In our last episode, we took a break from the depressing facts of the ecological crisis to simply marvel at the immense variety of experiences and sensations in the animal kingdom. Today we return to the tough stuff, although we begin with 30 seconds of whalesong to relax our spirits. Nathan's guest is Adrienne Buller of the progressive UK think tank Common Wealth, whose book The Value of a Whale: On The Illusions of Green Capitalism (Manchester University Press) is a thorough, devastating critique of market-based approaches to solving the climate crisis. The Value of a Whale is an essential primer for those who want to learn how to see through fraud and fakery in proposed climate policies. Buller shows how bad economic thinking has allowed corporations and governments to embrace pseudo-solutions that appear to address climate change but in fact do almost nothing. In this interview we discuss the futile (and dangerous) attempt to assign financial values to parts of the natural world (including whales), the harm done by using "cost-benefit analysis" and models of climate change that focus on its impact on GDP, and how we can tell real solutions to climate change from fake ones that are designed to avoid doing anything that would require sacrifices from rich Westerners. Adrienne's other book, Owning the Future (co-authored with Mat Lawrence), is available from Verso. 

Ed Yong of The Atlantic is the author of the new bestselling book An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which is about all of the fascinating ways in which animal senses differ from our own, and how they show the immense amount of information in the universe that is inaccessible to human beings. Ed's book gives us a glimpse of what the subjective experiences of other species are like, and they are incredible. Today we discuss how mind-expanding it is to empathize with creatures very different from ourselves. Ed's Atlantic writings are here and his book on microbes is here. The writings of Ed's colleague Marina Koren about space and the James Webb telescope are here. A recording of Carl Sagan talking about the "pale blue dot" is here.WARNING: THIS EPISODE BEGINS WITH TWO FULL MINUTES OF ANIMAL NOISES TO HELP US APPRECIATE THE MAJESTY AND VARIETY OF OTHER SPECIES

Bill McKibben is a legendary activist and writer whose 1989 book The End of Nature introduced the problem of global warming to a general audience. Since then, he has been one of the world's leading environmental activists, taking major roles in the fossil fuel divestment movement and the campaign against the Keystone pipeline. In his latest book, The Flag, The Cross, and The Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened, McKibben looks at the Middle America he grew up in and how, beneath its image of cheery prosperity, it was accumulating moral debts that have yet to be paid. McKibben grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, where he proudly told tales of the American Revolution as a tour guide on the town common. But he came to understand that Lexington was a far more complicated place than its mythology told him. While the town is a bastion of liberalism, and in his youth the residents came out to support Vietnam war protesters, at the same time it was deliberately keeping out affordable housing and making sure only the existing white residents saw the benefit of its skyrocketing property values. McKibben's book retells the history of his suburb and wrestles with its role in creating present crises. Today Bill McKibben joins us to discuss:The peaceful suburb of his childhood and how he came to discover its dark sideThe morally complicated role of the church in American historyThe debts that U.S. suburbanites have accrued through destructive carbon emissionsThe very disturbing sight on Paul Revere's famous "midnight ride" that is never mentionedWhy Jimmy Carter is underrated and the terrible path that America set itself on by electing Ronald Reagan in 1980Why Baby Boomers aren't all terrible and why we should involve older people in political activismNathan's article discussing Sam Walton's memoir is here. Carter's "Crisis of Confidence" speech is here. More on "where Mark hung in chains" can be read here. Find more about Third Act, McKibben's organization for older Americans looking to get involved in activism, here.

Things do not look good for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party right now. Polls show that nearly 3/4 of Americans, including a staggering 94% of people under 30, do not want Biden to run for reelection. Biden's prospects look slightly better when people are asked if they prefer him or Donald Trump, and for Biden that's apparently enough. The New York Times says the president has a favorite aphorism: "Don't compare me to the Almighty, compare me to the alternative." (This is the worst aphorism ever.) "The alternative to us is Christian Fascism" might be a platform that allows some Democrats to squeak back into office. After all, the existing alternative is Christian Fascism. But what kind of agenda could actually produce lasting majorities and enthusiastic public support? What would a real alternative to the GOP, one that put forward a positive and transformative set of ideas, look like? To answer this question, we are today joined by Alan Minsky, Executive Director of Progressive Democrats of America (PDA), and Professor Harvey J. Kaye, author of The Fight for the Four Freedoms and Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. In a recent series of articles for Common Dreams, Kaye and Minsky have laid out the case for a 21st-century Economic Bill of Rights. They argue that if Democrats want to win, they should formally embrace the principles of the Economic Bill of Rights, which would make it clear to Americans exactly what people would be voting for when they are asked to vote. Kaye and Minsky's article series is here:A Call for All Progressive Candidates and Officeholders to Embrace a 21st Century Economic Bill of RightsWhy Should Progressives Embrace a 21st Century Economic Bill of Rights? Because They Already Do (w/ Michael Brennan)The Time Has Come for Progressives to Rescue and Renew American DemocracyThe Economic Bill of Rights consists of the following: 1. The right to a useful job that pays a living wage, and to a voice in the workplace through a union and collective bargaining.2. The right to comprehensive quality health care.3. The right to a complete cost-free public education and access to broadband internet.4. The right to decent, safe, affordable housing.5. The right to a clean environment and a secure planet.6. The right to a meaningful endowment of resources at birth and a secure retirement.7. The right to sound banking and financial services.8. The right to recreation and participation in public life.For Kaye and Minsky, having a clear set of principles like this, and legislation ready to pass that will actually ensure the rights are granted, is a viable route to progressive electoral success that can deliver the kind of lasting political transformation last seen in the years of the New Deal. In this episode we talk about what the progressive left should borrow from FDR in order to stop the creeping advance of far-right theocracy in its tracks. A previous Current Affairs interview with Harvey Kaye specifically focusing on Thomas Paine and FDR can be heard here. More interviews with Kaye and Minsky about the Economic Bill of Rights can be found here. A relevant recent Current Affairs article about the New Deal era Works Progress administration can be read here. 

