Current Affairs

Judith Butler is one of the world's leading scholars and philosophers on issues of gender, sexuality, and the cultural phenomena that surround them. They are the author of the landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, and more recently the 2024 follow-up work Who's Afraid of Gender?

Becca Rothfeld is a staff writer at The New Yorker, an editor at The Point, and the former nonfiction book critic at The Washington Post, where she wrote until the paper eliminated its books section amid sweeping layoffs. She explains why book reviews matter and how criticism can introduce readers to ideas they didn’t know interested them. Rothfeld also discusses the role of negative reviews, what it means for a book to be “instructively bad,” and why criticism should challenge rather than flatter its audience. She also argues that the growing use of AI risks degrading human thought, and reflects on beauty, “looksmaxing,” and the kind of intellectual and cultural life worth preserving.

Trita Parsi is the co-founder and Executive Vice President of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and one of the leading analysts of U.S.–Iran relations. In this conversation with Current Affairs editor in chief Nathan J. Robinson, he explains how the escalating U.S.–Israel war on Iran is affecting civilians, how sanctions and propaganda shaped the political climate leading up to the conflict, and why Israel and the United States may see the war very differently in strategic terms. Parsi also discusses why he believes the war is a mistake for Washington, how Trump ended up launching it, how the conflict might end, and how a very different path might have been possible if diplomacy had prevailed.