Current Affairs

Celeste Lay is a professor of political science at Tulane University and the author of Public Schools, Private Governance: Education Reform and Democracy in New Orleans, which discusses the New Orleans charter school experiment. Since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, New Orleans has switched to an all-charter system, essentially abolishing public schools, as part of one of the most radical experiments in "education reform" anywhere. Prof. Lay discusses the politics that made this change possible, shows what the lack of democratic accountability for schools has meant for New Orleans, and evaluates the reform experiment. In this episode we discuss what happened and why, and what we know about whether the "all charter" system actually served children and communities. We also talk about the question of why democracy matters: what happens when you take it away? How does it change an institution? What does "private governance" of public institutions mean in practice? 

A New Orleans charter school sponsored by Capital One in a school building previously named for Thurgood Marshall (The Lens) 

The architect Christopher Alexander died recently. As the (surprisingly good) New York Times obituary described him: 

[Alexander] believed that ordinary people, not just trained architects, should have a hand in designing their houses, neighborhoods and cities, and proposed a method for doing so in writing that could be poetically erudite, frustratingly abstract and breathtakingly simple... Mr. Alexander was a fierce anti-modernist who found traditional and indigenous structures — the beehive-shaped huts of North Africa, for example, or medieval Italian villages — more aesthetically pleasing than highly designed contemporary ones, which he saw as ugly and soulless.

Alexander has long been an inspiration here at Current Affairs and his work has been mentioned in a number of articles. (1) (2) (3) (4)

In this interview, Nathan talks to his old friend, city engineer and planner Daniel Ohrenstein, about why they both love Alexander's writing and how Alexander can help us think more clearly about what's wrong with contemporary architecture and how to build beautiful places. 

A transcript of this interview, with lots of photos including some of Alexander's own built work, appears here.

"What emerges from A Pattern Language is a vision of life and how it should be. A society where people are mixing and aren’t isolated. There’s a good saying: when the revolution starts, everyone should know where to go. And if you think about your town, what is the public square? Having a center or public square where people gather is part of being in a real city. Having civic life means having these public spaces. And in these spaces, you can have carnivals, you can have old people and young people playing chess outside. What makes an idyllic city? It’s certainly one that has social engagement. Another suggestion in A Pattern Language is animals everywhere. I was at Whole Foods the other day and I got startled by a sandhill crane. It came up to me and squawked. That kind of interaction is important. Like: Don’t forget there are other beings that inhabit the planet." — Daniel Ohrenstein

The bestselling novels of Sally Rooney have been subject to endless chatter. She has been hailed as the great millennial novelist by some, her work called "extraordinarily lucid, gorgeous and nuanced." (Washington Post) On the other hand, there are those who say that "Rooney and her readers hope to bask in the self-congratulatory glow of their supposed egalitarianism without ceding any of their accolades." Current Affairs editors Yasmin Nair, Lily Sánchez, and Nathan J. Robinson decided to sit down with Rooney's books and figure out where they stand, whether they "hate" Rooney or are part of the "cult." 

One of the most fascinating and thought-provoking books of our time is Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics (Verso) by Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass. The book asks the question: how could we actually have a future for Earth that is both green and socialist? The authors dive into the history of attempts to plan the economy, unearthing useful insights from neglected thinkers like Otto Neurath (developer of the very cool Isotype system). They combine utopian fiction and serious scientific analysis to offer a vision of what humans might be capable of if we put our know-how to work. It's very rare these days to have serious scientific thinkers trying to imagine the path to radical futures, so Pendergrass and Vettese have given us a wonderful gift that all leftists should debate and discuss. The book has an eclectic mix of influences, as the authors write:

Half-Earth Socialism draws on ecology, energy studies, epidemiology, biogeography, Chilean cybernetics, history, eighteenth-century philosophy, Soviet mathematics, the socialist calculation debate, Hayekian epistemology, cutting-edge climate modelling, feminist sci-fi, and the forgotten tradition of utopian socialism.

Vettese and Pendergrass have even designed a free computer game to go along with their book, in which YOU can attempt to plan the entire global economy, reducing emissions and the destruction of life while keeping the population happy. It's like SimCity but with the whole world, and instead of your task being to build a city it's to maintain a viable eco-socialist global government. GOOD LUCK!  

Daisy Pitkin has been in the labor movement for two decades and is the author of the new book On the Line A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women's Epic Fight to Build a Union, which tells the story of an effort to unionize an industrial laundry in Arizona. It's a moving account of the difficult grinding work of putting together a labor union under the most hostile imaginable conditions.

In this episode, we discuss:

• The world of industrial laundries—hot, dangerous places hidden from public view, where workers toil in unhealthy conditions for unbelievably low pay
• The realities of union organizing: what it actually takes to make a campaign successful
• The difference between "top down" and "bottom up" organizing and why it matters
• How successful union fights change people's lives and give them a sense of their own power
• How the stories we tell about labor struggles often distort the truth and are too "individualistic" in their focus
• Finally, why moths feature heavily in Daisy's book

Kim Kelly's Fight Like Hell, mentioned in the episode, can be purchased here. The book The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks is an excellent introduction to the real story of Rosa Parks. The story of the Uprising of 20,000 can be found here.

Anatol Lieven is an international relations expert and journalist who serves as a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His books include Russia and Ukraine and most recently Climate Change and the Nation State. His commentaries on the Ukraine war have appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, and elsewhere. 

