Current Affairs

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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 went from being (somewhat) charitable institutions to farming debt collection out to huge companies that make massive profits off shaking down poor people. He joins today to explain the harms that medical debt does to patients' lives (and to their relationships with their doctors), how the debt collection industry works, and why things don't have to be this way. 

"We must reckon with the bounty hunters of medicine: the debt collectors who haunt the lives of the millions of Americans who cannot pay for their medical care. Any solution that leaves intact an industry that profits off the financial captivity of the poor cannot credibly be called just. It is time to build a future without medical debt or its collectors."—Luke Messac 

Jonathan Taplinhas 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 Culture and Undermined Democracy focused on leading monopolistic corporations. His new book, The End of Reality: How 4 Billionaires Are Selling a Fantasy Future of the Metaverse, Mars and Crypto, examines four leading billionaires (Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen). Each of them is extremely powerful and has a vision for the future of the world. Taplin thinks those visions are bleak, antidemocratic, and dystopian. He joins us to explain how he thinks these men are destroying our culture and even trying to "end reality." Taplin's background in rock-n-roll and New Hollywood gives him a distinctive perspective on the culturaldegradation that these billionaires are contributing to, from the erosion of musicians' livelihoods through streaming services to the threat posed to quality cinema by a nonstop stream of billion-dollar AI-written superhero movies.

“There is a choice about what the future holds, and it’s not necessarily Mark Zuckerberg’s or Elon Musk’s to make. The fight that remains will be to once again assert the possibility of constructing our lives as free and autonomous persons in a natural world not destroyed by industrial pollution and not ruled by the algorithms of the tech monopolies. It will be to resist this future of pseudo-experience and fantasy exploration. That resistance will require both government regulation and the individual decisions of millions of citizens around the world about how they are going to use technology. Fortunately these four technologies of the Metaverse, crypto, transhumanism, and space travel are in their early stages of adoption...[My greatest fear is] that enchanted by the magic of the Technocrats’ “immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life,” we will sleep through a right-wing revolution and wake up to find our democracy gone and our children being turned into Meta cyborgs. Let us wake up and resist the end of reality.” — Jonathan Taplin, The End of Reality

Read the Current Affairs critique of Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"here. Our episode on the relationship between MySpace and music ishere. The crypto story is fleshed out in ourprevious episodewith Zeke Faux.

Zeke Faux of Bloomberg Newsis 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 Infinitealso looks at Bankman-Fried, Faux sees the scamming and lying of the crypto world for what it is, and his book is highly conscious of the harm done to victims by the fraudulence of Bankman-Fried and others. (Faux's book begins: "'I’m not going to lie,’ Sam Bankman-Fried told me. This was a lie.") 

Today, Faux joins to answer all of the most pressing questions about SBF, FTX, crypto, and the very dumb world of "NFTs," like:

Bankman-Fried said that I was wrong. Crypto wasn’t a scam, and neither was Tether. But he wasn’t offended by my question. He said he totally understood my problem. Then he did something that didn’t strike me as strange at the time. But knowing what I know now, I can’t help but wonder if he was trying to make some kind of winking confession. Bankman-Fried cut me off, nodding, as I tried to explain more. His tone turned chipper. He said: “It’s like the narrative would be way sexier if it was like, ‘Holy shit, this is the world’s biggest Ponzi scheme,’ right?”

Right.
—Zeke Faux,Number Go Up 

Listeners may also be interested in prior episodes on crypto/NFTs/"Web3" withStephen Diehl,Molly White, andNicholas Weaver. Incidentally, Sam Bankman Fried istestifying in his criminal trial today. It's also never a bad time to reread our 2021 article "Why Cryptocurrency Is A Giant Fraud." 

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 Palestineand 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 personal tragedy. Because his book is about Palestinians under occupation, several of Thrall's book events have been canceled since the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel. Based in Jerusalem, Thrall joins us to explain the current state of Israeli society, and to tell us more about the reality of life for Palestinians under occupation. 

“For all the blame that was cast, no one—not the investigators, not the lawyers, not the judges—named the true origins of the calamity. No one mentioned the chronic lack of classrooms in East Jerusalem, a shortage that led parents to send their children to poorly supervised West Bank schools. No one pointed to the separation wall and the permit system that forced a kindergarten class to take a long, dangerous detour to the edge of Ramallah rather than driving to the playgrounds of Pisgat Ze’ev, a stone’s throw away. ... No one noted that the absence of emergency services on one side of the separation wall was bound to lead to tragedy. No one said that the Palestinians in the area were neglected because the Jewish state aimed to reduce their presence in greater Jerusalem, the place most coveted by Israel. For these acts, no one was held to account.” —  Nathan Thrall,A Day in the Life of Abed Salama

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 its legal borders and successive Israeli leaders’ staunch opposition to a Palestinian state. Slater’s exhaustively documented but accessible work also predicted that Israel’s policies toward Palestine were creating the conditions for a “disaster.” Three years later, Slater’s predictions have tragically come true. He joins to explain the background to the conflict.

“I’ve become convinced that Israel, with essentially blind US Jewish and government support, is well along the road to both a moral and security disaster.” —Jerome Slater,Mythologies Without End(2020) 

This interview is available as a transcripthere. 

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 Timesreview of Mann's book here.) Today he joins to help us better understand war. Are humans naturally warlike? Are wars rational ways to achieve political goals? Mann addresses the Steven Pinker narrative that civilization and enlightenment have brought about greater peace—in fact, he says, "civilization" has allowed us to build more efficient killing machines than ever. And he tells us what he knows on the subject that should interest all of us in the nuclear age: How do we end war? 

Note that this episode was recorded before the recent explosion of the Israel-Palestine conflict, so it is not addressed in the discussion. 

“War is the one instance where losing one’s temper may cause the death of thousands. War pays us back more swiftly for mistakes than any other human activity. Humans are not calculating machines—more’s the pity, since peace is more rational than war. If the social world did conform to rational theory, if rulers did carefully calculate the costs and benefits of war, trying hard to set emotions and ideologies aside and ignoring domestic political pressures, they would see that most wars are too risky and inferior to economic exchange, the sharing of norms and values, and diplomacy as ways of securing desired goals..War is the least rational of human projects, but humans are only erratically rational creatures...Human beings are not genetically predisposed to make war, but our human nature does matter, if indirectly. Its tripartite character, part rational, part emotional, part ideological, when set inside the institutional and cultural constraints of societies, makes war an intermittent outcome. Human nature does matter, and that is why when wars are fought, they are mostly fought for no good reason.” —Michael Mann, On Wars

Several years ago, Garrison Lovely wrote aninsider 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 McKinsey is like on the inside: how it justifies serving odious clients, why young "idealists" are tempted to join it, and what goes wrong with the logic of "optimization." 

The right-wing National Review's odd response to Garrison's piece is here. Our previous episode on the book When McKinsey Comes to Townprovides useful context for today's episode. 

We are now living with the consequences of the world McKinsey created. Market fundamentalism is the default mode for businesses and governments the world over. Abstraction and myth insulate actors from the atrocities they help perpetuate. Businesses that resisted the pressure to rationalize every decision based on its impact on shareholder value were beaten out or eaten up by those who shed the last remnants of their humanity. With another heavyweight on the side of management, McKinsey tipped the scale even further away from labor, contributing directly to the increase in wealth inequality plaguing the world. Governments are now more similar to the private sector and more reliant on their services. The “best and the brightest” devote themselves to client service instead of public service. —Garrison Lovely, "McKinsey & Co.: Capital's Willing Executioners." 

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Nick Dearden'sPharmanomicsis 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 order to maintain innovation. He shows how the pharmaceutical industry has pushed drugs that don't work, buried harmful side effects, experimented on the Global South, and extorted the public to line its pockets. He explains why scientific research needs to be under public, rather than private control, and offers a vision for a healthcare system that actually takes care of people's health. Dearden shows how the infamous Martin Shkreli, who became notorious for hiking drug prices, was not a mere bad apple, but following standard operating procedure in the world of "pharmanomics." 

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Allison Lirish Deanis a journalist and urban planner in North Carolina. She is the author of a recent piece for the Current Affairsprint edition (andnow 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 approach is ultimately undergirded by a right-wing ideology that does little to alter the political status quo and further naturalizes austerity and infrastructure inequality: communities get what theydeservebased on their ability to build wealth through entrepreneurship, not what theyneedfrom a system that prioritizes human rights and the delivery of universal public goods. — Allison Lirish Dean 

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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 conversation, is here. A comprehensive Current Affairsarticle on the controversy around race and music theory is here. Nathan's article on Charles Murray, including Murray's theories about music, is here. 

The main problem I have noticed as music theory faces its racial past is in how we confront what we see in the mirror as we look at ourselves. Understanding the exclusionist nature of the field is not difficult, and it is also easy to add to the music theory mix a few composers of color and think that this represents a solution to our racial dilemma. However, as Baldwin says in the epigraph to this chapter, all we ever see in that mirror is lies, whether we acknowledge that or not. The lie we are told by music theory, the lie that awaits in the mirror to be seen by the field if it is strong enough to glance, is that the dark secrets of our past are exceptional to our field, and that, by and large, our history has been one of social justice and decency. Of course, this is largely untrue of American music theory, since this is largely untrue of the United States as a country. —Philip Ewell, On Music Theory

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" andhis case for tearing down allstatues).

“I sign off from this column at a dispiriting time, with racism, cynicism and intolerance on the rise, wages stagnant and faith that progressive change is possible declining even as resistance grows. Things look bleak. The propensity to despair is strong but should not be indulged. Sing yourself up. Imagine a world in which you might thrive, for which there is no evidence. And then fight for it.”— Gary Younge, in his final Guardiancolumn

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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 Forestmovement 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 Americans should be deeply troubled by this outrageous prosecutorial overreach. 

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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 Socialismand, 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 Jacobinishere. The angry Wall Street Journalreview is here.

"Imagination is more important than knowledge,” said Albert Einstein in 1931. “For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.” We stand on the cusp of a new age, with many of us striving toward a more positive vision of the future like the one Roddenberry once provided, where human beings find a way to build a better world for subsequent generations of humanity. Our old ideas about patrilineality and patrilocality are no longer fit for that purpose. We need new ideas, new dreams, and the courage to imagine alternative futures. Now is the moment to “think different.” If we can imagine them first in a galaxy far, far away, it’s only a matter of time before we boldly go and begin figuring out how to translate these inspired visions into our own everyday utopias. —Kristen Ghodsee

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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 Historyis 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 some of the criticisms of Zinn. Detmer explains why he finds the criticisms to be so flimsy, and the way in which critics misunderstand what Zinn was doing. The fights over how American history should be taught are still ongoing, as we know, so it's a good moment to take stock of the most famous radical revisionist take on U.S. history. 

The quote at the beginning is, of course,from Good Will Hunting.Zinn's work lives on at the excellent Zinn Education Project. Highly recommended is Voices of a People's History, a companion volume to the original book that Zinn co-edited with Anthony Arnove. A 21st century sequel to Voiceswas recently released by Arnove and Haley Pessin. The original People's Historyhas also been adapted into a beautifully-illustrated graphic edition.

"Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, a perennial bestseller, offers a version of American history that differs substantially from previous accounts. Instead of the standard story, in which the wise and heroic deeds of presidents, Supreme Court justices, military and business leaders, and various other wealthy and powerful elites are celebrated, Zinn makes the case that, whenever progressive change has occurred, it has resulted from the struggles of ordinary people—those who have participated in popular movements agitating for peace, for racial and sexual equality, for improved working conditions, and for environmental protection, among other similar causes. And in opposition to the triumphalist bias of the more orthodox histories, in which the misdeeds of the powerful are either sanitized or erased altogether, Zinn shines a spotlight on official acts of enslaving Africans, slaughtering Indians, lying, breaking promises, violating treaties, trashing the Constitution, exploiting workers, bombing or massacring civilians, assassinating foreign leaders, sabotaging elections, and propping up brutal puppet dictators, among other transgressions.”

“As the continuing success of the book testifies (it was first published in 1980 and remains a bestseller 37 years later) many readers warmly welcome Zinn’s work... But the reaction of many other readers (and non-readers who know of Zinn’s book only by reputation) has been one of loathing. Such has been the typical response of political conservatives, the wealthy and powerful, many mainstream historians, and everyone else whose sense of “patriotism” engenders a commitment to the idea that our nation’s leaders, traditions, and institutions are uniquely great and moral.”

“What I found, over and over again, is that Zinn’s harsh critics...produce incompetent work—work that, while it occasionally scores an isolated minor point or two against Zinn, nonetheless can be fairly characterized, on the whole, as uncomprehending, larded with errors, and not up to the quality standards one would expect in a term paper submitted for credit by a college freshman for an introductory level course."—David Detmer

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Matthew Desmond's bestselling book Poverty, By Americaposes 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? How many nurses and engineers and scientists? Think of how many more of us would be empowered to thrive if we tore down the walls, how much more vibrant and forward-moving our country would be.”—Matthew Desmond

“Poverty will be abolished in America only when a mass movement demands it so. And today, such a movement stirs. American labor is once again on the move, growing more boisterous and feistier by the day, organizing workplaces once thought untouchable. A renewed movement for housing justice is gaining steam. In a resurgence of tenant power, renters have formed eviction blockades and chained themselves to the entrances of housing court, meeting the violence of displacement with a force of their own. The Poor People’s Campaign has elevated the voices of low-income Americans around the country, voices challenging “the lie of scarcity in the midst of abundance” and mobilizing for things like educational equity and a reinvestment in public housing.They march under different banners—workers’ unions and tenants’ unions; movements for racial justice and economic justice—but they share a commitment to ending poverty in America.”—Matthew Desmond

The piece by Matthew Yglesias that Desmond is responding to is here. A short version of the argument was published in the New York Times Magazine. Note that Desmond's audio skips briefing in the middle of a sentence toward the end, due to a faulty internet connection. 

"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 Meng

Grace Meng represents the 6th District of New York in the United States Congress. She recentlyreintroduced herMenstrual 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

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Lorne Stockmanis 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: 

Read Lorne's writings for Oil Change International here. A recent article Nathan wrote on the latest phase in climate denial is here. This podcast pairs well with our recent conversation with Current Affairscontributor Jag Bhalla. 

"It is abundantly clear that the production and consumption of fossil gas must decline immediately, even if methane reduction goals are met. No amount of wishful thinking about upstream emissions reduction, carbon capture and storage (CCS), gas-based “blue” hydrogen, or whatever the latest magical techno-fix the industry imagines will save it can change this fact."— Lorne Stockman

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Jag Bhalla is a contributor to Current Affairswho has also written for Scientific Americanand 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:

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 apocalyptic. It’s just that the apocalypse is not something that happens to the entire world at once. Instead, the apocalyptic events are experienced mostly by the world’s poorest people (who, incidentally, have contributed the least to creating the problem). Who,witnessing the scale of flooding in Pakistan last year,could possibly say that the climate crisis is not “apocalyptic,” unless you regard Pakistanis as unpeople whose well-being simply doesn’t factor into the equation? 33 million people were displaced, andmillions of homes destroyed. When white Western elites publish books with titles likeIt’s Not The End of The WorldorApocalypse NeverorFalse Alarm, what they mean is “it’s not the end of the world for people like me,” “apocalyptic conditions will never be experienced by my sector of society,” and “those of us who are among the world’s richest do not need to be alarmed.” Of course, even these are false comforts—the mansions of Malibu are flammable, after all.

