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge. From cigarettes to crack to opioids, Fong's book looks at how the United States became a country with a major drug habit. He talks about the role of private industry in monetizing addictive chemicals, and the hideous consequences of the war on drugs. For a leftist, drugs pose a certain conundrum: On the one hand, we believe in full legalization and an end to the horror of the drug war. However, we also don't take a fully libertarian "drug use as an expression of individual preference" approach, and recognize that drug use can be (1) a response to desperate conditions and (2) pushed by private actors who profit off misery. Legalization alone will surely produce more destructive industries like the cigarette industry, which profits from slowly killing its customers (and constantly addicting new ones)

Avi Shlaim is a distinguished historian and Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University. He is one of the Israeli "New Historians" whose pathbreaking work debunked some of Israel's most cherished national myths. Now he has written a fascinating memoir, Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew that challenges conventional understandings of Zionism, the binary categories of "Arabs"/"Jews," and the very nature of nationalism. Prof. Shlaim is known as a "British-Israeli" historian, but as his memoir explains, he was actually born into a cultural world that has long since vanished: the Baghdad of the "Arab Jews," whose culture and language was Arabic but whose faith was Judaism. Shlaim's memoir tries to recapture this cosmopolitan existence, where Muslims and Jews lived in relative peace side-by-side. For families like Shlaim's, the birth of the state of Israel was something of a tragedy, because it shattered their world, creating new animus between Iraqi Jews and Iraqi Muslims. Prof. Shlaim's d

Originally aired 7/23/2023. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !Today we have another in our Contentious Arguments series, as Nathan clashes with Christopher Rufo, the architect of the right's "critical race theory" moral panic and a close advisor of Ron DeSantis. Rufo has lately been criticized by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education for appearing to retaliate against public university professors for their political beliefs in his capacity as a trustee of New College of Florida. His new book, America's Cultural Revolution: How The Radical Left Conquered Everything argues that 60s radicals have successfully staged a "long march through the institutions" and exhorts conservatives to stage a "counter-revolution." You can read the review that Nathan and Matt McManus wrote of that book here.The quotation "Has the goal of the left, for a century, been the destruction of every Western institution?" is from the book's official publicity page. Nathan's essay debunking Michael Shellenber

Alyssa Hardy is a fashion journalist whose work has turned in recent years to exposing the underbelly of the industry, from the labor conditions of those who make the clothes to the colossal amounts of waste in our clothing industry and the climate consequences of "fast fashion." Today she joins to discuss her book Worn Out: How Our Clothes Cover Up Fashion's Sins, which is appreciative of good style but devastatingly critical of an industry where the people who make the clothes are mercilessly exploited and millions of dollars are spent trying to make consumers feel like they're not cool unless they keep buying new clothes. We discuss "microseasons," the lack of ethical standards in fashion journalism, and the radical turn of Teen Vogue, for which Alyssa has worked. “It pains me to say it, but so much of this industry, including the jobs that I dreamed about having for so long, is bullshit. When I was in high school, I had a cover of Teen Vogue taped to the inside of my locker so that every day I remembered