Since the end of the Cold War, it's been easy to see nuclear competition as a thing of the past. As the dust settles over Iran—as Russia rattles the nuclear saber in Ukraine—it's increasingly clear that the question of nuclear weapons has been re-opened. Join Samantha and guest Matthew Downhour as they talk the fundamentals of nuclear strategy, how "red lines" are not natural but socially constructed—and how Trump's reckless actions have degraded the social order that has kept the world from nuclear war since 1949.

The reactionary right is in ascendance in the Trump administration. It's easy to dismiss them as a cabal of incoherent fools scrambling for Trump's ear. But there is a deeper philosophy animating their political project: one based on a longing for an imagined aristocratic past, a craving for hierarchy and certainty, and simultaneously a deeply ambivalent relation to modernity. Samantha is joined by political theorist Professor Matt McManus for a discussion of his recent essay, "The Far Right Canon."

https://www.liberalcurrents.com/the-far-right-canon/#/portal/signup

Are Trump's tariffs a personal madness, or a response to deeper dysfunctions in the world trade system? Yes. Join Samantha and guest Steven Randy Waldman as we talk about why global trade has become so imbalanced, what kinds of dysfunctions that creates, and why a tax on the flow of capital rather than goods is a policy to work towards.

The takeaway: it's still John Maynard Keynes' world, we're just living in it.

As promised, the book whose name Samantha blanked on in the episode: Robert Allen's *Global Economic History* https://www.amazon.com/Global-Economic-History-Short-Introduction/dp/0199596654