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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 urban malaise is a seemingly concrete, visceral argument for their policy agendas of “backing the blue” and being “tough on crime.” And, for conservative Democrats, it allows them to ignore the fact that, for decades, they’ve held politicalpower in America’s largest cities—and have left behind only long legacies of failed policy. The present crises faced by the communities they’re responsible for are transformed, in their telling, into new and unique beasts brought about by a radical fringe, rather than outcomes decades in the making. And, most conveniently, this false narrative pins the blame for said crises upon burgeoning progressive movements, forcing them to answer for problems they bear no responsibility for. —Alex Bronzini-Vender

The article "Eric Adams' Moral Panics," mentioned by Alex, is here. The podcast with Mo Mitchell is here. The interview with Robert Peters is here. The story about Adams' fake photo is here. The thumbnail photo is an official homeless encampment that the San Francisco city government installed in front of city hall during the COVID-19 pandemic instead of giving people housing.

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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 counsel.) 

“Excessive punishment is one of the most important problems facing our country today, causing misery for people subject to it and their families, wasting vast resources, and making it harder for millions of people to contribute to society...A just criminal legal system is one that considers people charged with crimes as “uniquely individual human beings” subject to “the diverse frailties of humankind,” as demanded by Justice Potter Stewart in the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that rejected laws making the death penalty mandatory. It takes into account the many factors that may make a person more likely to commit a crime—poverty, racism, neglect, abuse, witnessing violence, post-traumatic stress disorder, serious mental disorders, and so on—and the inability of prosecutors, judges, or juries to predict who that person will be in the future. A just system responds to a crime both with sanctions that fairly reflect the moral culpability of the person who committed it and with measures that help him become a positive contributor to his community. In an adversary system, justice demands that people accused of crimes be represented by skilled, zealous lawyers with the time, resources, and information necessary to fairly defend their clients, and that cases be heard by judges motivated solely by upholding the law and achieving a just outcome. And justice demands that both courts and governments actively work to redress the systemic racial discrimination that plagues the criminal legal system.” —Stephen Bright and James Kwak 

Nathan mentions Prof. Kwak's excellent bookEconomism, which debunks the misuses of economic reasoning. 

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 notthe 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'tfunded by the state but nevertheless enrich life. 

Schiller joins today to discuss her ideas for a better kind of philanthropy. She explains why she thinks the effective altruists have everything backwards and why the "roses" in "bread and roses" should not be considered optional. 

Listeners might also enjoy our conversation with Prof. Linsey McGoey, author of No Such Thing As A Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy.

"The project of philanthropy is to make the earth more of a home, and to encourage inhabitants of the spaces and institutions it provides to feel at home in the world. Ours is a world for humans. It should serve all of us, not the few who can exploit the many for maximum profit. The money we use to build the common world communicates our belief in that world, and in all who inhabit it. It affirms the value of humanity beyond price."-Amy Schiller, The Price of Humanity 

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 resting state of the human race, [its force] is like gravity: Although it's eventually irresistible, it can be defied for long periods of time. If democracy is to survive in America, it's going to require a considerable reallocation of political and financial power in the wake of the Supreme Court's disastrous decisions that have handed our nation's political system over to America's oligarchs." —Thom Hartmann

Thom's previous appearance on the program can be heardhere.

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 success) and those who are not (and who deserve nothing). This classification invariably places those who do not fit the dominant physical or cultural mold—women, people of color, the poor, the disabled—in the second category.That is not to say that it would be preferable to reinstate the image of a divine creator-monarch, Thomas Aquinas’s vision of a universe where the laws of the natural world and of the social world are inextricable from one another, where the right of kings to rule is as ingrained in the functioning of our earth as the propensity of heavenly bodies to fall. But we must all ask ourselves what it means—politically, ethically, socially—to live up to Stewart Brand’s predictions that we are as gods, that the world is nothing but what we make of it, and that our choices, our desires, our wanting to be or to have, are the only things that make us human, that make usus. We must, too, ask ourselves how often our desires are stoked by those with a financial interest in making us think that we both can and should shape ourselves, whether they’re selling us self-help manuals or Snake Oil skin cream." —Tara Isabella Burton

Albrecht Dürer's Christlike self-portrait can be seenhere. Tara'sCurrent Affairsarticle "The Making of the Self-Made Man," which previewed some of the ideas discussed in the book, can be readhere. Listen to Tara's previous appearance on the podcast, discussing her bookStrange Rites,here.

Current Affairshas recently launched a new project: the Current AffairsNews 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 youwish for from your news media that you don't currently get? 

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). What, then, is the progressive approach to drug use? Quick Fixes offers a nuanced and fascinating look at the intersection of capitalism and chemical dependency. 

"Misguided and destructive as the War on Drugs has been, the key proposals of liberal drug reformism don't inspire much confidence in an alternative. Legalization has, for one, long been the principled position of the libertarian right: from Ludwig von Mises to Milton Friedman, free marketeers have loved pointing to the example of illegal drugs to prove their belief that markets solve everything. Place the drug trade in the stable hands of legal profiteers, they say, and away go the absurd profit margins, the government corruption, the distortion of local economies, the crime, the enforcement budgets, and the drug contamination... Unfortunately for their elegant argument, it's the legal drugs—cigarettes and alcohol—that are most hazardous to Americans. Letting profit-hungry corporations sell psychoactive drugs virtually assures abuses detrimental to public health... Illegal drug dealers can be dangerous sociopaths, but they are nothing compared to CEOs." —Benjamin Fong

The chapter of the book on cigarettes actually began as aCurrent Affairspiece,which can be read here.The 2018Current Affairsarticle "Death and the Drug War" may also be of interest. 

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-Jewthat 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 discussion of the early days of Zionism, and the effects it had on the Jews of Baghdad, shows that Israel's claim to operate in the interest of the world's Jewish population is highly questionable. Prof. Shlaim even claimsthat he has uncovered evidence that the Zionist movement was willing to resort to violence against Jews in Baghdad in order to build the Jewish state. His memoir, despite being tragic in many ways, is ultimately hopeful, because Prof. Shlaim still believes in the possibility of a country where ethno-religious binaries break down and different peoples can live side by side in a hybrid culture. 

“Time and again we are told that there is a clash of cultures, an unbridgeable gulf between Muslims and Jews. The ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis has become entrenched, supplying ammunition for rejectionists on both sides of the Arab–Israeli divide.The story of my family in Iraq – and that of many forgotten families like mine – points to a dramatically different picture. It harks back to an era of a more pluralist Middle East with greater religious tolerance and a political culture of mutual respect and cooperation between different ethnic minorities. My family’s story is a powerful reminder of once thriving Middle Eastern identities that have been discouraged and even suppressed to suit nationalist political agendas. My own story reveals the roots of my disenchantment with Zionism.” —Avi Shlaim 

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 Everythingargues 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 Shellenberger's climate lies is here. For more on the subjects covered in today's episode, read Nathan's article "Why Critical Race Theory Should Be Taught In Schools" and Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments. 

Christopher Rufo:No, no, no, the United States was not founded on racism. I think that that is a total misunderstanding of history.

Nathan Robinson:How many Founding Fathers were Black?

Christopher Rufo:How many people in the Chinese Politburo are European? I mean, it's like the representation fact. Look, hold on...

Nathan Robinson:There's not a big class of European slaves in China. But if there was, it would be a racist state.

Christopher Rufo:That's true. But look, if you say "What was the United States founded on?" it's a very specific question, and I'll answer the question for you. The United States was founded on a vision of human nature, of natural rights, of equality and liberty.

Nathan Robinson:That excluded Black people.

This edited has been very lightly edited to fix cross-talk. (In the original, much of what was said was unintelligible because both Rufo and Robinson were talking at once.) A directionless several-minute tangent about the nature of artistic talent has also been excised. In the interest of avoiding any allegations of selective editing, that outtake can be heardhere. Otherwise, the interview is presented in its entirety.

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 exactly what I wanted to do with my life. It’s all I ever wanted and that’s why I want it to be better—I didn’t dream of pushing people toward clothing on Amazon that I wouldn’t even buy myself because the magazine gets 3 percent of the sale. It’s also why I want to empower you to make choices that feel good and to arm yourself with knowledge about how this whole thing works.”— Alyssa Hardy 

Our previous podcast about Vogueeditor Anna Wintour's MasterClass is here. Our conversation with Sam Miller McDonald about menswear is here.

School sucks. But why? And must it? For our print magazine, Lauren Fadiman writesabout how radical leftists have historically tried to rethink schooling entirely, to create alternative schools that truly nourish the mind and soul rather than simply preparing kids to enter the workforce. Today she joins for a discussion of why we shouldn't just think of fixing schools as a matter of increasing their funding, but should broaden our imaginations and look to historic (and contemporary) examples of schools that truly care about preparing students to be empowered members of a democratic society.

We discuss a Democratic education secretary's comment that meeting industry demands for a workforceshould be a major purpose of education, the right's belief that children should go work instead of school, the attacks on public education, and why leftists should run for school boards and even found their own schools. We discuss the Summerhill school, the Ferrer schools, the Brooklyn Free School, and more radical alternatives to traditional education. And we discuss why kids' love of dinosaurs should be indulged and encouraged. 

"There is good reason, therefore, for leftists to start now to take back the American school system—not through programs like Teach for America, which sics largely untrained, prestige-hungry Ivy League grads on school districts, but in the old-fashioned ways: by becoming tutors and teachers, joining school boards, advocating for greater federal oversight of education. And—where the political environment is hostile to critical pedagogy—perhaps even taking matters into the Left’s hands and founding alternative schools." —Lauren Fadiman 

An article Nathan co-wrote on the purposes of education is here. The Financial Timesarticle "Why Do Kids Love Dinosaurs?" is here. A response to the pro child labor arguments on the right can be found in Nathan's Responding to the Right. 

Perhaps only those between the ages of about 30 and 35 will remember the golden years of MySpace, which dominated social media before Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok. MySpace was a mess, but it's looked back on fondly by many, in part because it encouraged individual expression and customization. Michael Tedder, in his new book Top Eight: How MySpace Changed Music shows that MySpace allowed musical culture to flourish in a way that succeeding social networks haven't. This was in part because the network was created by people who liked and appreciated music, which raises interesting questions about how a social media network can be built to either facilitate or inhibit the development of certain kinds of cultural forms. 

Tedder's book encourages us to ask questions like: What would a goodsocial network look like? What parts of ourselves would it bring out? What bad tendencies would it discourage? While perhaps not as nostalgic for MySpace as Michael is, Nathan agrees that it had some quirky qualities that are sorely missed today. We talk about what it would mean to have an internet for the people, a crucial conversation at a time when much of the internet seems to be dying a depressing death. 

Alas, MySpace itself was killed after being bought by Rupert Murdoch, a part of the story that shows how ruthless profit-seeking capitalism can snuff out things that are valuable. The story illustrates why who ownssocial networks is so crucial, and the values of owners are reflected in user experiences. (Elon Musk's Twitter, for instance, is saturated with his personal stupidity and bigotry, while Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook is as bland as he is.)

Nathan's article "Toward the Wiki Society" is here, and his article on Rupert Murdoch is here. Our interview with Cory Doctorow about the early promise of the internet is also relevant.

On this program, we have previously discussed the inspiring fight waged by the Amazon Labor Union on Staten Island, and theconfrontational tactics that can help unions win recognition despite the best efforts of corporations to thwart them. But even when unions win recognition, in many ways the battle is only just beginning. At Amazon and Starbucks, workers may have won recognition, but they haven't actually gotten contracts, because the companies are ruthless at the negotiating table (and ruthless about staying away from the negotiating table). So what happens then? What do workers do in Phase II, where they need to actually get a contract? 

Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor join us today to give us some answers. Their book, Rules to Win By: Power and Participation in Union Negotiations(Oxford University Press) follows on from McAlevey's earlier work on how to organize a union in the first place (see her previous interview with Current Affairs). They discuss how to extract concessions from intransigent employers and why the workers themselves (not an aloof, unresponsive team of professional negotiators) need to be at the heart of any negotiation. The lessons they offer are not just useful for unions, but as they explain, are practical for many other social movements who are trying to take on the powerful. 

"The labor movement presents some of the best insights for other social movements into how to negotiate effectively, because negotiations are a regular feature of union life. Sadly, very few social movements ever build enough power to pull up to serious negotiations—the kind that result in a written, enforceable agreement. Social movements, when they do win, often fail to secure good enforcement language. To this day, most provisions of the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, achieved some fifty years ago, have never been implemented. Not only can social movements learn from strong unions what it takes to build strong enforcement into an agreement, but also what it means to keep your organization strong enough to hold the inevitable opposition in check. This is true any time there are real stakes to a settlement, whatever the field." —Jane McAlevey and Abby Lawlor 

The Rickard Sisters, Sophie and Scarlett, have produced two wonderful graphic novel adaptations of books by early 20th century radicals. First they made The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, adapted from Robert Tressell's classic socialist story about a group of house painters who experience all of the horrors of laissez-faire capitalism. Then the Rickards made No Surrender, adapted from Constance Maud's neglected novel about the suffragette movement. 

Today, the Rickards join to talk about why they see the struggles of a century ago as so enduringly relevant. They have spent years adapting these novels for today, and the results are beautiful, colorful, funny, and moving. These two adaptations are some of the contemporary left's most accomplished and dazzling contributions to the graphic novel medium. But what is it that makes the original books so compelling? What can Robert Tressell and Constance Maud still offer us, so long after their deaths? Listen to the Rickards explain their project.

Kyle Chayka is a cultural critic and staff writer for the New Yorker. (Incidentally, he also wrote a piece back in 2017 that covered the early years of Current Affairs.) Kyle's bookThe Longing For Less: Living With Minimalism, is a delightful, profound exploration of the idea of "minimalism." Beginning with the Marie Kondo phenomenon, Kyle tours world history and culture to discuss everything from Thoreau's cabin to John Cage's music to Japanese rock gardens to the sculptures of Donald Judd. 

Today Kyle joins to talk about why there have been periodic movements stressing the importance of having "less." We talk about how contemporary Instagrammable minimalism can actually be quite expensive. We ask whether Jesus was a minimalist. We probe the mystery of why Agnes Martin's minimalist paintings are so mesmerizing. Nathan is on the record as being a proud "maximalist" who loves ornamentation and chaos (he has even written an article called "Death To Minimalism") while Kyle is sympathetic to the minimalist instinct, even if he highlights some of its more absurd manifestations (such as the glass walls in the Apple headquarters that were so "minimalist" you couldn't see them, leading employees to constantly bonk their faces on them). 

