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
- 598
- Years Active
- 2018 - 2025
Understanding Biden's Foreign Policy (w/ Richard Beck)
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Richard Beck is a senior writer for N+1 magazine and the author of the forthcoming book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life. His recent a…
How to Read Nietzsche (And How The Left Should Feel About Him)
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Friedrich Nietzsche was one of the most influential philosophers of all time. Interestingly, thinkers on both the right and left have found inspir…
How Fox News Turns People Terrified and Paranoid (w/ Kat Abughazaleh)
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Kat Abughazaleh has watched a lot of Fox News. As an analyst for Media Matters, her job was to monitor the Fox primetime shows, producing videos documen…
Jeffrey Sachs on What's Wrong With U.S. Foreign Policy
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Jeffrey Sachs is an economist at Columbia University and the author of the book A New Foreign Policy: Beyond American Exceptionalism, which argues…
What Biden's Changes to Asylum Mean For Immigrants
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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is the Policy Director of the American Immigration Council and a leading expert on U.S. immigration law. He has testified b…
How "Pharmacy Benefit Managers" Are Extorting Us (w/ Max from UNFTR)
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Max (just Max) is the host of Unfucking the Republic (UNFTR), one of our favorite podcasts. UNFTR publishes intensively-researched deep dives into…
Why Everyone Feels So Rotten About the Economy (w/ Kyla Scanlon)
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Kyla Scanlon is a leading online economics commentator and Bloomberg contributor, who regularly publishes TikTok explainers helping people underst…
Nuclear Countdown, or, Why We Need to Start Worrying and Stop the Bomb
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Nuclear weapons are always lurking there in the background, out in remote places where we don't have to think about them, but ready to be fired a…
Why No One Gets To Retire Anymore (w/ Teresa Ghilarducci)
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Teresa Ghilarducci is an economist at the New School for Social Research and the author of Work, Retire, Repeat, which shows how the possibilities…
The Authoritarian Nightmare Donald Trump Is Planning (w/ Radley Balko)
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Radley Balko is one of America's leading journalists on policing and criminal punishment. His book The Rise of the Warrior Cop is a remarkable exp…
What Americans Don't Know About Iran (w/ John Ghazvinian)
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John Ghazvinian is the leading historian of U.S.-Iranian relations, the author of the indispensable study America and Iran: A History, 1720 to the…
Is It 1968 All Over Again? (w/ Charles Kaiser)
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With antiwar protests jeopardizing a Democratic president's reelection and an upcoming party convention in Chicago, 2024 has some eerie echoes of…
The Toxic Legacy of Martin Peretz’s New Republic (w/ Jeet Heer)
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Jeet Heer has written two major essays about the intellectual legacy of the New Republic magazine’s 70s-2000s heyday. The first, from 2015, excav…
Jonathan Kozol on the Scandal of America's Apartheid Education System
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Jonathan Kozol is one of the leading critics of the U.S. education system, having written a series of widely acclaimed books across a 60-year car…
How Corporations Suck the Welfare State Dry (w/ Anne Kim)
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Anne Kim's book Poverty For Profit: How Corporations Get Rich Off America's Poor gives a partial answer to an enduring question: how come we spend…
Why Thomas Sowell is a Terrible Economist (w/ Cahal Moran)
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Thomas Sowell may be the best-selling economics writer of our time. For decades, the Hoover Institution pundit has published books and columns int…
Why Do We Have a "Viral Underclass"? (w/ Steven Thrasher)
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Steven Thrasher is a professor of journalism at Northwestern University and the author of The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and…
Is Trump an "Aberration" Or the Logical Conclusion of the Right-Wing Project? (w/ David Austin Walsh)
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Today we talk to David Austin Walsh, a postdoc at Yale and the author of Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, a new …
What Will New Weight-Loss Drugs Do to Us? (w/ Johann Hari)
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Bestselling author Johann Hari, whose Lost Connectionsand Stolen Focus have previously been discussed on this program, returns today to discuss h…
Inside the MAGA Movement on the Ground (w/ Isaac Arnsdorf)
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Who actually comprises the MAGA movement? Where do Trumpian politicians come from? How do they defeat "establishment" Republicans on the local an…