Gal Beckerman is an author and a staff writer at The Atlantic. His latest book is HOW TO BE A DISSIDENT. Before coming over to The Atlantic, whose books section he also ran, he was an editor at the New York Times Book Review for six years. He also served as the opinion editor at the Forward newspaper and a staff editor and writer at the Columbia Journalism Review. His writing has appeared in a number of places over the years, including the Washington Post, The New Republic and Bookforum.
His previous books include The Quiet Before, which was a New York Times Notable pick in 2022, and When They Come for Us We’ll Be Gone, which won two major book awards and was chosen as a book of the year by The New Yorker and the Washington Post.
Over the years he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Cameroon, lived in Berlin as a German Chancellor Fellow with the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and broke his arm almost in half while biking across France.
Our guest today is Amherst College’s Professor of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought, Lawrence Douglas. He is the author of seven books, including the nonfiction books, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust; and Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Electoral Meltdown in 2020; as well as the novels, The Catastrophist, and The Vices.
The recipient of major fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Institute for International Education, and American Academy in Berlin, and the Carnegie Foundation, he has lectured throughout the United States and in more than a dozen countries, and has served as visiting professor at the University of London and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.
His latest book, THE CRIMINAL STATE: War, Atrocity, and the Dream of International Justice, was just published by Princeton University Press. It’s a re-interpretation of international law’s reckoning with Nazi aggression and atrocity. He shows how the Nuremberg trials challenged centuries of thought—rooted in Hobbes and other canonical thinkers—that shielded sovereigns from legal scrutiny. Yet Nuremberg’s bid to frame aggression as the cornerstone of a new order of international criminal law largely failed, giving way to a system now centrally concerned with crimes against humanity and genocide—and leaving unresolved the legality and effectiveness of using force to stop the worst violations of human rights. It’s a provocative history of the struggle to bring perpetrators of state violence to justice, which is certainly relevant to the current conflicts around the world and, sadly, increasingly here at home, as well.
Media around the globe reported the death of Ted Turner on May 6, 2026, at the age of 87. Phillip Evans, a spokesman for the family, confirmed the death. He announced in 2018 that he had Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disorder. Turner’s Montana properties included the flagship 113,000-acre Flying D Ranch south of Bozeman.
So, we thought it would be good to rebroadcast our interview with Bozeman author, Todd Wilkinson, from 2013 when his book, LAST STAND: TED TURNER’S QUEST TO SAVE A TROUBLED PLANET, was published.
Our guest today is journalist, Christopher Mathias. His recent book is TO CATCH A FASCIST: THE FIGHT TO EXPOSE THE RADICAL RIGHT, published by Atria. It’s a deep dive into the resurgence of white nationalist and Neo-Nazi movements in the US, that centers on anti-fascist groups working to expose and stop their violence and intimidation.
Demonized as “extremist” by both conservatives and liberals, “antifa” became a bogeyman during Donald Trump’s first term. However, few Americans understood the dangerous work antifa was doing to disrupt and unmask a new generation of white supremacists, or listened when antifa sounded the alarm about these white supremacists taking positions of power. Now this underground network of militant anti-fascists continues in their determination to stop the rising tide of fascism in America.
We spoke with Christopher Mathias on April 7, 2026 via Zoom.
One month ago today, on February 13, 2026, our guest was the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred McCoy. We discussed his latest book, COLD WAR ON FIVE CONTINENTS: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF EMPIRE AND ESPIONAGE, published by Haymarket Books.
With the US and Israel’s continuation of the war against Iran, which began last June, 2025 and lasted 12 days, and then recommenced on February 28, 2026, I asked him to return to share his insights and analysis.
For well over five decades he has specialized in the foreign policy of the United States, European colonization of Southeast Asia, and CIA covert operations and illegal international drug trade. In June of 1972, he testified before the US Senate Committee on Appropriations’ Foreign Operations Subcommittee, testifying that American officials were condoning and even cooperating with corrupt officials at the highest levels in Southeast Asia’s illegal drug trade out of political and military considerations. He testified that the CIA chartered Air America aircraft and helicopters in northern Laos to transport opium harvested by their “tribal mercenaries”.
His multiple awards winning books include, THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: CIA COMPLICITY IN THE GLOBAL DRUG TRADE; A QUESTION OF TORTURE: CIA INTERROGATION, FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE WAR ON TERROR; IN THE SHADOWS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF US GLOBAL POWER; and TO GOVERN THE GLOBE: WORLD ORDERS AND CATASTROPHIC CHANGE. He was also our guest when those last two were published in 2017 and 2021 respectively. We spoke with him via Zoom on March 9, 2026.
Our guest on this edition of Forthright Radio is the Fred Harvey Harrington Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, Alfred McCoy.
For well over five decades he has specialized in the foreign policy of the United States, European colonization of Southeast Asia, and CIA covert operations and illegal international drug trade. In June of 1972, he testified before the US Senate Committee on Appropriations’ Foreign Operations Subcommittee, testifying that American officials were condoning and even cooperating with corrupt officials at the highest levels in Southeast Asia’s illegal drug trade out of political and military considerations. He testified that the CIA chartered Air America aircraft and helicopters in northern Laos to transport opium harvested by their “tribal mercenaries”.