But the important questions are: what leads us to want to reject the very things that supposedly make our consumer society so "abundant" and fulfilling? What's behind the Thoreau-like instinct to chuck it all away and do without luxury or adornment? Is the minimalist instinct the right response to a civilization of wasteful excess? If it is, however, how do we determine what is "enough"? 

“Maybe the longing for less is the constant shadow of humanity’s self-doubt: What if we were better off without everything we’ve gained in modern society? If the trappings of civilization leave us so dissatisfied, then maybe their absence is preferable, and we should abandon them in order to seek some deeper truth....Minimalism is a communal invention and the blank slate that it offers an illusion, especially given its history. It is popular around the world, I think, because it reacts against a condition that is now everywhere: a state of social crisis mixed with a terminal dissatisfaction with the material culture around us that seems to have delivered us to this point, though the fault is our own. When I see the austere kitchens and bare shelves and elegant cement walls, the dim vague colors and the skeletal furniture, the monochrome devices, the white t-shirts, the empty walls, the wide-open windows looking out onto nothing in particular—when I see minimalism as a meme on Instagram, as a self-help book commandment, and as an encouragement to get rid of as much as possible in the name of imminently buying more—I see both an anxiety of nothingness and a desire to capitulate to it, like the French phrase for the subconscious flash of desire to jump off a ledge,l’appel du vide, the call of the void...The popular minimalist aesthetic is more a symptom of that anxiety, having less as a way of feeling a little more stable in precarious times, than a solution to it.” —Kyle Chayka 

Benjamin Studebaker's new book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shutis a provocative critique of contemporary American politics. Studebaker argues that "none of the existing political movements in the United States are capable of responding to [our] economic problems." He's critical not only of conservatives who stir up culture war issues to distract from people's economic suffering, but of a left which he sees as irrationally committed to goals and strategies that won't work. Studebaker's book is quite pessimistic, because he sees the existing system as incapable of satisfying people's needs, but also deeply resistant to being changed. He raises challenging questions for those of us who want to see that kind of change, foremost of which is: how do we expect to make it happen? 

Today Benjamin joins for a lively discussion with Nathan about his theory of American democracy. Nathan, who is of a sunny and hopeful disposition, rejects some of Benjamin's analysis, but admits it's important to wrestle with. Nathan puts his disagreements and queries to Benjamin, who offers his responses. (You might remember that a few years ago, Studebaker joined for an argument on whether a Joe Biden or Donald Trump presidency was actually worse for the left.)

"[P]olitical professionals and their followers become politically estranged from the rest of society. What, then, becomes of everyone else?...Every political path these Americans might take is blocked. They cannot reform the global economic system, and they cannot overcome it by revolutionary means. The political professionals do not represent them. Their interests continue to be ignored, and politics continues to disappoint them. They have nowhere to turn, and there is nothing they can do. And yet, these Americans must go on living. They must continue to do the best they can to pay their bills, to pay down their debts, to keep their businesses open. What becomes of them?" —Benjamin Studebaker 

Sara Marcus is the author of Political Disappointment: A Cultural History from Reconstruction to the AIDS Crisis. A lot of studies of social movements look at movement triumphs, but Marcus is interested in what happens when people fail, when they throw themselves into a cause and (at least in the short term) it doesn't react its goals. Often, she argues, disappointment ends up forming the basis of new culture, expressing itself through art and music, sometimes in subtle ways. There is also a sense of waiting, as movement participants try to hang on until the historical moment is ready for them to act again. She looks, for instance, at Reconstruction, where a nascent multiracial democracy was destroyed before it could be secured, and the AIDS crisis, where activists went through long years of bleak hopelessness.

Today's activists suffer plenty of disappointments of their own, and as they sigh and try to figure out how to move forward, Marcus encourages them to look backward, to see how things looked to previous generations who were trying to change the world and usually not succeeding. Ironically, by learning how to be disappointed we may help ourselves become more optimistic and determined.

"Attending to the ways those we accept as forebears lingered with loss and found new forms and practices to accommodate, process, and transform their disappointment, we, too, can seek forms and practices suitable to our time, working in coalition with the dead as well as the living." —Sara Marcus

Listeners may also be interested in Sam Allison-Natale's essay "Keeping The Faith: Socialism In The Waiting Place," which discusses related issues.

You name it, it's been privatized somewhere in the United States. Schools, roads, libraries, courts, prisons, and even the law itselfhave been outsourced to private companies by state and local governments who buy into the idea that The Private Sector is more efficient at serving the functions of government. But this is baloney, as Donald Cohenshows in The Privatization of Everything How the Plunder of Public Goods Transformed America and How We Can Fight Back(co-written with Allen Mikaelian). Cohen, the founder and executive director of In The Public Interest, joins today to take us through case studies of privatization in action, likeChicago's disastrous deal to sell its parking meters. 

Cohen shows us that when we privatize, we are turning our own assets over to someone else who will sell them back to us and pocket our money. He explains why privatization is a bad deal and why public goods and services should remain in public hands. There is a right-wing effort to stigmatize public services as Big Government (calling public schools "government schools" for instance), and Cohen makes the case for why we need a pro-public culture that unashamedly demand that what belongs to the people stays in the hands of the people. 

"Understanding privatization means understanding that it is first and foremost a political strategy. It was born this way, and so it remains, but it has also become a grab for billions of dollars in contracts and fees. In the years since it sprang from the mind of Milton Friedman as a way to undercut government “monopoly,” it has also become a way for profiteers to tap into the $7 trillion of public revenue (which swelled to $9 trillion during the COVID crisis) spent by local, state, and federal government agencies each year and carve out a piece (sometimes a very big piece) for themselves. Privatization has also in recent history become remarkably bipartisan—Democratic president Bill Clinton arguably did more for the privatization project than did his Republican predecessor Ronald Reagan. And it has become surprisingly pervasive, to the point where there are now 2.6 times as many federal government contractors as there are government employees, and there is literally no public good that is not at risk of being privatized." —from "The Privatization of Everything"

Benjamin Howard is a Current Affairsreader who was once a huge fan of Canadian psychologist, pundit, and self-help guru Jordan Peterson. But Howard eventually became a harsh critic of Peterson's work, to the point where he is putting together a website called JordanPetersonIsWrong.com. Today he joins us to explain how and why he changed his mind. We talk about the sources of Peterson's appeal and how Benjamin found that by getting to a different place in his life and learning critical thinking skills he became more able to see through some of Peterson's sophistry.

An article about this conversation by Nathan can be found here. Peterson himself has reacted to this interview by insisting that he does not care at all. The clip about religion is from the Matt Dillahunty vs. Jordan Peterson Debate. The "clean your room" video is here.

"He’s also able to weave in a lot of different topics together, where he’s got the self-help, he’s got religion, he’s got psychology, and then the politics…If you listen to one of his lectures where he’s in this lecture hall talking for  an hour, two hours, he’ll go across all these different topics and weave them, like he’s trying to give the impression that they’re all unified together. But it’s this hodgepodge of different things that maybe aren’t related. It gives this feeling of “Wow, this guy knows about everything, and he’s just so knowledgeable, and he’s giving this profound insight that other people just don’t have. I think there is definitely an impression that you’re getting genius insights from this person. I think that’s what leads to over-trusting of his information, because if he’s a genius, then why look into anything he says? He must just be correct." —Benjamin Howard

Michael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother Jonesand the author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All.Michael's book goes beyond quantitative statistics about inequality to take a close-up look at the actual lives of the American oligarchs. Today he joins to discuss life inside "the bubble" that the super-wealthy inhabit—why they ceaselessly pursue endless accumulation, how they rationalize their privileges, and how they rig the system to make sure they never lose any of their dubiously-acquired gains. 

“Rarely have our collective wealth fantasy and public attitudes toward affluence been more worthy of examination than the present—a time of staggering economic inequality, political divisions, racial reckoning, and a global plague that has rendered undeniable the truth that America’s economic game is rigged...It is rigged so powerfully, and in so many ways, that if it were an actual game nobody would bother to play—a game in which the winner is preordained, and the more you have, the more you receive. In which capital is crucial but few can obtain it. In which white men receive favorable treatment, while other groups are forced to play by alternative rules that leave them at a disadvantage. It is a game in which nearly all of the spoils flow to the top one-fifth of players, and the four hundred biggest winners end up with more than the 150 million biggest losers. We have reached the point at which our republic, founded upon egalitarian ideals (if not behavior), is so starkly divided into haves and have-nots, winners and losers, that some 0.1 percenters feel compelled to bribe and cheat their children’s way into our nation’s top colleges. Such is the fear of our progeny winding up on the wrong side of the wealth equation.” —Michael Mechanic

Listeners may enjoy reading Rob Larson's Current Affairsarticleon the Wall Street Journal's "Mansion" section and Nathan's article about billionaire memoirs. 

Danny Katch is the author of the most accessible and entertaining existing introduction to socialist ideas,Socialism...Seriously: A Brief Guide To Human Liberation,available from Haymarket Books (in a new edition that promises 50% more socialism). Danny's book attempts something quite difficult: it tries to make reading about socialism fun. It's full of jokes and is non-dogmatic. It's a real blast and you should buy it! 

Today, Danny joins to discuss how he explains socialism in a way that ordinary people who aren't socialists can understand. We talk about misconceptions around Marxism, why we still need the word "socialism" and can't just "rebrand," how we can bring joy to the struggle, how you can talk to people who disagree with you, and why it's annoying when leftists pretend they're not surprised by anything. 

“The most essential ingredient of socialism isn’t its analysis of capitalism but its passion to fight on the side of the people. The theory only matters to the extent that it helps this fight (which it very much does). So before someone decides whether she is a socialist, she has to ask herself the more basic question: which side am I on?” –Danny Katch 

Asa Winstanley of The Electronic Intifada is the author of the new book Weaponising Anti-Semitism, a bombshell exposé of how the burgeoning socialist movement in the British Labour Party was destroyed by false accusations of anti-Semitism, amplified in the British press. The book is an important contribution to our understanding of why, after such a promising take-off, Jeremy Corbyn's party leadership came to a calamitous end. Asa joins us today to explain the history of what happened and the lessons we can take from it. Asa argues that we need to understand how pro-Israel forces, and centrists more broadly, wield these accusations cynically so that we can fight back against them.  

"The British media’s attitude to Jeremy Corbyn was one of implacable opposition from the outset...The media, conservative and liberal alike, did everything they could to stop Corbyn becoming leader. When they failed in that, they tried to overturn the election result. When that too was unsuccessful, they did everything they could to stop him being elected prime minister—and that succeeded. British journalists, editors, and politicians showed extreme dedication to reversing the Labour membership’s democratic selection of the party’s most left-wing leader since it was founded." —Asa Winstanley 

Read Gautam Bhatia's tribute to Corbynhere. James Schneider's interview about Corbyn, with its different take on the factors that led to his political demise, ishere. Nathan's personal account of his experience with false anti-Semitism accusations ishere. 

Terri Friedline is an associate professor of Social Work at the University of Michigan. She's also a contributor to Current Affairs, where she published one of our most unusual pieces ever: apiece of speculative utopian fiction about the end of Wells Fargo. Terri is also the author of the excellent book Banking on a Revolution: Why Financial Technology Won't Save a Broken System.Today, Terri joins to explain why Wells Fargo is so pernicious that she wrote a story imagining its obliteration. She explains how ordinary people are hurt by a financial system that concentrates so much power in a few giant mega-banks, and what the practical alternative to a world of Wells Fargos and JP Morgan Chases is. We talk about public banking projects and their prospects. We also talk about the way that "financial literacy education" perniciously tries to get people to accept responsibility for personal financial difficulties that are the result of systemic injustices, and what liberatory financial education (of the kind Friedline herself teaches) looks like.

"Eighteen years ago, a bank closure wouldn’t have gotten this kind of attention. Fortunately, things changed. People were radicalized by an onslaught of environmental and economic catastrophes, bank scandals (especially scandals involving Wells Fargo), and a creative use of financial education that, collectively, brought banks’ power into sharp focus. Banksspentmillions of dollars each year telling people to takeresponsibilityfor their  finances and budget their way out of poverty.Organizersand academic researchers likemyselfstarted to leverage the  financial education that banks had financed. We didn’t just teach people how to contest their overdraft fees or fix errors on their credit reports. We taughtpopular educationand built political power. We explained how private banksmake moneyoff of dubious account fees and how proprietarycredit scoringalgorithmssurveilanddiscriminate. So, many people were ready to celebrate the closure of a bank that had once beendeemed'too big to fail.'" —Terri Friedline 

Listeners may also be interested in our recent conversation with the New York Times' Emily Flitter, who covers racism in the banking sector.

Emily Hund is the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticityon Social Media. Today she joins to discuss how "influencing" turned from something bloggers did, organically, to a giant industry where powerful commercial interests try to manufacture authenticity. Influencers are a paradox, because they have to work very hard in order to appear real, and if they ever stop seeming real they stop being paid. Hund takes us behind the curtain to try to sort out what's real and what's artificial in the frequently dystopian world of social media influence.

"What began as a belief, perhaps naive in retrospect, about the "realness" of early bloggers and digital content creators has, through the influencer industry's development, been transmuted into a particular aesthetic, textual vocabulary, and technological infrastructure leveraged by a wide range of people and groups for financial and ideological gain. Authenticity among influencers is not necessarily spontaneous, if it ever was; it is inextricable from the commercialism that now ensconces digital interactions." —Emily Hund

Today Norman Solomon returnsto the program to discuss his new book War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine.Norman is one of the country's leading progressive media critics. In this book, he talks about how the media helps construct a mental wall between the people of the United States and the victims of U.S. foreign policy. He talks about how the reality of violence is kept from view and how heroic whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Daniel Haleare punished when they try to put cracks in the "wall" and show people the reality of their country's crimes abroad. 

Read the report from Brown University's Costs of War Project on the human toll of the global War on Terror here. A full discussion of the Iraq war by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson is available here. 

The militarism that propels nonstop U.S. warfare is systemic, but the topic of systemic militarism gets little public attention. Ballooning Pentagon budgets are sacrosanct. While there can be heated disagreement about how, where, and when the United States should engage in war, the prerogative of military intervention is scarcely questioned in the mass media. Even when conventional wisdom ends up concluding that a war was unwise, the consequences for journalists who pro- moted it are essentially nil. Reporters and pundits who enthusiastically supported the Iraq invasion were not impeded in their careers as a result. Many advanced professionally. —Norman Solomon

Mark Paul is an economist who argues that there can be no meaningful freedom without economic freedom—by which he does notmean the libertarian idea of the freedom to exploit others. Mark's book The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America's Lost Promise of Economic Rightsexplains how having a functional and free country will require establishing new rights: the right to employment, the right to housing, the right to healthcare, the right to a clean environment, etc. Today he joins us to explain how we can create a true "land of liberty." 