Anatol is a highly experienced reporter with a thorough knowledge of the region, and in this conversation he explains what he thinks is left out of mainstream discourse in the United States around the war. He explains Russia's motivations and shows the most obvious path to peace. He also discusses the risks of nuclear escalation that could come from a U.S. policy that pushes Russia past red lines. Anatol's explanation of the current state of the war and what happens next is clarifying and intelligent, and anyone wanting to have a better understanding of what is actually going on needs to read Anatol's work.

• Anatol's major Nation feature from before the war, "Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem In The World" can be read here.
• Anatol's latest Guardian piece making several of the arguments discussed in this episode is here.
• The delusional Daily Beast article that comments on "how little Putin and his spokespeople mention NATO in public justifications" is here.
• The Wall Street Journal op-ed arguing that we must "show we can win a nuclear war" is here.
• An article Nathan wrote mentioning several of the Cold War movies discussed in this episode is here.
• Our previous episodes with Katrina vanden Heuvel and Noam Chomsky cover some of the same issues.

Cryptocurrencies have been hyped in Super Bowl ads and promoted by everyone from Bill Clinton to Glenn Greenwald to Spike Lee to Larry David to New York City mayor Eric Adams (who has pledged to turn the city into a "crypto hub"). But times are tough for crypto. As the New York Times reports, “the crypto world [recently] went into a full meltdown... in a sell-off that graphically illustrated the risks of the experimental and unregulated digital currencies.”

One of cryptocurrency’s most vocal skeptics is Nicholas Weaver, senior staff researcher at the International Computer Science Institute and lecturer in the computer science department at UC Berkeley. Weaver has studied cryptocurrencies for years. On today's episode, Prof. Weaver explains why he views the much-hyped technology with such antipathy. He argues that cryptocurrency is useless and destructive, and should “die in a fire.”

• Nicholas Weaver's YouTube lecture on crypto can be found here.
• Nathan's take on cryptocurrency is here and his take on NFTs is here.
• The writings of crypto skeptic Stephen Diehl make an excellent supplement to this interview.
• A slightly cleaned-up transcript of this interview can be read here.

Note: Prof. Weaver's audio is of mixed quality for the first portion of the podcast but gets better as the episode goes on. 

Edited by Tim Gray. 

Kate Raworth is an economist at Oxford University whose book Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st Century Economist is a radical attempt to rethink foundational concepts in economics and create a new framework for a sustainable economy that does not depend on "infinite growth." Prof. Raworth shows how the ideology that growth needs to be "maximized" causes catastrophic ecological destruction while not even building an economy that serves human needs. She goes beyond critique of the dominant paradigm, however, and actually works out some new models that help us think more clearly about what the goals of economics should be and can replace simplistic neoliberal ideas with more sophisticated and realistic models of the way the world works. This conversation offers a useful introduction to Prof. Raworth's revolutionary ideas, which help us think more clearly about what matters and how to balance competing human and ecological needs in the 21st century. 

Raworth's Doughnut, a diagram that helps us think about the targets for economic policy, which should aim to make sure the economy produces neither too little nor too much. 

The article Nathan mentions about the term "development" is here. The episode with Jonathan Aldred discussing the moral assumptions built into economics is here. The books of Mariana Mazzucato, which Prof. Raworth recommends, are here. Prof. Raworth's TED talk, in which she succinctly explains some of her core ideas, is here. 

CORRECTION: In the program, Nathan mentions a proposed highway expansion in Houston, which he says "is turning an 8-lane highway into a 12-lane highway," as an illustration of the insanity of continued highway expansion. In fact, the highway will be up to 24 lanes. 

A recent article in Vanity Fair about the National Conservatism Conference profiles figures on the "New Right," including Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Blake Masters, and a deeply unpleasant individual called Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug. Yarvin/Moldbug is an advocate of "neoreactionary" politics and explicitly believes in ending democracy and instituting a dictatorship in the United States. J.D. Vance, who may well be a U.S. senator soon, admits in the Vanity Fair profile that he is an admirer of Yarvin's thinking. For a long time, "neoreactionary" thought dwelled mostly in the darker corners of the internet, but we may well soon see these ideas become more mainstream as the American right becomes increasingly extreme and hostile to the democratic process.

Today on the podcast, author Elizabeth Sandifer joins to discuss "neoreaction": what its tenets are and why it is both incredibly stupid and incredibly terrifying. Sandifer is the author of Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays on and Around the Alt-Right. Sandifer's book profiles some key neoreactionary thinkers and is a witty demolition of their horrible ideas. In this episode, Sandifer explains the core of neoreactionary philosophy, including some of the more bizarre ideas to percolate through this ecosystem such as the "basilisk" of the title. We discuss why these ideas catch on and the threat they pose. 

The photograph above is of Curtis "Mencius Moldbug" Yarvin, who looks precisely like what you'd expect a sinister pro-dictatorship pseudointellectual named Moldbug to look. 

Santa Claus is the mayor pro-tem of North Pole, Alaska. Yes, he's real, and he's a democratic socialist running for Congress in the special election against Sarah Palin. Current Affairs is honored to be joined by a man falsely thought to be a mere myth. In fact, when parents tell their children there is no Santa, they just don't want kids to know that the real Santa is a leftist who believes love is more important than presents.

Note from Nathan: Apologies for the absence of new podcast episodes over the last week. I had to defend my PhD dissertation this week and it took all of my energy away! Good news is that's done and I am Dr. Robinson now. Many magnificent new podcasts coming soon so stay tuned!! Thank you so much for all your support we have great stuff planned for the next months.