Current Affairs

This episode originally aired on January 7, 2025. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Today, Nathan is joined by Malaika Jabali as co-host along with Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, authors of the book Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a Dangerous Idea. They join us in the wake of the killing of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson. The alleged killer's manifesto said that he was motivated over the hideously unfair practices of the insurance industry, and polling shows Americans blame the healthcare system (as well as the killer himself) for Thompson's death. But assassinations are not social movements. They don't fix the system, as Nathan argues in a piece on the killing. What kind of movement do we need on health justice, then? Leah and Astra help us think through how we can organize for meaningful improvements in the healthcare system.

This episode originally aired on December 30, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Adam McKay is a writer and film director who has made some of the most successful comedy films of our century, including Anchorman (No. 6 on Time Out's top 100 comedy films of all time), Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, and The Other Guys. In the last decade, his more dramatic and political films like Vice and The Big Short have attracted critical acclaim and been nominated for multiple Academy Awards. He joins us today to discuss the film he released in 2021, Don't Look Up, a satirical look at the climate catastrophe that uses the analogy of an approaching deadly comet to expose how the media, corporations, and the political system are incapable of addressing a major crisis. When Don't Look Up came out, it quickly became one of the most popular movies in Netflix's history, but many critics assailed it as "heavy-handed." In Current Affairs, Nathan wrote an article arguing that these critics were missing much of the penetrating leftist analysis that makes the film a remarkably astute piece of satirical fiction.

Today Adam joins to talk about Don't Look Up: what the film was saying about our world, what Adam hopes the audience gets out of it, what critics didn't get, and why the film should get us talking about the climate crisis itself rather than just analyzing the film.

This episode originally aired on December 12, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist with a unique, albeit controversial, take on the idea of "wokeness," laid out in his new book We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite. Essentially al-Gharbi argues that among elites, a kind of social justice language has come to be important for maintaining and enhancing their status, but has little to do with meaningfully advancing justice in the real world. He points out the contradiction between the embrace of "woke" language among many elites and their behavior. They are not, he says, and have never been, woke in any real sense, and conservatives are missing what is actually going on when they treat these people as dangerous radicals. Instead, al-Gharbi argues, there is nothing radical at all about the strands of "wokeness" found in the Ivy League.

Al-Gharbi's argument doesn't entirely persuade Nathan, and al-Gharbi joins today to answer some probing questions, like: how do we know that the use of this language is an effort at self-advancement rather than a good-faith presentation of a set of ideas that should be judged on their merits? But while al-Gharbi is a critic of much contemporary social justice discourse, he is a constructive one, who shares the goal of achieving a society free of racial and economic injustice. This makes his criticism all the more interesting and worth engaging with.

it would be mortifying for people on all sides of this argument to recognize that what they are actually fighting over is how future generations of elites understand, describe, and legitimize their social position. One side instead pretends as though CRT-associated ideas represent the "authentic" will and interests of most "people of color." The other side pretends as though an embrace of these ideas will somehow harm their children. In reality, mastering these frameworks will enhance students' social status and professional flourishing. And this is why elite schools are pushing it. - Musa al-Gharbi, We Have Never Been Woke

This episode originally aired on December 10, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Thomas Frank, historian, journalist, and author of What’s the Matter with Kansas? and Listen, Liberal, joins us to dissect how Democrats abandoned populism, the rise of Trump’s faux-populism, and why the party refuses to embrace the working class. He also explores the path forward for authentic left-wing populism in the face of neoliberal failures.

Video version of this podcast is here.

“The Democrats posture as the “party of the people” even as they dedicate themselves ever more resolutely to serving and glorifying the professional class. Worse: they combine self-righteousness and class privilege in a way that Americans find stomach-turning. And every two years, they simply assume that being non-Republican is sufficient to rally the voters of the nation to their standard. This cannot go on.

Yet it will go on, because the most direct solutions to the problem are off the table for the moment. The Democrats have no interest in reforming themselves in a more egalitarian way. There is little the rest of us can do, given the current legal arrangements of this country, to build a vital third-party movement or to revive organized labor, the one social movement that is committed by its nature to pushing back against the inequality trend.” — Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal

This episode originally aired on December 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Zohran Mamdani represents the 36th District in the New York State Assembly. A member of the Democratic Socialists of America, he is currently running for mayor of New York City, hoping to unseat the controversial Eric Adams, who is facing federal corruption charges. Mamdani is running on a platform of lowering the cost of living for New Yorkers. He joins today to discuss his city and his campaign.