"While an economic bill of rights is indeed about material security—making sure all are able to put food on the table and a roof over their heads—it's also about advancing a new social contract, one that truly honors people's inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's about rooting out the deep power imbalances that warp America's economy and society. It's about building a sustainable economy and world that works for current and future generations alike. It's about freedom."— Mark Paul

Listeners interested in the topic should also check outour conversation with Alan Minsky and Harvey Kaye,who discussed FDR's proposals and what an economic bill of rights would look like today. 

Samuel Miller McDonaldis a regular contributor to Current Affairs,where he has written about such disparate subjects as collectivism, the food system, Game of Thrones, cultural atrophy, ecofascism, His Dark Materials, the term "development," the history of oil, the fiction of Kim Stanley Robinson, the future of cities, and the forests of Madagascar. In our latest issue, Sam takes on one of his most challenging subjects yet: menswear. Sam is unapologetic about enjoying clothes, and showcases outfits on his "Mr. Clothes" account. But some on the left see men who like menswear as bourgeois, indulgent, even unethical. Must socialists wear overalls and Leninesque mariner's caps to be aesthetically authentic? 

Today we discuss Sam's argument, made eloquently in his print article, that clothes matter and there's nothing wrong with making yourself feel good by wearing nice clothes that you think look good. We discuss Twitter's "menswear guy,"who has become infamous for savagely critiquing the attire of famous men (often right-wing men who think they look fantastic). We talk about the ethical questions that face all of us when we buy clothes: is it a luxurious indulgence to buy expensive clothes, or is it worse to purchase the cheapest clothes made under exploitative labor conditions? We talk about how, far from being the provenance of the bourgeoisie, style has often been a weapon of the marginalized to assert their dignity, fromsapeurs to zoot suiters to working class mods and rockers. Nathan explains what he's trying to do by wearing the clothes he wears, and Sam offers tips for being a menswear guy while staying committed to left principles. 

Today on the podcast, we dive into the question of what kinds of musical borrowing constitute "influence" versus "plagiarism." In the news at the moment is a lawsuit against pop singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, who is accused of lifting parts of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On" for his song "Thinking Out Loud." We're going to listen to both songs, and you can decide what you think. But we're also going to go on a tour through musical history and see how supposed "original" artists are often blatant plagiarists. We're also going to discuss the history of the exploitation of Black music by white artists and the question of who should owe what to whom when someone gets rich off a song based in parton someone else's song. 

This audio essay is adapted from Nathan's recent Current Affairsarticle "The Ed Sheeran Copyright Lawsuit Exposes The Absurdity of Music Ownership." A playlist of songs played in the episode (plus a few more involved in plagiarism cases) is available on Spotify. 

Today we hear a little-told story, the story of how idealistic socialists around the world, starting around 1890, took over city governments. Prof. Sheldon Stromquist  is the author of the book Claiming the City: A Global History of Workers' Fight for Municipal Socialism(Verso), which looks at how leftists in places from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to a small mining town in the Australian outback tried to implement socialist ideals in their cities and towns. In Sweden, in Britain, in Austria's "Red Vienna," these often colorful figures fought for public housing, public utilities, the 8-hour day, clean water, public schools, and much more. 

Today, Prof. Stromquist argues, we take for granted many things that the socialists of the late 19th and early 20th century had to fight to attain. In this conversation, Stromquist introduces us to some of the neglected stories of these men and women, who were inspired by the Paris Commune to try radical political experiments the local level. They can, he argues, offer important lessons to those of us today who want to continue their work. We talk about not only what they accomplish, but what they failedto accomplish—and why.

"I argue that the promise of a truly 'public city' that would meet the needs of its citizens in collective and humane ways—the legacy in many ways of the Paris Commune, Red Vienna, and countless other municipal socialist experiments—has remained a dream worthy of realization." —Shelton Stromquist

Julie Suk is a professor of law at Fordham University. Her new bookAfter Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do about Itis about why the law has not succeeded at eliminating patriarchy despite advances in formal gender equality. Suk acknowledges that legal feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg helped bring about equal protection under law, but shows that, just as "colorblind" racial policies leave existing hierarchies untouched, "equal treatment" fails to alter gender imbalances of power. 

Suk also explains that, just as racism doesn't have to involve "hatred," misogyny shouldn't necessarily be defined as hating women. Rather, she draws our attention to concepts she calls overempowermentand overentitlement;that is, misogyny is men's excessive power over women and excessive sense of entitlement to women's labor. 

In this conversation, Prof. Suk explains her new framework for understanding gender inequality under the law. We talk about unpaid care work, abortion, and Prof. Suk even gives an interesting revisionist take on Prohibition, which many women saw as a way to curtail alcohol-fueled domestic abuse. Suk also explains how other countries around the world have tried to create real gender equality rather than just equality on paper, and gives her take on whether theEqual Rights Amendment would create meaningful equality or just more "on paper" equality. 

Sophie Lewis is a radical critic of the family. In Lewis's books, Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against FamilyandAbolish The Family, she argues that families are expected to take on functions that should be the responsibility of society as a whole, and that the results are disastrous. Families "privatize care." People have to depend on their families to fund their schooling or to take care of them in old age, which means that those who don'thaving loving and supportive families will simply end up not being cared for.

Lewis argues that seemingly neutral pro-family rhetoric is actually pernicious, because we should be trying to create ways to care for people that do notdepend on everyone being supported by family. At the core of Lewis' work is the idea that care is a basic right, that we all deserve to be cared for. In this conversation, we talk about how organizing society around the unit of the family reproduces inequality. We discuss why people should be able to live fulfilled and happy lives without having to depend on family, and why we'll be better off when we have a society in which family matters lessrather than more. Lewis' work is challenging and openly utopian, but forces us to interrogate some of our most seemingly uncontroversial ideas (in this case, "families are good").

Sophie's Patreon is here. Some of Yasmin Nair's critiques of gay marriage can be found here and here. An article about "family abolition" by Current Affairsmanaging editor Lily Sánchez, who cites Lewis' work, can be found here. Lily also cites the quote Nathan reads from the 1976 Republican platform, which reads as follows:

“Families must continue to be the foundation of our nation. Families—not government programs—are the best way to make sure our children are properly nurtured, our elderly are cared for, our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved. … [I]t is imperative that our government’s programs, actions, officials, and social welfare institutions must never be allowed to jeopardize the family. We fear the government may be powerful enough to destroy our families; we know that it is not powerful enough to replace them.”

Lily Sánchez is the managing editor of Current Affairs, and also a physician.In a new article for the magazine, Lily draws on her experiences practicing medicine to discuss different conceptions of what health justice requires. She reviews an acclaimed book called The People's Hospitalby Ricardo Nuila, which covers a public hospital that Lily also worked at. Nuila sees this hospital as a model for fairness in healthcare. Sánchez, by contrast, sees it as a place that can't help but be unfair, because it's part of a healthcare system that is unjust to its core. The differences between the perspectives of Nuila and Sánchez help us to think about what it would mean to care for people "fairly." For Nuila, we don't need Medicare For All. For Sánchez, Medicare For Allis only a start. In this episode, Lily and Nathan talk about the hospital that she and Nuila both worked at, what Lily saw in medicine, and what she thinks the limits of liberal healthcare reform are. 

Our episode with Mark Vonnegut can be found here. Listeners may also be interested in our old interview with Timothy Faust, the author of Health Justice Now.Lily's article on "zombie" medicine is here.

"We need radical change and a healthcare system in which for-profit health insurance is rendered irrelevant. Healthcare must be more than a commodity, something we aim to get a fair deal on. Our priority should be to build a healthy and sustainable society, prevent disease as much as possible (and treat it effectively when it arises), and give everyone the care they need when they need it, free at the point of use. This will require nothing short of a political movement as well as the willingness to challenge the market logic that is pervasive in healthcare." —Lily Sánchez

Today we are joined by political philosopher Matt McManus of the University of Michigan. Matt has contributed to Current Affairs and collaborated with Nathan on articles about Douglas Murray andthe right-wing disdain for college. At the time of this recording, Matt was reading Ron DeSantis' autobiography, which he has now written about for Jacobin.Matt has also written for CA about conservative faux-"populism", the right's long string of anti-"intellectual" intellectuals, andthe American democratic socialist tradition. Nobody has a better command of the core literature in right-wing thought than Matt McManus.

This conversation goes through some of the ways in which right-wing "thinkers" have tried to articulate a clear and consistent conservative philosophy. In the United States, these attempts tend to be muddled, because reactionary thinkers simultaneously believe in natural social hierarchies andhave a disdain for "elites." European reactionaries are often much more open in their contempt for the people in and their belief in monarchical rule, but in the U.S., with its widespread belief in democratic self-rule, it's not really possible to come out against democracy openly (although some still do). Hence the "elitist anti-elitism" of people like DeSantis, who loathe democracy and are happy to impose the policy preferences of rich right-wing Christians on a reluctant populace, but do so by claiming to act on behalf of the People against the Elite. 

"The vulgarity of conservative populism à la Trump or De Santis is hardly some monstrous abnormality. While earlier figures like Buckley or Reagan may have argued for vicious policies in a more genteel manner, despotism delivered with a thesaurus is still despotism."— Matt McManus

Jono Shaffer is a legendary labor organizer who was instrumental in the Justice for Janitorscampaign. J4J successfully unionized Los Angeles janitorial workers under unbelievably difficult conditions—the janitors were undocumented and worked for contractors rather than buildings themselves, so they were easily fired. J4J built a movement that successfully pressured building owners to respect the rights of cleaning staff. 

Today Jono joins to explain how they did it and what the lessons are for the labor movement today. It's an important conversation in part because Jono's take on what makes for successful organizing is a little different than conventional wisdom. He's skeptical of unionizing via NLRB elections, because even when you win, companies stall and won't negotiate a contract (this is happening at Amazon and Starbuckseven when elections have been won). Jono thinks it can be a mistake to follow a predictable, orderly legal process. J4J took a different approach, working on building public pressure against building owners and figuring out what owners wanted, then finding ways to prevent them from getting it. They used disruptive and sometimes theatrical protest actions that meant it took longer to actually unionize, but which built worker power nonetheless. In this conversation, Jono discusses how power works and how those who want to force employers to capitulate can do it. He talks about the importance of building social movements that are bigger than just unionization campaigns around a single workplace. It's a conversation full of the wisdom that comes from a lifetime of experience doing crucial work in the labor movement. 

"Justice for Janitors unquestionably provides critical lessons for future organizing: As Wall Street and the finance industry increasingly take control over the global economy, we have to look up the economic food chain and target the real culprits. We have to bring as many stakeholders to the fight as possible, and creatively and aggressively organize to disrupt business as usual for those in control — that can mean strikes, civil disobedience, engaging shareholders, or directly challenging other business, social, and political interests and their exploitative practices and schemes. Workers’ lives have been disrupted enough. It’s time to turn the tables." —Stephen Lerner and Jono Shaffer, "25 Years Later: Lessons from the Justice For Janitors Campaign" 

Harold Meyerson's American Prospect article about Shaffer ishere. Thank you to Leo Shaffer for arranging this conversation. 

Ben Clarkson is an illustrator and animator who has produced work for some of the best magazines in the country, including our own Current Affairs. Matt Bors is a leading political cartoonist and founder of The Nib.They have now teamed up to produce one of the wildest satirical comic books of all time, Justice Warriors.Set in a horrifying dystopia called Bubble City, where the rich live in a bubble dome and mutants inhabit a wasteland outside, the comic chronicles the times and crimes of the police, the mayor, and urban terrorists. The book satirizes everything from policing to influencer culture to cryptocurrency. It's like The Wire,but with a mutant poop emoji as the protagonist.

Today, Ben and Matt join to explain the world of Justice Warriorsand how they created this bizarre and wonderful (but bleak) caricature of our times. We talk about the comic's influences, what they're trying to say with it, whether the world they depict is entirely hopeless, and what the power of politically sharp comics can be (including the "we should improve society somewhat" cartoon that Matt became famous for).

"Readers are hungry for sincere and intelligent fiction in a landscape of reassuring fairy tales, to be able to bite into something meaty that doesn't beat you over the head with easy mythological lullabies." —Ben Clarkson

Naomi Oreskes is a historian of science at Harvard University. Erik M. Conway works as the historian at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Together they have just published The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market.We've talked a lot on this program about that failures of neoclassical economics and the myth of the pristine free market whose great Invisible Hand delivers justice to all. But Oreskes and Conway are historians of science rather than economists, so they are interested in where these damaging ideas came from. How did the "neoliberal consensus" actually form and why? How was the belief in New Deal principles destroyed over time? Oreskes and Conway showcase the formidable power of propaganda in changing the course of history. In this episode, we discuss both the origins of the "big myth" and somewhat more theoretical questions about how we can actually measure the effects of particular historical propaganda efforts. 

Oreskes and Conway are also the authors of the excellent book Merchants of Doubt,which shows how industry scientists obscured the truth about tobacco use and global warming. Our conversation with Oreskes and Conway pairs well with our recent interview with Jennifer Jacquetabout the corporate playbook for obscuring scientific findings that could harm profits. 

"Five hundred thousand dead from opioids, over a million dead from Covid-19, massive inequality, rampant anxiety and unhappiness, and the well-being of us all threatened by climate change: these are the true costs of the 'free' market." —Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. ...We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of." —Edward Bernays,Propaganda 

Mehdi Hasan, who hosts The Mehdi Hasan Showon MSNBC, is known as one of the most formidable interviewers in journalism. He has tangled with Blackwater's Erik Prince, John Bolton,Richard Dawkins,Paul Bremer, and many others. A video of a powerful speech he gave defending Islam at Oxford University has received 10 million views. He has now written a book on his methods, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking, showing how to effectively confront and expose toxic beliefs. In this high energy conversation, he joins to discuss such questions as: 

“Philosophically, I consider argument and debate to be the lifeblood of democracy, as well as the only surefire way to establish the truth. Arguments can help us solve problems, uncover ideas we would’ve never considered, and hurry our disagreements toward (even begrudging) understanding. There are also patent practical benefits to knowing how to argue and speak in public. These are vital soft skills that allow you to advance in your career and improve your lot in life. There are very few things you cannot achieve when you have the skill and ability to change people’s minds.” —Mehdi Hasan 

Listen to Mehdi Hasan's previous appearance on theCurrent Affairspodcasthere. 

Johanna Fernández is a historian of social movements who is the author ofThe Young Lords: A Radical History, a deeply researched history of one of the most vibrant and fascinating social movements of the 20th century.

From their origins as a Chicago street gang in the early 60s, the Young Lords became an effective grassroots radical movement, the Puerto Rican counterpart to the Black Panthers. They helped produce an early version of the "patient's bill of rights" in medicine, organized lead testing for children, protested inadequate garbage collection, and demonstrated a model of how to fight for the rights and dignity of a marginalized community. Though short-lived, the Young Lords offer a great many lessons for those in our own time who want to work on the same kinds of issues.

