Hotel and restaurant workers in Los Angeles won a $30 minimum wage last week, Disneyland workers are getting $233 million in back pay, and Wisconsin public employees regained collective bargaining rights. Harold Meyerson reports on some victories in the class struggle in America.

Also: a special feature: novelist Rachel Kushner reports on the world of Nostalgia Drag Racing, where people make machines – with their hands. One of them is her teenage son.

On this episode of American Prestige, Danny speaks with Andrew deWaard, assistant professor of media and popular culture at UC San Diego, about his book Derivative Media: How Wall Street Devours Culture. The two discuss how the falling rate of profit shapes the modern media landscape, the increased drive toward consolidation in entertainment companies, the big movers like private equity firms, hedge funds, asset managers, and venture capitalists, artists' limited ability to defend themselves, the rise of IP, and more.

On this week's American Prestige news roundup: 2024 is officially the hottest year on record (0:57), particularly because the Arctic is no longer a carbon sink, but rather a net carbon emitter (2:40); regarding the situation in Syria, an update on the political transition (5:16), renewed fighting between the SDF and Turkish proxies (10:56), and Israel makes a land grab for an extended "buffer zone" (15:01); in Israel-Palestine, Hamas makes a major ceasefire concession (18:22); rebels in Myanmar seize the Bangladesh border (21:29) while other factions call for a ceasefire (22:51); President Yoon of South Korea survives his first impeachment vote and chaos ensues (24:30); Ethiopia and Somalia strike a deal to settle their recent tensions (30:14); in Russia-Ukraine, Trump's demand for a ceasefire panics Zelenskyy (33:22); Romania's constitutional court annuls the first round of its presidential election (37:14); an armed group commits a massacre in Haiti (40:25); and the Biden administration is building migrant detention facilities (42:00).

On this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, Paris Marx is joined by Amanda Mull to discuss the data-informed decisions that are changing the way we all experience air travel, mostly for the worse. 

Amanda Mull is a senior reporter and Buying Power columnist at Bloomberg Businessweek.

Kamala Harris lost not because Democratic voters switched to Trump, Steve Phillips shows, but because of a massive failure of the Democrats to turn out their base. 

Also: In a new episode of “The Children’s Hour,” Amy Wilentz reports on “Lives of the In-Laws” – Ivanka’s and Tiffany’s – and comments also on the rise of Eric’s wife Lara, and about the latest schemes of Ivanka’s husband Jared Kushner.

On this episode of American Prestige, Danny and Derek speak with Jeff Stein, White House economics reporter for The Washington Post, about his series on US sanctions for the Post, "The Money War". They talk about the function of economic sanctions for the US and how that's changed over time, broader cases like Iran to targeted ones like Russian businessman Viktor Vekselberg, how sanctions can "disconnect" war from the public, the humanitarian impact, and more.

Matthew Yglesias, a very influential journalist and proprietor of the Slow Boring substack, has emerged as a divisive figure within the Democratic party. To admirers, he’s a compelling advocate of popularism, the view the Democratic party needing to moderate its message to win over undecided voters. To critics, he’s a glib attention seeker who has achieved prominence by coming up with clever ways to justify the status quo. 

For this episode of the podcast, I talked to David Klion, frequent guest of the show and Nation contributor, about Yglesias, the centrist view of the 2024 election, the role of progressives and leftists in the Democratic party coalition, and the class formation of technocratic pundits, among other connected matters. 

On this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, host Paris Marx is joined by Cam Wilson to discuss Australia’s plan to ban under-16s from social media, the interests driving it, and whether it’s the right approach to tackle the harms of those platforms. Cam Wilson is associate editor at Crikey.

“Our worst enemy right now is not Trump himself, but fatalism about our ability to stop him.” That’s what David Cole says – he recently stepped down as National Legal Director of the ACLU, after 8 years and hundreds of lawsuits against the first Trump administration.

Also: Project 2025,the Heritage Foundation’s famous 900 page book, is partly “"too dumb to accomplish anything at all”--that’s what Rick Perlstein says. The rest, he says, can be read as a useful catalog of how we should focus our resistance.

On this episode of American Prestige, hosts Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner are joined by Ben Fong of Arizona State University for a two-part discussion of his book Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st Century Binge. In this episode, the group covers everything from coffee to opiates to antidepressants, how they interact with capitalist society, the CIA, commodity fetishism, licit vs. illicit as distinct from legal vs. illegal, and more.

Check out more of Ben's work at his Substack on labor and logistics, On the Seams.

For this week's edition of The Time of Monsters podcast, we're posting a talk that host Jeet Heer gave at Carleton University earlier this November on how the crisis of democracy is related to the crisis of journalism. In the talk, I argue that we are living in an age where the salient political divide is not so much left/right as system/antisytem. Liberals have tried to fight antisystem politicians like Donald Trump by doubling down on factchecking.

But as I argue, this strategy is deeply flawed since voters who respond to antisystem arguments are also skeptical of institutions that claim to check facts. The talk tries to lay out a strategy for engaging with antisystem anger in a more productive way.