Behind the News
12:00 PM (Noon) Pacific Time: Thursdays
Host Doug Henwood covers the worlds of economics and politics and their complex interactions, from the local to the global.
The bankers’ club and how to bust it • the culture of immediacy
Gerald Epstein, author of Busting the Bankers’ Club, on the finance racket and how to transform it • Anna Kornbluh, author of Immediacy, on our sped-up, unmediated cultural eternal present
Exhaustion and the climate crisis • shocker: recessions increase life expectancy
Ajay Singh Chaudhary talks about his new book, The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World • Matt Notowidigdo, co-author of this paper, on how recessions increase life expectancy
Why did South Africa charge Israel at the ICJ? • organizing unions in the society of sprawl • the widening war in the Middle East
Sean Jacobs explores why South Africa brought the genocide case against Israel in the World Court • Eric Blanc (Substack post here) on organizing in a scattered and atomized society • Hassan El-Tayyab on the widening war in the Middle East
Who are the Houthis? • more on Hezbollah
Shireen Al-Adeimi of Michigan State and the Quincy Institute, on the Houthis • political scientist Aurélie Daher with another view of Hezbollah
Electronic monitoring, and who is Hezbollah?
Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative on electronic monitoring (the ankle bracelet kind) • Joseph Daher, author of Hezbollah: The Political Economy of the Party of God, on that demonized organization
More on Argentina, and Americans’ complicated relationship with psychoactive drugs
political scientist Jacqueline Behrend on Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei • Benjamin Fong, author of Quick Fixes, on Americans’ love/hate relationship with drugs
Perils of striking Trump from the ballot and the year in organized labor
Samuel Moyn, law prof and historian, on the political and legal dubiousness of excluding Trump from the presidential ballot • labor journalist Alex Press on the year in labor (articles on that topic here and here)
transcending the family, questioning homeownership
slaying sacred cows: M.E. O’Brien, author of Family Abolition, on doing that and “communizing care” • Jane Chung, author of this article, on what’s wrong with our cult of homeownership [holiday encore presentation of a show first broadcast in June]
COP28 and Argentina’s new president
environmental journalist Tina Gerhardt on the recently concluded COP28 environmental summit, where limited good intentions were uttered and oil contracts were signed • historian Forrest Hylton on Javier Milei, the new libertarian/authoritarian president of Argentina