Today, Prof. Fernández joins us to recount the history of the Young Lords, to show us how they succeeded and why they ultimately fell apart. It's an important story that everyone who wants radical social change should be sure to familiarize themselves with.

“Their intrepid organizing campaigns, literature, bold political analysis, and media savvy reclaimed the dignity of New York’s hardest-working and most exploited workers and replaced stereotypes with powerful images of radical, strategic, and articulate militancy….The Young Lords had their finger on the pulse not just of the moment but also of the future. They built a profoundly multiethnic movement: approximately 25 percent of their members were black American, and between 5 and 8 percent were non–Puerto Rican Latinxs, among them Cubans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Panamanians, and Colombians. The Young Lords’ membership reflected the demographic character of a postmodern city, of which New York and Los Angeles are today the best expressions…For today’s organizers, the Young Lords offer a wealth of practical lessons. First and foremost, if your intention is to build a movement that responds to the conditions of real people, there is no substitute for hands-on organizing on the ground and at the local level….”  —Johanna Fernández

Read aCurrent Affairsarticle on the broad lessons to be learned from 60s movementshere. 

Adam Glenn is a Current Affairsreader who has produced a free online book called Brain Worms: How Right-Wing Propaganda Destroys Reason, Conscience, and Democracy.Today he joins to discuss how (and why) to engage with conservative arguments (which Nathan does a lot as well). The text of Adam's book usefully explains in plain language the flaws in right-wing philosophy, but the comprehensive bibliography alone is well worth browsing through. Adam explains how familiarizing yourself with the other side's arguments thoroughly can help you feel less frustrated when you encounter those arguments, and we go through some of the key arguments. 

"Many liberals and leftists, however, don’t know the arguments. They might happen to be correct to think the Right’s arguments are flawed, but too often they don’t know why (or at least don’t know how to articulate why). When they’re confronted with the Right’s arguments, rather than responding in a rational manner, they’re often dismissive, combative, or taken aback—unable to find a rational foothold upon which to formulate a convincing counter-argument. This allows the Right to paint their targets as naive, unrealistic, “bleeding heart” saps who don’t understand “how the world works,” and gives the impression that the Right’s ideas are possibly correct. We should therefore do everything we can to neutralize the Right’s arguments and convince others to help make the world a better place, rather than allow right-wing propaganda to remain unchecked in the service of power and privilege." —Adam Glenn

The Philip Agre article "What Is Conservatism and What Is Wrong With It?" can be found here. 

Alissa Quart is the executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of the new book Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.Her book looks at the cruelty of the myths of being "self-made" or "pulling yourself up by your bootstraps." 

In the first part of her book, Quart examines the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Horatio Alger, Ayn Rand, and Laura Ingalls Wilder (one of Quart's chapters is called "Little House of Propaganda") to show how radically our images of what it takes to succeed depart from the lived reality. She exposes the constraints that keep people from achieving a decent standard of living, and shows how "dependency" isn't a bad thing—in fact, we're all interdependent by our nature. Quart's book shows how people help each other through mutual aid and presents an inspiring alternative to the existing vision of the "American dream." 

"As much as individualism dominates, millions in this country have also pushed against the singular and toward its opposite, coming together in cooperatives, collectives, and mutual aid societies...While the fairy tale of solo success fails many Americans, there are alternative models that can take that fiction's place, ones rooted in the tenet of interdependence and working together to life one another up. We might also accept our dependence, permitting an acknowledging societal aid and help from other structures of support." —Alissa Quart 

More on MLK's speech about car commercialscan be read at Vox (note the mention of Current Affairsin the article.) Dolly Parton's horrible Squarespace ad is here. The book about "meritocracy" is The Rise of the Meritocracyby Michael Young.  

R.S. Benedict is a speculative fiction writer whose popular 2021 essay "Everyone Is Beautiful But Nobody is Horny," published in Blood Knife, arguedthat the disappearance of sex from movies is linked to wider cultural trends toward the celebration of militarism and violence, the shunning of hedonistic pleasure, a utilitarian disdain for frivolous things, and increasing social isolation. Today, Benedict joins to discuss this essay as well asher 2022 piece on "safe fiction." We also tie in the rise of McMansions and defend messiness over sterility. The overarching theme of the conversation is the need to resist the drift toward a Spartan culture in which our bodies are built for fighting rather than pleasure, we are each worker-units whose job is to maximize GDP, and everything unnecessary, gratuitous, or chaotic is to be purged. Benedict is a defender of humanity in all its diversity, sloppiness, and, yes, horniness, and presents a vision for a culture—in film, architecture, and everywhere else—that lets us be ourselves and celebrates desire and fun.

"A generation or two ago, it was normal for adults to engage in sports not purely as self-improvement but as an act of leisure. People danced for fun; couples socialized over tennis; kids played stickball for lack of anything else to do. Solitary exercise at the gym also had a social, rather than moral, purpose. People worked out to look hot so they could attract other hot people and fuck them. Whatever the ethos behind it, the ultimate goal was pleasure. Not so today. Now, we are perfect islands of emotional self-reliance, and it is seen as embarrassing and co-dependent to want to be touched. We are doing this for ourselves, because we, apropos of nothing, desperately want to achieve a physical standard set by some invisible Other in an insurance office somewhere." —R.S. Benedict 

Khaled Beydoun is a professor of law at Wayne State and the author of two books, American Islamophobia: Understanding the Roots and Rise of FearandThe New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. American Islamophobiais a definitive analysis of the roots and spread of anti-Muslim animus in the United States, but The New Crusadesexpands the analysis to look at how the same bigotry manifests around the world, from France to India to China to New Zealand. The new book also shows how the "Global War on Terror" launched by the U.S. after 9/11 helped to fuel anti-Muslim bigotry elsewhere—for instance, China's persecution of Uyghurs deploys justifications and rhetoric lifted straight from the Bush administration. 

"The way in which the media was disseminating this violent, vile information about Muslims—people like me, who sat across from him—mobilized [the soldier] to enlist in a war in a place that he had no knowledge of. He just knew that he wanted to defend his country, he wanted vengeance, and that these Muslims, these Arabs who were a world away were the culprits of this 9/11 terrorist attack...When he came back from the war, you could tell that he felt deceived by this country...he didn't have the same love for country that he did before he left for that war because he realized how the war had broken people like him and told lies about people like me."—Khaled Beydoun 

Brown University's Costs of War project has produced a horrifying tally of the human misery caused by the "War on Terror," available here. The interview Nathan mentions with Vietnam veteran W.D. Ehrhart is here (part II). 

Émile P. Torres is an intellectual historian who has recently become a prominent public critic of the ideologies of "effective altruism" and "longtermism," each of which is highly influential in Silicon Valley and which Émile argues contain worrying dystopian tendencies. In this conversation, Émile joins to explain what these ideas are, why the people who subscribe to them think they can change the world in very positive ways, and why Émile has come to be so strongly critical of them. Émile discusses why philosophies that emphasize voluntary charity over redistributing political power have such appeal to plutocrats, and the danger of ideologies that promise "astronomical future value" to rationalize morally dubious near-term actions.

"A lot this is about working within systems. There's really no serious though within EA, at least that I've seen, about the origins of a lot of problems around the world, those origins being in systems of power, structures that have [caused] individuals in the Global South to end up destitute. There's no discussion of the legacies of colonialism... It's pretty appalling the extent to which these other considerations about colonialism, capitalism, [etc.] are just not even on the radar of a lot of EAs."  —Émile Torres 

Émile's Current Affairsarticle on longtermism is here.Nathan's article on effective altruism is here. Émile's forthcoming book is Human Extinction: A History of the Science and Ethics of Annihilation.

Jennifer Jacquet is not actually an evil corporate consultant. She's a professor in NYU's Department of Environmental Studies and deputy director of the school's Center for Environmental and Animal Protection. But you might think otherwise if you flipped open her bookThe Playbook: How to Deny Science, Sell Lies, and Make a Killing in the Corporate World,a tongue-in-cheek handbook supposedly directed toward CEOs who want to fully follow Milton Friedman's dictum that "The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits." 

The Playbookshows these readers what to do when they find that the spread of scientific knowledge is posing a threat to their bottom line. Using case studies from the cigarette industry, the fossil fuel industry, and more, it's a "guide on whom to hire, how to recruit experts, tips for effective communication, and ways to successfully challenge the science, the policy, and the scientists, reporters, and activists using science to further their policy agendas.”

In fact, Prof. Jacquet is interested in exposing these techniques. Her book shows just how many insidious ways there are to sow doubt on scientific research that demonstrates a corporate harm, and she teaches readers to identify the familiar tricks that are used to keep effective public policies from curtailing corporate wrongdoing. Today she joins us to discuss the methods that have been perfected for protecting corporations from the ongoing risk posed by the public's exposure to truth.

“In the same way that a casino can affect the character of a town, corporate-funded scientific denial has contributed to the erosion of scientific authority and mistrust in the government. In this casino, however, we are gambling with our health, the planet, and our most reliable way of knowing the world. The stakes could not get higher." —Prof. Jennifer Jacquet

Van Jackson is a dissident among foreign policy intellectuals, a harsh critic of the infamous "Blob." HisUn-Diplomaticnewsletteris essential reading (and its accompanying podcast essential listening), and his analyses of U.S. policy in the Pacific in Foreign Affairsare very useful for those who want to understand what is going on in the region. These include: 

He is the author of the new book Pacific Power Paradox: American Statecraft and the Fate of the Asian Peace(Yale University Press) and today he joins the Current Affairspodcast to explain why he thinks U.S. policy in Asia is dangerous and putting us unnecessarily on the path towards conflict with China. It's a vital conversation for understanding the most consequential tensions in the world today. 

"It's patently obvious that by pursuing primacy we're making ourselves the enemy of what remains of the Asian peace." —Van Jackson

A Current Affairs article about U.S. relations with China by Nathan and Noam Chomsky can be read here.

Cordelia Fine is a psychologist and philosopher of science whose work brilliantly demolishes myths about the "nature" of differences between men and women. Prof. Fine has written three books, A Mind of Its Own: How Your Brain Distorts and Deceives, Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, and Testosterone Rex: Unmaking the Myths of Our Gendered Minds.

Today she joins for a conversation about various popular myths about how men and women are "wired" and why a lot of supposedly sound science on sex differences is, in fact, untrustworthy or downright wrong. Prof. Fine shows how these kinds of claims about the biological roots of social gender differences have a long, long history, and they're not any more sound now than they were in the 1900s when suffrage was being opposed on the grounds that women were biologically incapable of voting intelligently. We discuss the contemporary claims of people like Jordan Peterson and the Google memo guy about the supposed scientific foundations of various kinds of gender inequalities.

“As the number of studies reporting sex differences in the brain pile up, the argument that sexual selection has created two kinds of human brain—male and female—seems to get stronger and stronger. Could John Gray have been right after all when he claimed that men are from Mars and women are from Venus? Some scientists have argued that although average differences in the way males and females think, feel, and act may, on a trait-by-trait basis, be relatively modest, the accumulated effect is profound. 'Psychologically, men and women are almost a different species,' was the conclusion of one Manchester Business School academic...If the sexes are essentially different, then equality of opportunity will never lead to equality of outcome. We’re told that 'if the various workplace and non-workplace gaps could be distilled down to a single word, that word would not be ‘discrimination’ but "testosterone"'; that evolved sex differences in risk preferences are 'one of the pre-eminent causes of gender difference in the labor market'; and that rather than worrying about the segregated pink and blue aisles of the toy store we should respect the 'basic and profound differences' in the kinds of toys boys and girls like to play with, and just 'let boys be boys, let girls be girls.'Thisis Testosterone Rex: that familiar, plausible, pervasive, and powerful story of sex and society. Weaving together interlinked claims about evolution, brains, hormones, and behavior, it offers a neat and compelling account of our societies’ persistent and seemingly intractable sex inequalities.Testosterone Rex can appear undefeatable. Whenever we discuss the worthy topic of sex inequalities and what to do about them, it is the giant elephant testicles in the room. What about our evolved differences, the dissimilarities between the male brain and the female brain? What about all that male testosterone? But dig a little deeper and you will find that rejecting the Testosterone Rex view doesn’t require denial of evolution, difference, or biology. Indeed, taking them into account is the basis of the rejection...Testosterone Rex gets it wrong, wrong, and wrong again. Contemporary scientific understanding of the dynamics of sexual selection, of sex effects on brain and behavior, of testosterone-behavior relations, and of the connection between our evolutionary past and our possible futures, all undermine the Testosterone Rex view.” — Cordelia Fine,Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society

Today on the podcast: Nathan takes a turn as the guest, to discuss his new book Responding to the Right: Brief Replies to 25 Conservative Arguments. Get your copy now! 

Responding to the Rightgoes through arguments about abortion, minimum wages, trans rights, immigration, Big Government and much more and shows both why right-wing talking points are wrong andhow to effectively defeat them. In Part I of the book, Nathan discusses how conservative arguments work and why they can sound persuasive to people. Then in Part II he responds to 25 different arguments. In each case, he uses direct quotes from right-wingers making the argument (to avoid the accusation of "attacking straw men.")

In this episode, managing editor Lily Sáncheztakes a turn as the host for a conversation with Nathan on the book, the question of why it's worth responding to the right at all, and the common structure of conservative arguments. 

"I've tried to make this book as comprehensive and useful of a handbook as I can. I think many of us on the left can get frustrated when we're not quite sure how to articulate a persuasive response to a conservative argument even when we know it's wrong. This book will help those who want snappy retorts that 'demolish' and 'destroy' the right, but it will also hopefully unsettle some conservatives who will be faced with definitive irrefutable proof that everything they believe is wrong."— Nathan J. Robinson 

“What I didn’t realize at the time was that what I was living through was the death paroxysms of the Jim Crow order.” —Adolph Reed

Prof. Adolph Reed Jr. has been called (by Cornel West) “the towering radical theorist of American democracy of his generation.” His new book The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlivesis a departure from Reed’s previous work in political science, as it is a personal reflection on his upbringing as part of the last generation to experience the Jim Crow south firsthand. Reed grew up mostly in New Orleans (where this interview also took place) and vividly recalls both the everyday realities of the Jim Crow order and the remarkable process by which the regime was shattered. His book discusses what has changed and what hasn’t in the South. Today he joins to discuss the book and tell us more about how the Jim Crow order functioned in practice, what brought it to an end, and how seismic historical changes happen (sometimes much more quickly than you expect).

Adolph Reed’s previous appearance on the program can be heard hereand watched here. He mentions the book Black Masters, and the Supreme Court cases Grovey v. Townsendand Smith v. Allwright. Ben Burgis' review of Prof. Reed's book for Current Affairsis here. The 2020 controversy over Reed's DSA talk is reported on here. The Preston Smith article Prof. Reed mentions is here. 