"This is also a moment of political uncertainty as well as political possibility. People feel failed by the answers they have been told for many decades. And while there is not a majority of socialist or progressive thinking across New York City, I would say there is a majority who feel left behind by this economic system and the policies of this current administration, and that is an ingredient that could give rise to an entirely new coalition of people who feel left behind and are ready to get behind a leftist in order to turn the page." — Zohran Mamdani

This episode originally aired on November 26, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Brian Kateman is the head of the Reduceitarian Foundation and the author of the book Meat Me Halfway: How Changing the Way We Eat Can Improve Our Lives and Save Our Planet, which has an accompanying documentary. Brian has thought a lot about how to persuade people to help improve animal welfare in ways that actually get them on board and don't alienate them. Today he joins to discuss what's wrong with the food system, why animal rights matter, and how to get people to take steps in their lives that help animals.

This episode originally aired on November 18, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs! 

Garrison Lovely wrote the cover story for Jacobin magazine's special issue on AI, which explained how leftists should think about the risks posed by the new technologies. He also recently wrote for the New York Times about AI safety, and has written for Current Affairs about psychedelic drugs and McKinsey. Garrison joins today to discuss what the real harms that AI could do are, why Big Tech can't be trusted to self-regulate, and how we can avoid a nightmarish future.

Listeners might also be interested in Nathan's recent article on the California legislation.

The United States’ current arrangement of managing A.I. risks through voluntary commitments places enormous trust in the companies developing this potentially dangerous technology. Unfortunately, the industryingeneral — and OpenAI in particular — has shown itself to be unworthy of that trust, time and again. — Garrison Lovely, The New York Times

This episode originally aired on November 15, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs !

Is our “child welfare” system successfully helping protect kids from neglect and abuse? Or is it inflicting widespread trauma through unnecessary, unjustifiable family separation? Dorothy Roberts, professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, has long been one of the country’s most deeply-informed critics of “child protective services,” which she argues systematically target poor Black mothers whose only parenting error is to be poor. Roberts is the author of Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World, which sums up over 25 years of her research into the subject. Roberts is also a 2024 winner of the MacArthur fellowship, commonly known as the Genius Grant. Today, she joins to discuss her work. 

This episode originally aired on November 4, 2024. Get new episodes early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairs!

Dr. Feroze Sidhwa is a trauma surgeon who has served in conflict zones around the world. He authored a recent New York Times op-ed that surveyed dozens of medical professionals who had served in Gaza about their observations, including the targeting of children. He is also the organizer of the Gaza Healthcare Letters to the Biden administration. He joins today to discuss the level of harm that has been inflicted on Gaza civilians and why he and other professionals have concluded the Biden administration is supporting a major crime against humanity.

Warning: this episode contains graphic descriptions of violence.

A video of this episode can be found here.

"It's a disaster, and it's going to be multigenerational, with absolutely no question. Not only are these children traumatized, but they've been malnourished for a year. Their brains are not going to develop normally. And people often talked about the Palestinians just being serial killers and psychopaths and stuff. But if you wanted to make sure that there are people with serious problems, with serious difficulties concentrating, with serious difficulties understanding peaceful resolution of problems, now you've guaranteed it for an entire generation, in fact." - Dr. Feroze Sidhwa

This episode originally aired on October 29, 2024. Get new podcasts early at patreon.com/CurrentAffairsRight!

Richard Seymour is one of the most learned and provocative leftist writers in the world. He has written books on subjects ranging from social media (The Twittering Machine) to British Labour politics (Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics) to liberal apologists for imperialism (The Liberal Defense of Murder) to the career of Christopher Hitchens (Unhitched). On whatever he writes about, Seymour is well-read and thoughtful, posing challenging ideas in elegantly-crafted prose. Today he joins to talk to us about "disaster nationalism," the apocalyptic brand of right-wing politics that Seymour says is on the ascent, and threatens to destroy liberal civilization as we know it. It's not necessarily an encouraging conversation, but Seymour encourages us to look honestly at the dark trends in right-wing politics in our time, and to be cognizant of the extent of the threat we face. Helping us understand what the right believes and what it might be capable of, Seymour's warnings could not be more timely as we get closer and closer to an election that might see Donald Trump returned to power.

"Reaction always thrives on the prospect of annihilation. ‘American carnage’, ‘white genocide’, ‘death panels’, ‘invasion’, ‘great replacement’, ‘Islamisation’, ‘treason’, ‘cultural marxists’, ‘scum’, ‘communism’. The erosion and  threatened destruction of worlds of power resembling, from its ideological purview, civilisational collapse, defeat, devastation. With which it is both appalled and enthralled... Amid the decomposition of the old party system, the legacy media, and associated forms of public authority, political forces organising around the nation and its enemies have won the major battles of the last decade. What is more, incumbency has been incredibly forgiving of their failures, their political gains proving far less fragile than those of the Left... The phrase ‘disaster nationalism’ implies something disastrous, or exploitative of disaster, or in elective affinity with disaster, or opaquely drawn to, or hurtling toward, or yearning for disaster. It is all of this." — Richard Seymour