Current Affairs
A podcast of politics and culture, from the editors of Current Affairs magazine.
- Update frequency
- every 3 days
- Average duration
- 42 minutes
- Episodes
- 600
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2025
How To Be A Foreign Correspondent Without Swallowing Propaganda - interview with Patrick Cockburn, Middle East correspondent for The Independent, about his decades as a foreign correspondent
Patrick Cockburn has been a Middle East correspondent for The Independent for over 30 years and has become known for his combination of a deep knowledge of the region and a healthy skepticism toward …
How Bill Gates Makes The World Worse Off
Bill Gates has long cultivated a reputation as the Good Billionaire, giving away vast sums of money toward global health and education initiatives through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. For man…
Astonishingly, There IS An Alternative! Interview with Yanis Varoufakis, former Finance Minister of Greece about his book "Another Now"
Yanis Varoufakis is the former Finance Minister of Greece, professor of economics at the University of Athens, co-founder of the Democracy in Europe Movement, and member of the Greek Parliament. The …
Why Suppressing "Fake News" Can't Fix Our Journalism Crisis
Victor Pickard is a professor of Media Studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication. His book Democracy Without Journalism?: Confronting the Misinformation Society i…
What Policing Looks Like From The Inside
Rosa Brooks is a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author Tangled Up In Blue: Policing The American City, named one of the best books of 2021 by the Washington Post. The book chronicl…
War Zones & Prisons: The Places We Hide Suffering and The Ways We Rationalize It
Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and the author of many bestselling nonfiction books. He began his career as a war correspondent, and was a reporter for the New York Times for fift…
How Do Hedge Fund Managers Justify Their Existence?
Megan Tobias Neely is a sociologist whose book Hedged Out: Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street takes a deep look inside the world of hedge funds, those small boutique investment banks that play …
How To Think Sensibly About Apocalypse and Catastrophe
Phil Torres is a scholar of "global catastrophic risk," meaning that he studies the various ways in which terrible things could happen to humanity: nuclear war, global warming, asteroids, killer robo…
Why Is Climate Communication So Impossible and Frustrating?
George Monbiot has been working on issues of climate and environmental justice for three decades. A columnist for The Guardian, George's books include Heat: How to Stop the Planet From Burning, Out o…
Our Era of Scams & Hype: From the Fyre Festival to Trump's Career to NFTs
We live in an age where economic success can depend a lot more on hype and branding than offering actual useful things that help people. Occasionally, we see extreme examples of fakers and frauds, li…
How Did Anyone Ever Believe WeWork's BS?
Maureen Farrell is a business reporter with the New York Times and co-author of the book The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion, which documents one of the most bizarre …
Is The International Criminal Court a Functional Institution?
The International Criminal Court in the Hague is the place where war criminals are supposed to be tried and punished. It embodies a vision of global justice in which war crimes are universally forbid…
Is Mocking the Deaths of Anti-Vaxxers "Necessary"? Or Cruel and Useless?
Michael Hiltzik is a Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist for the Los Angeles Times. He has recently attracted a lot of (almost entirely negative) attention for a column and tweets arguing that …
Why Judge Judy Is A Reactionary Enemy of the Poor Who Must Be Destroyed
Judge Judy Sheindlin has long been one of the highest-paid TV stars, earning a staggering $47 million per year for her show, Judge Judy. She is universally known and loved nationwide for her acerbic,…
How Segregation Was Built—And Why It's Still With Us
Sheryll Cashin is the author of White Space, Black Hood: Opportunity Hoarding and Segregation in the Age of Inequality. She has been called "one of the most important civil rights scholars of our tim…
Leadership Lessons from Bill Clinton
Editors of Current Affairs recently took Hillary Clinton's "MasterClass" and had a deeply unpleasant time. But Bill Clinton, too, has a MasterClass, and as public interest journalists committed to un…
How Can Socialists Get Things Done In State Government?
Today, in our last episode of the year, we present a hopeful discussion about what leftists can accomplish in power. Sam Bell is a Rhode Island state senator and Democratic Socialists of America memb…
Why Are Student Loans Such a Catastrophe?
Today Nathan is joined by Wall Street Journal reporter Josh Mitchell, author of The Debt Trap: How Student Loans Became a National Catastrophe. Under pressure from progressive Democrats, Joe Biden re…
How Criminalization Destroys The Lives of Black Children
Kristin Henning directs the Juvenile Justice Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. She has worked as a public defender for juveniles in Washington, D.C. and is the author of the book The Rage o…
Is Julian Assange Being Unjustly Persecuted By The U.S. Government?
A UK court recently ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange can be extradited to the United States. Assange faces serious charges over violating the Espionage Act, based on WikiLeaks' publication…