Jacobin Radio

We return to a TV show that is one of the prime relics of mid-2000s libertarian culture. We watch episodes of PENN & TELLER: BULLSHIT! on topics as disparate from handicapped parking to reparations, …

Japan may be a powerhouse of global capitalism. But it also developed a powerful socialist movement in the twentieth century. During the Cold War, the Socialist Party led the opposition to the ruling…

Clara Mattei, author of The Capital Order, explores the links among neoclassical economics, austerity, and fascism. Edwin Ackerman, author of a recent article for the New Left Review blog, looks at A…

Featuring China Miéville on The Communist Manifesto. Miéville is the author of A Spectre, Haunting: On the Communist Manifesto.

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Quentin Tarantino's ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) hit the zeitgeist by consciously going against the 2019-era cultural grain. Tarantino looks back on the winds of change that greeted the movie…

Anatol Lieven, Eurasia director of the Quincy Institute, discusses Prigozhin’s aborted uprising in Russia and Putin’s status. Samuel Bazzi, co-author of a paper on "The Confederate Diaspora," talks a…

William Morris is renowned for his work as an artist and designer. But he was also one of Britain's greatest socialist thinkers. Morris combined his opposition to capitalism with a deep understanding…

Did Tetris bring down the USSR? That's the implication of TETRIS (2023), a highly fictionalized account of the beloved video game's journey from the Soviet Union to your phone. We examine what anti-C…

Behind the News is slaying sacred cows this week. M. E. O’Brien, author of Family Abolition, discusses doing that and “communizing care." Then Jane Chung, author of a recent article in The Nation, la…

Jacobin Radio pays tribute to the late Daniel Ellsberg, who was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer earlier this year and passed away on June 16 at age 92 . A committed, consequential activist with a mo…

Featuring Meredith Whittaker, Edward Ongweso Jr., and Sarah Myers West on the mundane dystopia concealed beneath the AI hype machine.

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Our sacred quest to tackle every political comedy inevitably reaches the Will Ferrell/Zach Galifianakis vehicle THE CAMPAIGN (2012). We discuss what a middle-of-the-road comedy from the middle of the…

While other shows are getting applause for interviewing Corey Robin about his excellent book on Clarence Thomas (who is very much in the headlines these days), Behind the News was there first, as it …

Featuring Giuliano Garavini on his book The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century. The second in a two-part series on the 20th-century history of petrostates, petrocapitalists, and the world…

Italy’s current prime minister Giorgia Meloni can trace her political roots all the way back to Mussolini. But what exactly does the Italian far right of today have in common with its fascist forebea…

Hell is real, and it's really bad, and it's really important that you repent. That's the thesis of THE BURNING HELL (1974), a crackpot Evangelical oddity from the deep south, brought to you by the dy…

Christopher Layne discusses his Harper’s magazine article, “Why are we in Ukraine?” Plus: Marcus Brown talks about his augmented reality exhibit that evokes the eighteenth-century Wall Street slave m…

Featuring Giuliano Garavini on his book The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the Twentieth Century. The first of a two-part series on the 20th-century history of petrostates, petrocapitalists, and the world …

A ragtag gang of Beltway misfits discover how to start a proxy war in CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007), a lighthearted look at American intervention from the combined forces of Tom Hanks, Mike Nichols, an…

Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative talks about some under-appreciated aspects of the carceral state: probation, parole, and civil commitment. Francisco Pérez of the Center for Economic Dem…