“When I’m out in different places in the South and see groups of coworkers or neighborhood friends at a Chili’s or TGI Fridays, they’re having drinks and a meal convivially—that doesn’t say anything major about who’s inclined to vote for socialism but that’s a level of complex experience and conviviality that wouldn’t have been possible before 1968.”—Adolph Reed

Ben Tarnoff is the author of Internet For The People: The Fight For Our Digital Future.Today he joins to discuss what's wrong with the internet and how we fix it. Ben helps us to think more clearly about how the ownership of the underlying infrastructure of the internet affects our experiences—not just platforms like Facebook and Twitter but the "pipes." Ben takes us through the history of how the internet began as a public infrastructure project and gradually became privatized and shows us what the consequences of that privatization have been. He then helps us think through a vision for what a very different internet—one that operated in the interests of the people rather than for profit—would look like. 

"The profit motive is programmed into every layer of the network." — Ben Tarnoff 

"When the individualized self bears sole responsibility for its happiness and emotional wellbeing, failure is synonymous with failure of the self, not external conditions.”— Ron Purser

Ronald Purser is a Professor of Management at San Francisco State University and the author of McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality.Prof. Purser’s book exposes how corporations have pushed pseudo-Buddhist “mindfulness” training to shift the burden of dealing with stress to employees without having to address the toxic work conditions that create that stress in the first place. 

Today, Prof. Purser joins to discuss how mindfulness became a “therapeutic solvent” meant to help individuals cope with their problems but how it ultimately ends up obscuring the systemic causes of those problems and shifting responsibility for dealing with them. Prof. Purser is not an opponent of mindfulness practice, which he believes offers some benefits, but he is highly critical of the way mindfulness is presented as revolutionary, when it can in fact be profoundly de-politicizing. He shows how a multi-billion dollar industry has sprung up that uses appropriated, watered-down Buddhist spiritual practices and pseudo-science to convince people that the causes of their discomfort are internalrather than external.

Prof. Purser mentions the book The Happiness Industryby William Davies, as well as the work of Erich Fromm and Paulo Freire. A useful Truthoutarticle on the corporate use of mindfulness, including “Ama-Zen,” can be found here. Prof. Purser mentions Lauren Berlant’s idea of “cruel optimism” and Kevin Healey’s concept of “civic mindfulness.” More on the Nazis’ interest in Yoga is here.

“The fundamental message of the mindfulness movement is that the underlying cause of dissatisfaction and distress is in our heads.”— Ron Purser

“Corporations have become really attracted to these mindfulness programs—because it lets management off the hook.”— Ron Purser

Alex Lawson is the Executive Director of Social Security Works and the convening member of the Strengthen Social Security Coalition. He has spent his career working to try to save Social Security from Republican (and sometimes Democratic) attempts to "reform" (i.e., cut) it. Today, Alex joins to discuss:

Alex's testimony to the Senate budget committee from last year can be found here. Useful commentaries on Social Security by Matt Bruenig can be found here and here. Here is his explanation of the point Alex made about how raising the retirement age cuts benefits (the chart is very helpful in making the point clearer). The bookSocial Security Works For Everyone!is a useful primer on the issues. 

The philosophical bent of Social Security is an ever-expanding system of economic security delivered to more and more and more people. When FDR signed it into law, he said 'With this law, I lay the cornerstone that future generations can build upon.' And that's what we have to recognize. —Alex Lawson 

How To Hold The New York Times Accountable (w/ Margaret Sullivan)

Margaret Sullivan is one of the country’s most astute media critics. During her time as Public Editor of the New York Times(essentially an ombudsman) Sullivan became widely respected for her willingness to call out the paper’s lapses, often to the considerable consternation of her Timescolleagues. Sullivan criticized the paper’s reliance on anonymous government sources, its practice of allowing sources to approvetheir own quotes, its previous deference to the Bush administration's "national security" justifications for suppressing a story, its failure to adequately cover the Panama Papers, Chelsea Manning's trial, and the Flint Water Crisis, and even the paper’s habit of reporting nonexistent style trends as if they were real things (e.g., the supposed hip comeback of the monocle).

Sullivan also spent much of her career in local journalism, serving as the managing editor of the Buffalo News. Her book Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy is about the destruction of local newspapers and its consequences for the country. Her new memoir, Newsroom Confidential, discusses both her time running a city paper and her time as an in-house critic of The New York Times.

Today, Margaret Sullivan joins to discuss why local news matters, why holding the media accountable is crucial to maintaining public trust in it, and how she tried to keep the New York Timestrustworthy during her time there. Sadly, with the Timeshaving eliminated the position Sullivan held, the paper is no longer conducting the same level of public self-scrutiny, which is unlikely to help it in the mission to rebuild public trust. 

Sullivan’s old Public Editor posts can be read here. Those interested in this subject should also listen to our interview with Victor Pickard, the author of Democracy Without Journalism?

"I understand very, very well why they wanted to get rid of that position. ... The more powerful a media organization is, the more important some kind of oversight or accountability is." —Margaret Sullivan 

Audio note: Nathan sat too close to the microphone. Also someone started hammering in the background on Margaret's end toward the end. Apologies for these distractions. 

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“It’s not that hard to let yourself be led by something that doesn’t match up with your morals, when you’re desperate.” —Jennifer Dines

Jennifer Dines is a Boston-based schoolteacher, poet, and essayist who has written an article for Current Affairs called "The Quit-Lit Pseudoscience and Faulty Feminism of Women’s Sobriety Memoirs," which critiques the bestselling books targeted at women recovering from alcoholism. In her piece, Dines shows how these books often try to sell women on expensive courses so they can "buy their way to health," disparaging free alternatives like Alcoholics Anonymous in favor of unrealistically expensive lifestyle changes (e.g. yoga retreats).

Dines also discusses how these books use the language of social justice to try to convince readers that their own self-care (and their purchase of the authors' products) advances broader feminist goals. In this conversation, we discuss how difficult it is to get accurate information and receive quality healthcare, and how hard it is for desperate people to tell quacks like Dr. Oz from those who truly have their best interests at heart.

"[T]op-selling books are not rigorously fact checked (a serious problemin the world ofnonfictionbooks), and authors often mix discussions of legitimate science with quackery or unproven practices, which is outright dangerous for the non-discerning reader. Authors in this genre also tend to appropriate the language of social justice (rallying against capitalism, patriarchy, and so forth) to make readers think that tackling their alcohol problems (or doing self-care) equates to a larger project of social change. These writers cleverly create a trail of breadcrumbs that leads vulnerable readers to programs such as expensive online courses and coaching services and related products and services, many of which are offered by the authors themselves. Aspirational big-money lifestyles are highlighted while effective programs like Alcoholics Anonymous are trashed. Most dangerous of all, this consumptive approach to alcohol dependency treatment makes products a substitute for healthcare from a qualified mental health professional." —Jennifer Dines

The books Jennifer doesrecommend areThe Recoveringby Leslie Jamison andHow to Murder Your Lifeby Cat Marnell. Lily refers to an article by Nathan about COVID-19, which can be foundhere. Lily’s own writing about bad healthcare ishere.

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Thomas Geoghegan is a labor lawyer and writer whose latest book is The History of Democracy Has Yet To Be Written: How We Have to Learn to Govern All Over Again. MSNBC's Chris Hayes says of the book: "This book made me laugh out loud and also gave me glimpses of an entire horizon of possibility I hadn't seen before.” Indeed, while Tom's book examines the hopeless dysfunction of our political system (including amusingly describing his own effort to run for Congress), it's also a look at how we could make a much, much better system of government if we were committed to getting rid of the filibuster, making voting mandatory, restructuring congress, and passing the PRO Act. Even though we often assume that we stand on the cusp of an authoritarian end to democracy, we actually have within our grasp the possibility of making it far more stable and having a Congress that actually represents the people of the country. Today, Tom joins to discuss his book, telling us what it's like to run for Congress in Chicago in a freezing winter (not fun) and why democracy depends on making the labor movement flourish again.

"The labor movement is necessary to pull people into the political process. If it's the right kind of labor movement, it's going to have the goal of all true republican government: to help people govern themselves, to increase people's capacity to be citizens, to increase people's capacity to rule and take responsibility for all aspects of their lives." — Tom Geoghegan

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“There’s an old adage ‘He who forgets history is condemned to repeat it.’ But what’s missing in that phrase is that there are the people who are in charge of keeping your history. And they can make you forget it. They can keep it from you. And then you’re doomed to repeat something that they want you to repeat.”— Samuel James

Samuel Jamesis a musician and storyteller from Portland, Maine, who specializes in blues and roots music. Samuel has a deep knowledge of American musical history and recently wrote a column in the Mainermagazine about the origins of the phrase “stay woke,” first heard on a Lead Belly record about the Scottsboro Boys. He shows that when we see attacks on “wokeness” like Ron DeSantis’ “Stop WOKE Act,” we should remember that it’s “an old, Black phrase being weaponized against the very people who created it.”

Today, Samuel joins to explain how listening to the words of early 20th century Black songs provides critical context for understanding America today. From commentary on the prison system in the words of “Midnight Special” to Mississippi John Hurt’s unique twist on the “John Henry” legend, Samuel James offers a course in how to listen closely to appreciate both the rich diversity of the music lumped together as folk blues, and how to hear the warnings that the early singers passed down to Black Americans today. It’s a very special hour featuring some of the greatest music ever written, played live by one of its most talented contemporary interpreters.

Nathan’s article on Charles Murray is here, and one on Joe Rogan is here. A Current Affairsarticle about John Henry songs is here. Beyond Mississippi John Hurt and Lead Belly, artists mentioned by Samuel James include Gus Cannon, the Mississippi Sheiks, Charley Patton, Skip James, and Furry Lewis. More information about the St. Louis chemical spraying is here. Follow Samuel James on Twitter here. His 99 Years podcast is here. Nathan mentions the “Voyager Golden Record” that went into space, which did in fact include a classic blues song.

“This is the hammer that killed John Henry
But it won't kill me, but it won't kill me, but it won't kill me”
—Mississippi John Hurt

NOTE: The n-word is heard several times in this episode, spoken by Samuel James, and in recordings by Lead Belly and Ice Cube.

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One of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, FTX, recentlyimploded spectacularly. Its CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried, had been called "the next Warren Buffett" and was a Democratic megadonor as well as a major funder of the "Effective Altruism" movement. Overnight, Bankman-Fried saw his fortune and his company wiped out, and he is nowunder criminal investigation. 

To explain what happened, and why we keep seeing spectacular frauds in the crypto industry, we are joined today by Stephen Diehl, a longtime critic of crypto who has been warning for years that crypto assets can suddenly implode and that unregulated crypto exchanges like FTX are a terrible place to keep your money. Diehl is the co-author of the new bookPopping the Crypto Bubble, an accessible explanation of how cryptocurrency works and why it's a terrible idea. He and his co-authors show how the history of financial bubbles and manias helps us understand crypto-hype today. In this episode, Stephen discusses the credulity that allows con artists like Bankman-Fried to flourish in the crypto industry, and that dupes supposedly savvy investors into believing in the digital equivalent of magic beans. We also discuss the complicity of financial journalists in promoting con artists as altruistic geniuses who can be entrusted with one's retirement savings. 

"To anyone who does due diligence, this thing [FTX] is papered in red flags. It’s a Bahamanian shell company set up in the least regulated environment on the planet, with no board of directors, no governance, completely opaque financials set up by a 28-year-old and apparently staffed by 17 kids all living in a frat house in the Bahamas. But the investors in this thing were some of the most sophisticated funds on the planet! … Apparently none of them did anydue diligence on this thing." — Stephen Diehl

The FTX Super Bowl commercial with Larry David ishere. TheBloomberginterview in which Bankman-Fried seemingly admits he is “in the Ponzi business” is here. For more on the subject, read our interviews with Molly White and Nicholas Weaver, or read "Why Cryptocurrency is a Giant Fraud." A delightful 1901 illustration of financial speculators being tormented in Hell can be viewed here.

Shon Faye is the author of the book The Transgender Issue: Trans Justice is Justice For All,available from Verso. The title of the book is meant slightly ironically, because part of Faye's argument is directed against talking about a "transgender issue" in the first place. Faye's book is a manifesto for a specifically socialist form of trans liberation, which she contrasts with the politics of liberal inclusion, which is often "inclusion within deeply unequal at best and at worse quite oppressive systems." Faye argues that the things that make trans people's lives difficult (lack of housing and healthcare, incarceration) often oppress others as well and that we do not just need representation/diversity at the top but a caring society in which everyone has what they need. Faye prefers the language of "liberation" over "rights" and "equality" (though rights and equality are important), and argues that "the liberation of trans people would benefit the lives of everyone in our society." 

In this conversation, we discuss Faye's ideas as well as the difference between US and UK feminism's approaches to trans issues, how the right has tried to push a moral panic around one of the most marginalized groups of people, and what it really means to live in a "cisnormative society." We also discuss the British tabloid press, the BBC, the limits of debate, and "the Harry Potter Lady." 

“You tell people at JP Morgan to put ‘nonbinary’ on the job application form. Sure, that’s great. Who is applying for jobs at JP Morgan? College graduates who are white, middle-class, rich. This idea of liberal trans inclusion favors a certain kind of trans person on the grounds of class, ethnicity, citizenship. So for me it’s not a liberation movement if it’s only including really small echelons of an already-tiny community.” —Shon Faye

The Current Affairsarticle "Inclusion in the Atrocious" offers further discussion of the point about inclusion within inherently unjust institutions. We also have articles about both Matt Walsh and the "Harry Potter Lady." The U.S. politicians Shon mentions are Sarah McBride and Danica Roem. The internal clash in the Guardiancan be seen here. 

Lyle Jeremy Rubin is a veteran of the U.S. Marines who served in Afghanistan. He is the author of the new memoir Pain is Weakness Leaving the Body: A Marine’s Unbecoming, which documents his evolution from a Young Republican patriot into a socialist critic of U.S. empire through direct exposure to the front-line realities of the U.S. “war on terror.” He shows how the “politics of overcompensation” convinces young men who want to feel secure and masculine to submit to oppressive hierarchical systems and is astute in showing the connection between toxic masculinity and U.S. foreign policy.

“At the time I told myself there were purely rational intellectual reasons for why I was being drawn to these certain types of politics but in retrospect I think it’s clear that there was a deeper need to no longer feel defenseless, to feel strong, to feel secure … While I was talking to my friends and family members and others about this kind of neoconservative vision of humanitarian intervention, it was clear when I was being honest with myself that I wasn’t all that dissimilar to a lot of my comrades-in-arms who just wanted to see action and feel like a man.” —Lyle Jeremy Rubin

Shorter writings from Lyle on some of the subjects discussed in the book can be found in The Guardianand The Nation.(He has also written for Current Affairs.) The books Lyle mentions are Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary Americaby Kathleen Belew and Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trumpby Spencer Ackerman. The song is, of course, the Bush-era classic “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” by Toby Keith.