His multiple awards winning books include, THE POLITICS OF HEROIN IN SOUTHEAST ASIA: CIA COMPLICITY IN THE GLOBAL DRUG TRADE; A QUESTION OF TORTURE: CIA INTERROGATION, FROM THE COLD WAR TO THE WAR ON TERROR; IN THE SHADOWS OF THE AMERICAN CENTURY: THE RISE AND DECLINE OF US GLOBAL POWER; and TO GOVERN THE GLOBE: WORLD ORDERS AND CATASTROPHIC CHANGE. He was our guest when those last two were published. His latest book is COLD WAR ON FIVE CONTINENTS: A GLOBAL HISTORY OF EMPIRE AND ESPIONAGE, published by Haymarket Books.
As in his earlier books, he reiterates the importance of maintaining dominance over the heartland of the “World Island,” comprised of Eurasia and Africa, which was articulated in Halford John Mackinder’s 1904 article, “The Geographical Pivot of History.”
“WHO CONTROLS THE PAST CONTROLS THE FUTURE, WHO CONTROLS THE PRESENT CONTROLS THE PAST.” George Orwell, 1984.
We first interviewed Harvard University’s Laird Bell Professor of History, Sven Beckert, when his tremendously informative Bancroft Prize winning book, EMPIRE OF COTTON: A GLOBAL HISTORY, was published in 2015. It weighed in at a respectable 640 pages.
His most recent tome, CAPITALISM: A GLOBAL HISTORY, dwarfs that earlier work at over 1,320 pages. In it he traces over the past thousand years, what he calls “the most impactful revolution the world has ever seen.” His exhaustive research took him to the archives on 6 continents, however it is anything but a dry disquisition. Rather it is people focused – examining their agency, resistance, ruthless coercion and innovations. From the merchants of 12th Century Aden, Yemen circulating goods from Asia, Africa and Europe to the workers in this decade’s sweat shops in Cambodia, he chronicles the ever adapting transformations of Capitalism. We spoke with Sven Beckert, who was somewhere in Europe on January 13, 2026 via Zoom.
This edition of Forthright Radio is dedicated to the memory of Renee Nicole Good and the thousands of Iranians who have been killed demanding freedom and justice in their homelands, as well as the thousands more spurred on by the same imperatives and their courageous examples, who continue to brave dangerously cold weather and disproportionately armed agents of the state .
The Fourth Amendment The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
This edition of Forthright Radio features Princeton University Anthropology Professor, Agustín Fuentes. His research focuses on the biocultural, delving into the entanglement of biological systems and the social and cultural lives of humans, our ancestors, and a few of the other animals with whom humanity shares close relations. Trained in both zoology and anthropology, his early work looked at the behavior and ecology of humans and other primates, and their patterns and trends in social organization. In the early 2000s, he added a focus on human biological variation, and the use – and misuse – of those patterns and processes in the context of race/racism and sex/gender.
Among his books, which we discuss in our interview with him, are his most recently published in 2025, SEX IS A SPECTRUM: THE BIOLOGICAL LIMITS OF THE BINARY; as well as his earlier, RACE, MONOGAMY, AND OTHER LIES THEY TOLD YOU; and THE CREATIVE SPARK: HOW IMAGINATION MADE HUMANS EXCEPTIONAL.
Illustration: Gender sexuality sex symbols – AnonMoos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
An initial report of circa 241,000- to 335,000-year-old rock engravings and their relation to Homo naledi in the Rising Star cave system, South Africahttps://elifesciences.org/articles/89102
…Doug Wilson, the self-taught pastor who co-founded Pete Hegseth’s denomination has insisted that it was a mistake to let women vote. (He also teaches that sex “cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party”, because “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”)….
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is Senior Fellow at The American Immigration Council. He previously worked as a Staff Attorney at the American Immigration Council, working on impact litigation, Freedom of Information Act litigation, and practice advisories. Prior to joining the Council, he was an Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow and Staff Attorney at the Immigration Law Unit of The Legal Aid Society in New York City, representing immigrants placed in removal proceedings because of a prior criminal conviction.
Of course the implications for those from other countries, both documented and undocumented, are dire, but the implications for American rule of law and democracy are also increasingly disturbing. Things are happening so fast, norms are being shattered, judicial rulings are being ignored. To find out what’s going on, we spoke with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on December 5, 2025 via Zoom.
In our first segment we speak with Stanford University Director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Ken Olivier and Angela Nomellini Professor of International Studies, Michael McFaul. He served for five years in the Obama administration, first as special assistant to the president and senior director for Russian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council at the White House (2009-2012), and then as U.S. Ambassador to the Russian Federation (2012-2014).
His latest book is AUTOCRATS VS. DEMOCRATS: CHINA, RUSSIA, AMERICA, AND THE NEW GLOBAL DISORDER, published by Harper Collins. His earlier books include Russia’s Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin and the NYT bestseller, From Cold War to Hot Peace: An American Ambassador in Putin’s Russia.
Jeff Mangan
In our second segment, we speak with Montana’s former Commissioner for Political Practices, Jeff Mangan, about a proposed amendment to the Montana State Constitution, titled The Transparent Election Initiative. It has garnered tremendous interest and excitement nationally, and is being dubbed The Montana Plan. If enacted, it would effectively kill Citizens United in Montana, and would serve as a model for other states. Instead of being cut off at the pass by the Supreme Court’s first amendment ruling that money is free speech, it instead asserts a 10th amendment states’ right to govern and control corporate charters to determine what they can and cannot do.
Articles, etc. that are pertinent to these interviews:
Forthright Radio 