Yuval Noah Harari is an Israeli historian whose books have been major bestsellers, praised by Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. Harari not only offers a sweeping chronicle of the human past, but makes confident predictions about the human future. His visions of a future in which technology creates godlike humans has turned him into a kind of prophet, especially in Silicon Valley, though Harari insists he is a mere objective chronicler. Darshana Narayanan is a neuroscientist and journalist whose Current Affairs article "The Dangerous Populist Science of Yuval Noah Harari," available in our March-April 2022 issue, shows that Harari's claim to broad-ranging expertise is dubious and the stories he tell often lack sufficient factual foundation. Narayanan argues that belief in these unsupported prophecies is dangerous and experts need to do a better job of spreading the true findings of their academic fields so that populist pseudoscientists don't become our go-to explainers of reality. Today, Darshana joins to discuss her article and Harari's work. We talk about:Why deterministic visions of the human future are both wrong and harmful, because they inhibit our sense of the possibleHow many of Harari's statements become meaningless upon scrutiny, such has the idea that lions are more "self-confident" than humansThe comparison between Harari and Jordan Peterson, both of whom fill a void where a true culture of public intellectualism should be (the Jordan Peterson article can be read here)How experts are strangely resistant to critiquing and engaging with "popular" books, meaning those books don't get rigorously fact-checked or refutedThe Sapiens diagram explaining the "economic history of the world" that Nathan makes fun of during this episode looks like this: 

Pioneering blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has been an activist for online freedom since the early days of the history of the internet. He has long been one of the major voices opposing restrictive copyright and corporate domination, and a visionary defending a pluralistic online world where eccentricity and individuality are allowed to flourish. In books like Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (which, like all of his books, is available in full for free), Doctorow has shown what an internet created by the people, unconstrained by intellectual property law, Digital Rights Management, and monopolistic corporate gatekeeping, could be like. In this conversation, Doctorow joins to discuss the importance of a democratic internet, and his recent book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that many people misidentify the main problem with what is called "surveillance capitalism," assuming that the problem is that corporations are amassing to manipulate us the power through intrusive collection of Big Data. In fact, Doctorow argues, the problem is less about a particular thing these corporations can do to us and more about the fact that monopolistic tech companies are in control in the first place. This has important implications, because it means that we cannot just regulate what companies do with our data, we have to fundamentally redistribute power over the internet. In this conversation, we talk about how Wikipedia provides an alternative vision for a participatory internet where the rules are set by users and there is oversight over governance. We do not need better and more benevolent Zuckerbergs. We need what Doctorow calls the pluralistic internet.Cory Doctorow publishes a daily link blog at Pluralistic. His books can be found at his website, Craphound.com, and his archive of posts at Boing Boing is here. His upcoming book Chokepoint Capitalism (co-authored with Rebecca Giblin) can be pre-ordered here. A Current Affairs article about "surveillance capitalism" is here and Nathan's article about the magic of Wikipedia is here.