This interview pairs well with our recent interviews with W.D. Ehrhart (about Vietnam), Yasmin Nair(about Western views of Afghanistan), Craig Whitlock (about the Afghanistan war), and Chris Hedges (about war in general).

“If you’re an occupying power, there’s no way you can really win the hearts and minds of the people. You are by definition a force of domination, an oppressive force. You’re an outsider force that is doing things without the express permission of the people there and the people themselves in one way or another have to submit to whatever your whim at any given moment is. ... The counterinsurgency ideal itself is an impossible ideal. This quickly becomes clear to front line troops. … Violence is guaranteed and required to ensure the maintenance of an occupying regime no matter how culturally sensitive it is.” —Lyle Jeremy Rubin

Nomi Prins is one of the country's leading financial journalists, who has gone from working on Wall Street to exposing the inner workings of the economy and how it is rigged in favor of the powerful. Her books include Other People's Money: The Corporate Mugging of America, Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,and most recentlyPermanent Distortion: How Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever.Today Nomi joins Nathan to explain how the financial markets and the "real economy" became so disconnected and why the actions of central banks make such a difference to our lives. She also talks about the real causes of inflation and what we need to do to avoid a future of unending economic and political crises. 

Last week we only released one episode instead of two, so this week we're putting out three to make up for it. 

McKinsey & Co. is the world's leading consulting company. But it also does a lot of work that's, well, pretty downright sinister, and it's verysecretive about that work. But in the new book When McKinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm,Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe of the New York Timesexpose the hidden hand of McKinsey across the world. McKinsey has assisted opioid manufacturers, tobacco companies, fossil fuel companies, ICE, and authoritarian governments, and in each case has covered up its footprints. Bogdanich and Forsythe show that the firm often advises both the companies that create problems andthe governments that are trying to solve them, "playing both sides" and making a tidy sum in the process. 

In this episode we discuss how McKinsey recruits young elites with promises of doing socially useful work but then tells them that their job is "execution, not policy," meaning that they aren't to question the underlying values of the institutions they're consulting for. This has helped them justify working for the shadiest of shady clients. And even when McKinsey consults for companies that aren't wrecking the earth or killing their customers, it often advises them on how to maximize profits in ways that do real harm. Again and again, McKinsey has come to town and left people worse off. Bogdanich and Forsythe show that many of the worst problems we face today have had McKinsey's hand in them—but of course, McKinsey stands to profit handsomely from advising governments on how to fix those problems. 

A Current Affairs article about McKinsey by a former McKinsey consultant is here. The New York Timesreporting on the hospital that McKinsey advised to juice profits by stealing from sick poor people is here, and was written up in Current Affairshere. An article that partly discusses McKinsey’s role in the opioid crisis appears in the September-October print issue of Current Affairs.Nathan's article about famous ex-McKinseyite Pete Buttigieg is here and some speculation about what Pete did at the firm is here. 

“They advise almost all of the pharmaceutical companies around the world, making tens of millions of dollars in profits, at the same time as they also advise the Food and Drug Administration that is supposed to be regulating them.” —Walt Bogdanich 

“Yes, they do a lot of laughable things and silly PowerPoint slides that don’t really tell you anything, but they also do things that really make a difference, and sometimes a very malign difference."— Michael Forsythe

The editorial team of Current Affairsis fascinated by the online learning platform MasterClass, on which A-list celebrities offer “classes” that are sometimes very cool but frequently of dubious educational value. We have previously taken and discussed the MasterClasses of Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. (We have not yet mustered the fortitude to sit through the Leadership Lessons From George W. Bush MasterClass.) Today we take and discuss the class offered by longtime Vogueeditor-in-chief Anna Wintour, who offers an introduction to the fashion world and lessons on "How To Be A Boss." We talk about the economic structure of the fashion industry, how fashion is made into something exclusive rather than universal, and the mountain of cruelty (to both people and animals) that sustain this bizarre self-contained world. We are particularly interested in the inner workings of Voguebecause it’s a such an entirely different part of the magazine industry to the world of Current Affairs.So enjoy as Yasmin, Lily, and Nathan discuss how you, too, can become a famous fashion mogul.

Read “The Socialist Case for Fashion” in Current Affairshere. The documentary about Wintour and Vogue, The September Issue, can be watched here. The “cerulean” scene of The Devil Wears Pradais here.

Chris Hedges, who appeared on this program a few months back after the publication of his book Our Class, returns to discuss his powerful new book The Greatest Evil is War,which shows the true face of war and exposes the propagandistic narratives that help to sustain and escalate wars. Hedges, a veteran war correspondent, shows us the people who actually do the fighting and the dying, from those maimed and traumatized for life to those who must collect the corpses from the battlefield. He shows how every war is presented by each side as a battle of the forces of light against the forces of darkness, and why the real story is almost always much more complicated. He shows how the darkest facts of war are kept from public view, and instead the population is presented with an image of war as something heroic and exciting. He shows how war memorials and the media get us to "admire the despicable beauty of weapons systems without seeing what they do to human bodies," and explains how those who benefit from continued conflict contribute to sustaining it. Hedges warns that history shows us that those who think they can keep wars from spiraling out of control are often deluding themselves, and policy-makers who think themselves rational have often led their countries into catastrophic and suicidally destructive conflicts. 

Hedges' TomDispatchpiece about writing on war is here. Tomas Young's letter can be read here. Hedges refers to Johnny Got His Gunand the preface to Edward Said's Orientalism. Nathan's review of The Greatest Evil is Waris here. The news story about the Congressional Progressive Caucus' letter is here. 

Apologies for the delayed release of this episode. CA staff are busy trying to finish up the new print issue, which will be out within days! Also Nathan still isn't quite over COVID.

For some time, Nathan has been critical of the "YIMBY" (Yes In My Backyard) movement, which takes stances on housing policy that are sometimes classified as "market fundamentalist" or "trickle-down." Nathan's article "The Only Thing Worse Than a NIMBY is a YIMBY" is scathing, and Current Affairshas published a public service announcement discouraging people from letting their friends become YIMBYs. For their part, online YIMBYs generally do not care for Nathan, and he has been branded a leader of the "Left NIMBYs." 

But does this fight make sense? Darrell Owens of the group CA YIMBY argued recently in Jacobinthat those who think YIMBYs advocate "Reaganomics" in housing policy are mistaken, and that the movement has been misunderstood by its critics. Owens said:

"The overall YIMBY movement understands that we need more market-rate and public housing, more subsidies for housing, zoning reform, and stronger tenant protections, especially around eviction. And while there are some moderates and neoliberals that don’t support rent control, they’re in the minority. For example, the majority of local YIMBY groups across California endorsed the repeal of the ban on statewide rent control in 2020."

Darrell and Nathan have clashed on social media before, and Nathan was listed as a major "Left NIMBY" on Darrell's Discourse LoungeSubstack, so today Darrell and Nathan meet for the first time to hash out their differences and figure out whether Nathan is a NIMBY and whether YIMBYism has been treated unfairly by its critics. 

The title of this episode is intentionally misleading clickbait, because the conversation is polite and respectful and Nathan and Darrell both have positive things to say about each other's work and significant points of common ground. But they discuss such questions as:

Douglas Rushkoff is a media and tech critic who has been called "one of the world's ten most influential intellectuals" by MIT. He has hosted PBS Frontline documentaries and written many books including Life Inc., Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus,and most recently Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.Today we talk about how Silicon Valley's elite are trying to shield themselves from the consequences of inequality and climate destruction. 

Douglas' new book builds on an experience he had several years ago, where several billionaires called him out into the desert to ask him how to survive "The Event," an anticipated apocalyptic catastrophe that would send them heading for their bunkers. He shows how the super-rich often don't feel like winners. They feel scared about a coming giant global rupture. Some want to upload their consciousness and merge with machines. They are lost in fantasies about a transcendent future that bear striking similarities to Christian ideas of the Rapture. 

Our conversation touches on many topics, including right-wing conspiracy theories, Timothy Leary, metaverses, simulated cats, James Brown, plants, bunker jacuzzis, and Mussolini. But we focus on what Douglas calls "The Mindset," the ideology held by the world's "tech bros" that envisions an escape from material reality and the merging of humans and machines: 

"Climate change is the excuse for them to think about the fantasy they've had since they were little baby tech bros. They've always been wanting to create some kind of digital womb around themselves that could anticipate their every need and make it so they didn't have to deal with real people. [It's] the dream of being the last person alive and getting all the toys." —Douglas Rushkoff 

Douglas makes the case for viciously mocking tech bros who entertain damaging and delusional beliefs. He shows how what we really need is to care for the planet, care about each other, and not lose ourselves in techno-solutionist fantasies about transcending the material world. The "bunker strategy" for dealing with chaos, he says, won't work, because human survival dependson the survival of society. "What happens when you need a new heater for the jacuzzi?" he asks. You can live alone in a bunker for a few weeks or months, maybe. But the only realistic long-term path forward is to build a resilient society and planet. 

The Vanity Fairarticle on neo-reactionary politics is here, and more on neoreaction can be heard in our interview with Elizabeth Sandifer. William Shatner discusses his visit to space here. The clip of Shatner and Bezos ishere. Nathan's article "The Bezos Future" ishere and his article on the metaverse is here. More on Yuval Harari can be read here and more on “longtermism” is here. For more on “Web3,” see our interview with Molly White.

Note: Mike Davis has notin fact died, but it has been reported that he is terminally ill.

Rebecca Giblin is a professor at the University of Melbourne and the co-author (with Cory Doctorow) of Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back.The book is about how corporations that act as gatekeepers between the creators of creative work and the public are able to use their power to extract huge amounts of wealth from workers. From YouTube to Amazon to LiveNation concerts to news conglomerates to Spotify, Giblin and Doctorow look at how corporations that own the means of accessing content are able to keep musicians, artists, and writers from reaping the full value of their work. But Chokepoint Capitalismisn't just a critique of how these institutions hoard wealth and keep creative workers poor. It's also filled with clear and workable solutions that can change the situation and give those who produce creative work a fairer share of the value they produce. In this conversation, we discuss:

The Peter Thiel lecture is called "Competition is For Losers." Listen to Cory Doctorow's interview with Current Affairs,which also touches on some of the themes in the book, here. 

The thumbnail for this episode is a nod to Amazon's infamous "Gazelle project" which tried to prey on book publishers the way a cheetah would prey on a "sickly gazelle."

"Let's make interventions that directly support more power to creative workers rather than rights-holders." — Rebecca Giblin

Wayne Hsiung is a former law professor who was recently acquitted by a Utah jury after being charged with stealing two piglets from a factory farm, in a story that made national news. In 2017, animal liberation activist groupDirect Action Everywhere (DxE) released a video showing the horrifying conditions of pigs in a facility run by Smithfield Foods, and showing the rescue of two dying piglets from the farm. The activists, including Hsiung, were pursued relentlessly for the next five years, with the FBI even invading animal sanctuaries in order to try to recover the stolen piglets. Hsiung faced significant jail time if convicted, but successfully managed to convince the jury to acquit him. The case is important because a conviction would have had a chilling effect on important activism exposing the abuses of factory farms. But jurors even went so far as to ask why Hsiung hadn't rescued moreof the facility's sick piglets. 

Today, Wayne joins us along with DxE investigator Matt Johnson, to discuss the original nighttime operation, the Utah trial, and what DxE hopes to expose about the animal farming industry. We talk about why DxE chooses the tactic of going into factory farms and removing animals, how a Utah jury became convinced Wayne's actions weren't a crime, and the work yet to be done in creating a humane life for animals everywhere.

More on the time Matt tricked Fox Business into thinking he was the CEO of Smithfield Foods is here. Wayne's blog The Simple Heartis here and information on the campaigns surrounding is at righttorescue.com. The interview with Marina Bolotnikova on factory farming is here. 

Norman Solomon is one of the foremost progressive media critics, having founded the Institute for Public Accuracy and authored or co-authored many books on media including Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death,and The Habits of Highly Deceptive Media. 

Today Norman joins to give us a crash course in how to be an informed and careful consumer of news media who can spot bias and buzzwords. Norman explains how to read your morning newspaper to figure out what you're notbeing told, and gives examples of how dissenting opinions (particularly on war) are censored. He shows how words like "defense" and "reform" are used to obscure the truth, and argues that when you actually understand an issue deeply, you can easily see how bad the media coverage of it is. We discuss how social movements like Occupy and the democratic socialists are covered in the mainstream press, and what we can learn from a generation of prior media critics like Upton Sinclair and I.F. Stone. Norman also encourages us to be skeptical of progressivemedia as well, making sure that we're always concerned with a fair representation of the facts. 

As a bonus, Norman recounts his 1990s run-in with Dilbertcreator Scott Adams. Long before Adams went full MAGA, Norman was warning that Dilbertposed as a satire of the workplace but was actually clearly written by a reactionary. He even wrote a book called The Trouble With Dilbert: How Corporate Culture Gets the Last Laugh. At the time, Norman was presented in the press as hysterical killjoy, but he has been fully vindicated over time and deserves credit for being among the first to see through Adams. 

Norman's Nationtribute to Robert Parry is here. The website of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) ishere. The full conversation between Noam Chomsky and the BBC's Andrew Marr is here. Nathan's article on the 2019 DSA convention ishere, and one can contrast it with the depiction of the same event on Fox News. Nathan's article on the Guardianincident is here. Ashleigh Banfield's full speech can be watched here. Philip Agee's CIA diary is here.How to Read Donald Duckis here. Upton Sinclair's The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalismcan be read in full at Project Gutenberg. George Seldes' memoir is here.

The thumbnail for this episode is from the Dilbertcomic written about Norman Solomonin February of 1998. More on the episode can be read in 1990s newspaper articles like "Author dismisses Dilbert as corporate shill" (Tampa Bay Times) and "Dilbert detractor is not amused" (Los Angeles Times).

These are the 17 pro-war media talking points that form the table of contents of Norman's 2006 book War Made Easy: 

Shawn Vulliez and Aaron Moritz are the creators and hosts of the utopian leftist comedy podcast Srsly Wrongand also the creators of the new animated series Papa and Boy, currently making its debut on the worker-owned streaming platform Means TV. 

Papa and Boyis an absurdist comedy, but it's rich with political and social commentary. It's set in a dystopian world where fathers tyrannize over sons and justify their rule with a spurious ideology. Today Sean and Aaron join to discuss how they managed to make the series leftist while keeping it funny, and how Papa and Boydepicts:

The Current Affairsarticle Nathan mentions about meritocracy and bullshit jobs is here. 

"[The social order] requires the boys to be demoralized and it requires the papas to be fearful of what the boys can accomplish and to prevent them from collaborating, in the same way that in current society huge companies like Amazon and Starbucks are fighting tooth and nail to prevent unionization efforts, because they know that if workers work together they'll be able to extract concessions from them and to change how things are working."

