Current Affairs

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 …

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 …

School sucks. But why? And must it? For our print magazine, Lauren Fadiman writes about how radical leftists have historically tried to rethink schooling entirely, to create alternative schools that …

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 looke…

On this program, we have previously discussed the inspiring fight waged by the Amazon Labor Union on Staten Island, and the confrontational tactics that can help unions win recognition despite the be…

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 …

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 book The Longing For L…

Benjamin Studebaker's new book The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut is a provocative critique of contemporary American politics. Studebaker argues that "none of the existing poli…

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 interes…

You name it, it's been privatized somewhere in the United States. Schools, roads, libraries, courts, prisons, and even the law itself have been outsourced to private companies by state and local gove…

Benjamin Howard is a Current Affairs reader 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 wor…

Michael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother Jones and the author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. Michael's book goes beyond quantitative statistics abo…

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 (i…

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 destroye…

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: a piece o…

Emily Hund is the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media. Today she joins to discuss how "influencing" turned from something bloggers did, organically, to a gia…

Today Norman Solomon returns to 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 me…

Mark Paul is an economist who argues that there can be no meaningful freedom without economic freedom—by which he does not mean the libertarian idea of the freedom to exploit others. Mark's book The …

Samuel Miller McDonald is 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,…

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 …