Prof. Leslie Reagan is the probably the country's leading expert on the history of abortion laws. Her award-winning book When Abortion Was a Crime: Women, Medicine, and Law in the United States, 1867-1973 is the most comprehensive available history of the era of criminalized abortion before Roe v. Wade, and Prof. Reagan is quoted regularly in the press for her knowledge of US abortion history. Her book on abortion law is distinguished by the fact that it focuses not just on the text of laws, but on the enforcement process, i.e., the lives of women who sought abortions. She exposes how criminalized abortion, even when it does not prosecute those getting abortions, is a horror for women and creates an intensive regime of the surveillance and policing of pregnancy. In this episode, we look at some of the history that the right chooses to ignore, including:How Samuel Alito's view that there is "no tradition" of allowing abortion is completely historically ignorant.Why The Economist is completely wrong to say that "there is no documented case in America of a woman being prosecuted for seeking an abortion since 1922." First, there is, and the outrage over one such prosecution helped fuel the movement that brought about Roe (see newspaper headline above). Second, even when doctors are the ones prosecuted, women could be arrested and coerced into giving testimony and subjected to intrusive interrogations by the state.The horrifying realities of what criminalized abortion meant, including sexual coercion by unlicensed abortionistsHow, even in the era of criminalized abortion, abortion was widespread and there was a divergence between the "public morality" of law and the actual practices indulged in, a fact that undercuts the idea of America as a historically anti-abortion countryHow legalization was a way to bring law in line with actual social practices, and how Roe was not a spontaneous departure from law, but the result of a social movement that sought to expose what women knew but had not been able to sayWhy Roe v. Wade was not a radical opinion, and in fact disappointed feminists, but came out of the Court's acceptance of the fact that criminalizing abortion was incompatible with any reasonable notion of liberty (though men of the Court appeared to care more about the liberty of doctors than women)This is the third in our series of episodes on abortion in America. Part I, in which Carole Joffe explained the "obstacle course" that (even pre-Dobbs) faced those seeking abortion, is here. Part II, in which Diana Greene Foster discusses the empirical evidence that abortion makes women's lives better off, is here. For an explanation of why Samuel Alito's legal reasoning was garbage, see here. For a discussion of how the abortion decision delegitimizes the court, see here. For the perspective of a doctor on how the decision will force medical practitioners to act unethically by withholding necessary care, see here. For more on the case of Shirley Wheeler, see here.   

Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of American History at UCLA. His classic study Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination is about to be re-released in a 20th Anniversary Edition. The book looks at how, throughout Black history, movements against oppression have been inspired by (and produced) grand visions of alternate possibilities for what life could be. Kelley shows how radicals have, in circumstances of grinding oppression, managed to expand our minds as to what is possible. Kelley's book looks at communism, surrealism, Pan-Africanism, and even funk and jazz music, to show the colorful and marvelous dreams that have kept social movements alive. His book is invaluable for leftists, because it shows how in addition to our critiques of capitalism, racism, and patriarchy, we can present inspiring and creative new cultural practices. The revolution needs poetry, dance, and fiction, and Kelley shows us that movement activists have always been dreamers as well as doers.The Movement For Black Lives' "Vision for Black Lives" Agenda can be found here. More about the great Black Surrealist Ted Joans can be found here. Franklin Rosemont's book Dancin' In The Streets! Anarchists, IWWs, Surrealists, Situationists & Provos In The 1960s is another useful resource. The Times review of Kelley's Thelonious Monk can be found here.

The war in Afghanistan was a calamity from the start and four US presidents (Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden) have deceived the American public about it as they wrecked the country. This is the inescapable conclusion one gets from reading Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock's bestselling book The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War (Simon & Schuster). Whitlock obtained internal government records showing that U.S. officials at every level knew that the war lacked coherent objectives and that it was costing untold Afghan and U.S. lives with little benefit to anyone. As the Pentagon Papers did for Vietnam, The Afghanistan Papers exposes the way U.S. officials manipulated public perception and buried inconvenient facts over the course of a 20-year quagmire. Today on the podcast, Whitlock joins to explain the revelations contained in this "secret history" and recount the true facts of a military mission that has ended with the Taliban back in power and the country in ruins. The Washington Post report by Susannah George on the starvation of the Afghan people is here. The 2001 story about the U.S. rejecting a Taliban offer to turn over Osama bin Laden is here.

Financial Times journalist Simon Kuper's book Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK argues that in order to understand how power works in the UK, you have to examine Oxford University, where most of its prime ministers are educated. The university has long functioned as the springboard to power for aspiring UK politicians, and Kuper takes us inside this insidious clubhouse, delivering a "searing critique of the British ruling class." Kuper argues that Brexit, far from being a "populist" revolt, would not have been possible without Oxford-educated Tory elites who were in search of a grand political project. Kuper discusses the disturbingly reactionary culture of the Oxford that nurtured Boris Johnson (as well as its low intellectual standards), and explains why—although certain improvements have been made—he believes the university should stop teaching undergrads altogether in order to diversity the pool of backgrounds of those who end up in British politics. The clip at the beginning is taken from the 1981 Granada Television adaptation of Brideshead Revisited, which Kuper says many Oxford students in Thatcher-era Britain watched and consciously tried to emulate. The Guardian's review of Chums is here. Nathan's own article on the life and career of Boris Johnson is here.