"If you can't imagine that another world is possible, or even that resistance to the current world is possible, it places you exactly where the hierarchical systems want you to be. That's why propaganda, and terms like 'It is what it is,' are so powerful in terms of keeping society the way it is, because they seek to limit the horizons of what people as see as possible. Having those moments of realizing 'Oh, maybe it is what it is butit doesn't have to be,' is so powerful." 

Some, including both geniuses like Stephen Hawking and nongeniuses like Elon Musk, have warned that artificial intelligence poses a major risk to humankind's future. Some in the "Effective Altruist" community have become convinced that artificial intelligence is developing so rapidly that we could soon create "superintelligent" computers that are so much smarter than us that they could take over and pose a threat to our existence as a species. Books like Nick Bostrom's Superintelligenceand Stuart Russell's Human Compatible have warned that we need to get machine intelligence under control before it controls us. 

Erik J. Larson is dubious about the chances that we'll produce "artificial general intelligence" anytime soon. He argues that we simply have no ideahow to simulate important kinds of intelligent reasoning with computers, which is why even as they seem to get much smarter, they also remain very stupid in obvious ways. Larson is the author of The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think The Way We Do(Harvard University Press) which shows that there are important aspects of intelligence that we have no clue how to make machines do, and that while they're getting very good at playing Go and generating images from prompts, AI systems are not making any progress toward possessing the kind of common sense that we depend on every day to make intelligent decisions. Larson says that a lot of progress in AI is overstated and a lot of people who hype up its potential don't grasp the scale of the challenges that face the project of creating a system capable of producing insight. (Rather than producing very impressive pictures of cats.)

Today, Erik joins to explain how different kinds of reasoning work, which kinds computers can simulate and which kinds they can't, and what he thinks the realthreats from AI are. Just because we're not on the path to "superintelligence" doesn't mean we're not creating some pretty terrifying technology, and Larson warns us that military and police applications of AI don't require us to develop systems that are particularly "smart," they just require technologies that are useful in applying violent force. 

A Current Affairsarticle on the "superintelligence" idea can be read here. Another echoing Larson's warnings about the real threats of AI is here. The "Ukrainian teenager" that Nathan refers to is a chatbot called Eugene Goostman. The transcript of the conversation with the "sentient" Google AI is here.

The image for this episode is what DALL-E 2 spat out in response to the prompt "a terrifying superintelligent AI destroying the world." 

Raina Lipsitz is a journalist whose book The Rise of a New Left: How Young Radicals Are Shaping the Future of American Politicsprofiles the young leftists who are bringing socialism back to American politics. Raina looks at high-profile campaigns like those of AOC and Bernie Sanders, but also at the left political victories that fly under the radar, occurring on city councils and in state legislatures. To anyone who wants to feel hopeful that a new generation of political leaders is rising that can take on the most serious challenges we face, Raina's book offers an encouraging assessment of the possibilities for a new movement. 

This episode should have come out yesterday but Nathan has COVID-19 and was feeling too weak and useless to press the "post" button. 

Sam Shain is a public school teacher whose book Education Revolution: Media Literacy for Political Awarenessargues that K-12 students need to be equipped with the ability to analyze media and spot misinformation. This crucial skill, which helps them become informed participants in democracy and resist demagogues, is not actually widely taught. Shain explains how he teaches his students critical thinking, including playing "spot the fallacy" with Ben Shapiro videos and having students write their own piece of "fake news." 

In our conversation, we talk about why it's important to bring politics into the classroom and how to make sure kids hear dissenting perspectives without trying to indoctrinate them. Shain also recounts his own disturbing experience being forced out of a job after a complaint from a Trump-supporting parent. 

Nathan's recent article "Six Subjects That Should Be Taught In School But Aren't" can be read here. The book that Sam got in trouble for teaching, Rising Out of Hatred: The Awakening of a Former White Nationalist, is available here. 

"If the teacher is merely teaching something that happened [in history], or teaching a book that might be a little bit controversial, [administrators] need to hold the line [against parent complaints]. And teachers need to do this sort of thing." —Sam Shain

Prof. Elizabeth Popp Berman is the authorof Thinking like an Economist: How Efficiency Replaced Equality in U.S. Public Policy,which documents how a style of reasoning that heavily emphasizes efficiencyover equalitycame to dominate U.S. social policy. In our conversation we discuss the rise of "cost-benefit analysis" and how applying the economists' favored framework excludes important values from being taken into account. We talk about what the "economic style" misses and the solutions it leads policy-makers to embrace in areas like student debt, healthcare, climate, and antitrust. (We also make clear that not alleconomists are the problem. Karl Marx was an economist, after all!) 

The Boston Reviewpiece discussing Thinking Like an Economistis here. The Adrienne Buller interview is here, although it was not from "last week," as Nathan says. It was from July, and Nathan just forgot that time has passed and it is already late September. The image accompanying this episode is a stock photo depicting "Cost-Benefit Analysis" taken from Shutterstock. 

Today we return to our interview with Dr. W.D. Ehrhart, for the second part of a conversation on what Americans should know about the war in Vietnam.

The photograph is of Dr. Ehrhart himself in Vietnam. It appears accompanying his 2017 New York Timesarticle "God, Jesus, and Vietnam." 

Edited by Tim Gray.

Dr. W.D. Ehrhart is a Vietnam veteran, poet, teacher, and essayist who was active in Vietnam Veterans Against The War and has written multiple volumes of memoirs about his observations of the war and his return to civilian life afterwards, beginning with Vietnam-Perkasie. He has been hailed as "the dean of Vietnam war poets" and "one of the major figures in Vietnam War literature." His work offers a blunt and often haunting look at the realities of war. His collected poems, on Vietnam and many other subjects, can be found in the volume Thank You For Your Service.(Included are the poems featured in this episode.)

Today, Dr. Ehrhart joins to discuss how the Vietnam War destroyed the image of America that he had formed during his upbringing in small-town Pennsylvania and give some insight into the true nature of the war for both Americans and the Vietnamese. It is a powerful and important conversation about a period in this country's history that we might rather forget but need to confront head-on.

An article by Nathan on the Vietnam War is here. An old video of Dr. Ehrhart on YouTube talking about his war experiences has received nearly 20 million views and can be found here. Examples of Dr. Ehrhart's poems can be found on his personal website here.

This is Part I of II. Edited by Tim Gray.

Alec Karakatsanis is one of the country's most forceful and persuasive critics of the criminal punishment system. Alec is the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, and as a civil rights lawyer he has fought against the vicious punishment system that cages the poor and plunges them into debt. Alec's work as a lawyer has been covered in the New York Timesand he was recently a guest on the Daily Show.Alec's book Usual Cruelty: The Complicity of Lawyers in the Criminal Injustice Systemis a stirring indictment of the legal system. 

Today, Alec joins editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss "copaganda," and how media narratives about crime and policing keep us from having an intelligent conversation on how to reduce violence in our society. We discuss: 

Alec's Copaganda newsletter can be read here. Alec's Current Affairsarticle responding to Matthew Yglesias' argument that we need more police is here. Alec's contentious exchange with Ana Kasparian of the Young Turkson criminal punishment is here. 

"One of the most profoundly depressing aspects of my current job leading a national civil rights organization is that I often find myself in conversation with Democratic politicians. And by and large, these people are profoundly lost. They have no sense of what the actual evidence is on these issues is, and that's largely because they don't care. They have no sense of how to speak about these issues in a way that's compelling. They don't understand how to build a popular political project that actually brings to people the things they want and need to flourish." —Alec Karakatsanis 

"Jails are what we call 'criminogenic'—they lead people to commit more crime in the future. So when you jail someone you are actually making it more likely they will commit crime in the future. As opposed to, for example, trying to understand what led that person to come into the criminal system and trying to address the needs that they and their community have." —Alec Karakatsanis

"There's this tendency to define people who've committed a crime asbad people. And they committed a crime because of that evil. That just fundamentally, in my experience, misunderstands human behavior. The vast majority of times when people hurt each other in our society it is not because the person is irredeemably bad, but because of very particular circumstances in which they found themselves. And we have control to a large extent over those circumstances." —Alec Karakatsanis

"I will never again spend money on a Minion movie. ... I surprised myself. I went into this a huge fan of the Minions. And I thought 'Oh, they're so popular, we should talk about them on the left.' And I don't regret this conversation at all. It has deepened my understanding. But I have come out of it as an anti-fan." — Yasmin Nair 

Current Affairspodcasts have been deadly serious lately, with many shows devoted to U.S. foreign policy, including episodes on Palestine (Part I, Part II), Afghanistan, U.S. empire, and the threat of nuclear war. Today we take a break from eating our vegetables and indulge ourselves in a bit of dessert, with a much lighter subject (some might say a frivolous one): the "Minions" from the Despicable Meseries. 

Films featuring the Minions have been hugely successful, being some of the top-grossing animated films of all time and spawning a multi-billion-dollar franchise with a vast range of products, from toasters that will imprint a Minion onto a piece of bread to toothpaste dispensers and Minion-shaped tic-tacs. On Etsy, one can choose among dozens of different crocheted Minion hats. The Minions have become ubiquitous in memes and a 2015 article called "How Minions Destroyed The Internet" argues that Minions have become a "template onto which we project ourselves." 

But can we learn anything from the Minions films? Today, Current Affairseditor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson is joined by editor-at-large Yasmin Nair and managing editor Lily Sánchez for a discussion about the Despicable Meand Minions films, probing such questions as:

"I think I feel about the Minions the way I feel about shopping malls, which is that I can go to them or see them as sociological experiments mostly, as opposed to genuine enjoyment."— Lily

"I am surrounded by ever-growing piles of Minions in my dreams."—Nathan

The scene of Minions being tortured can be watched here. The full "banana song" can be heard (if so desired) here. Lily's article about families is here and Nathan's about J.K. Rowling is here. The Crackedarticle alleging that the film leaves open the possibility that the Minions have committed murder ishere. The Voxarticle "Labor exploitation, explained by Minions" is here. A more basic Vox"explainer" on Minions is here. The academic article "Beautiful Exploitation. Notes on the Un-free Minions" is here. 

"Are children who watch the first three Despicable Me movies going to grow up to become laborers who don't understand their enslavement? Given the way capitalism is crushing the world, I seriously doubt it. ... It's a kids' movie about a bunch of yellow pills who like bananas and run around speaking gibberish. Those kids will grow up, they'll be fine." — Yasmin 

"No! The movie normalized and accustomed them to situations of exploitation by depicting the Minions as content with their condition!" — Nathan 

Please enjoy our detailed analysis of Minions. As Nathan promises at the end of the episode, we will never be revisiting the subject, no matter how many more of these films are released. 

Minions Being Tortured: 

In our previous episode on Palestine with Rashid Khalidi, we discussed the early history of the conflict. Today we speak with Noura Erakat, human rights lawyer and professor at Rutgers University, whose book Justice For Some: Law and the Question of Palestine(Stanford University Press) examines how international law does and doesn't apply in Israel and Palestine. We discuss why a two-state solution has not been implemented, and how international law has treated Palestinians over time.

Today we dive into old cinema and television, looking at the films of Charlie Chaplin and the television show The Twilight Zone, both of which have recently been the subject of essays in Current Affairsby Ciara Moloney. Ciara has written for Current Affairson subjects ranging from the 2020 Democratic candidates' range of merch to Hollywood's depictions of George W. Bush. Her essays on Chaplin's films and The Twilight Zonemake the case that while both have become enduring cultural tropes and cliches, going back and viewing the original works shows them to have incisive and enduring satirical power. Today Ciara joins us to talk about how Chaplin skewered modern capitalism and how Rod Serling depicted anti-Communist hysteria, and why each showed the capacity of film and television to generate empathy. We also talk about how valuable it is to go back and view things that are old and neglected, since they are often fresher and more relevant than one would expect. 

The other films Ciara mentions in the episode are:

More of Ciara's writing on film, television, and music can be found at The Sundae. The "feeding machine" sequence from Modern Timescan be watched here. 

Branko Marcetic is a staff writer for Jacobinand the author of Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden.He is also a leading heterodox commentator on U.S. foreign policy, and has written critically about the U.S. approach to China and the war in Ukraine. Branko recentlywrote an article for Current Affairsarguing that the Eisenhower administration's cautious response to Soviet aggression, prompted by the risk of nuclear escalation, offers an important set of lessons for us today. Today he joins to explain why he thinks U.S. policy toward Russia is much more dangerous than is widely perceived, and how he believes we are ignoring important lessons from history about how to avoid catastrophic wars. 

Branko's valuable interview with US Naval War College scholar Lyle Goldstein about China policy is here. His critique of Biden's foreign policy is here. His critique of Biden's approach to diplomacy on Ukraine is here. His piece on the International Criminal Court is here. His latest piece on the prospects for a negotiated end to the Ukraine war is here. 

Vijay Prashad is a leading historian on the Global South and U.S. empire. His books include Washington Bullets, The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third Worldand most recently The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power,which features Prashad in dialogue with Noam Chomsky. Today, he joins editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson for a spirited conversation on U.S. foreign policy. The discussion covers, among other things:

"No country in the world has through its wars killed the number of people that the United States has killed in the last 35 odd years. And yet in the U.S. you sound insane to say: Why didn't we have Donald Rumsfeld give testimony at the ICC? Or why not ask George W. Bush to at least stand up and stop painting his ridiculous paintings and reflect a little on having conducted that war? There's just no space in public discourse for that kind of thing. In Nuremberg, there was the death penalty for a war of aggression. But the poison pen of Nuremberg is for others. It's not for the United States. I think that's the responsibility of intellectuals is to not allow amnesia to set in around these really quite consequential issues—consequential not only for the Iraqis, I must say, but also for the U.S. veterans who continue to be haunted by that war."—Vijay Prashad 

An article on the Clintons and Haiti can be found here. The Robinson/Chomsky article on China is here and the one on Afghanistan is here. 

Today, we seechildren killed in Gaza by Israeli airstrikes, but anyone who gets their understanding of the Israel-Palestine conflict from news reports lacks the context necessary to make sense of the horrors they are seeing. To understand why there is an Israel-Palestine conflict today, we have to go back a hundred years to see what Palestine was like before the state of Israel was established and how things changed. 

Joining us to explain the background of the conflict is one of the leading historians on the region, Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University. He is the author of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, edits the Journal of Palestine Studies, and in the 90s served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations.Prof. Khalidi's book is essential reading for anyone who wants to know where modern-day Israel and Palestine came from in the first place. 

Among topics discussed:

The Israel-Palestine conflict is often treated as complicated. In fact, Prof. Khalidi argues, it is not very complicated at all: it is precisely the kind of conflict that can be expected to arise when a colonial project tries to displace a country's native inhabitants and denies them equal rights. 

Prof. Khalidi mentions Nathan's experience at the Guardian, which is discussed here. Discussion of the shooting of peaceful Palestinian protesters in 2018 can be found here.  

Map of Palestine before the project of expelling, dispossessing, and occupying Palestinians had succeeded, taken fromBefore Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948