Why Is This Happening? With Chris Hayes

Civil rights attorney and author Alexandra Brodsky has spent her entire career focusing closely on ways institutions can best address sexual harms. Her work is the subject of “Sexual Justice: Supporting Victims, Ensuring Due Process, and Resisting the Conservative Backlash,” a book published in August 2021. She joins to talk about the importance of treating both victims and the accused fairly, the Biden administration’s response to Title IX, and what’s ahead as institutions seek to address sexual misconduct claims more equitably.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Spencer Ackerman joins to discuss catalysts for the War on Terror, inflection points, recent developments in Kabul, and the role of U.S. hegemony in continued global combat. Ackerman also talks about his new book, “Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump,” which tells the story of how the weaponized bigotry that fueled the war on terror after 9/11 created the conditions for Trumpism and increased threats to American democracy.

Grammy award-winning musician Ani DiFranco joins for an enlightening conversation about her creative process, how she’s pivoted during the pandemic, and what’s enabled her to keep making music after so many years.

Note: This conversation was recorded on July 27th, 2021, before the latest news in Kabul. Recognized around the globe for her research on corruption, Sarah Chayes has seen her fair share of corruption at play.  She also had frontline experience in Afghanistan during the events leading up to the country’s collapse. The anti-corruption activist witnessed incidents that ultimately contributed to the United States’ recent withdrawal. Chayes’ career has led her from reporting in Paris for NPR and covering the fall of the Taliban in 2001, to examining developing countries that are considered corrupt during a stint at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. The prolific author has said that kleptocratic actions are an “existential threat facing our generation” and her book “On Corruption In America - And What Is At Stake” examines the myriad reasons why unscrupulous practices are prevalent across global networks, and why crisis results.

Retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman has seen (and heard) a great deal in his experiences in public service. He became a household name as a key witness in Donald Trump’s impeachment hearings in 2019. His memoir out August 2021, "Here, Right Matters: An American Story," shares insight into the lead up and events following the infamous call at the center of the trial between former U.S. President Trump and Ukrainian president Zelensky. Vindman joins to discuss that, immigrating to the US, serving in the military, his take on global relations, and what’s next for him.

Producer Tiffany Champion is back with a post-quarantine vibe check on the WITHpod inbox! In this backstage glimpse of the podcast, hear how Chris Hayes prepares for interviews, which recent episode got the biggest response from listeners, and find out about the exciting changes happening on the show!

Why is the housing market so hot right now? From the pandemic-induced influx of people working remotely to our collective obsession with cruising Zillow (it’s not just us, right?), Bloomberg Opinion columnist Justin Fox discusses why some parts of the country are seeing housing prices sky rocket.

From her experience as a single mom trying to figure out how to pay her bills, to her time as a nurse working tirelessly for her patients, to her dedication as an activist marching for accountability in the streets of Ferguson, Congresswoman Bush can tell you exactly why her district voted for her in 2020. She knows she didn’t take the road well-travelled on her path to Congress, and her defeat of 10-term incumbent Lacy Clay was one of the biggest upsets of the election, but it’s her relatability that sets her apart. It also helps that she’s a natural born storyteller – and if you don’t believe us, then you need only listen to this episode.

What happens when the bombing stops? The unfortunate reality of American news coverage of Israel and Palestine is that it centers almost entirely on times of extreme violence, broadcasting dramatic images of explosions and destruction. But as soon as some sort of ceasefire is reached, any future coverage of the area instead turns to the state of Israeli politics. The result is not only an asymmetry between our knowledge of Israeli and Palestinian politics, but also an ignorance around what life is actually like for Palestinians in the region.  To understand the grinding struggle of life under occupation, the state of Palestinian politics, and the role the United States plays, we’re lucky to hear from one of the most celebrated Palestinian-American intellectuals in the world, Rashid Khalidi.

Dan Taberski is an expert at pulling on threads. His tireless curiosity and impeccable reporting resulted in a run of acclaimed investigative podcasts, including "Missing Richard Simmons", "Running From COPS", and "Surviving Y2K". He's back with an Apple original podcast "The Line", which uses the case of Eddie Gallagher, a former Navy SEAL charged with war crimes, as a lens to understand the blurred moral boundaries soldiers are asked to operate within when sent to battle.You can listen to "The Line" here.

Alright, tell it to us straight - what's the deal with UFOs? In recent years, there's been a steady drip of reporting about UFOs that has penetrated mainstream culture, moving beyond The X-Files and straight into the Pentagon. A series of reports not only confirmed the existence of a government program dedicated to understanding UFOs, but also showed eye-grabbing footage of military encounters. So what do we know about them? And what exactly is the government up to? Gideon Lewis-Kraus set out to answer these questions in his phenomenal new piece in The New Yorker, How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously, and he joins to tell us what he learned.Read the latest piece from Gideon Lewis-Kraus on the new Pentagon report.

You might think that nothing good happens on the Internet anymore. It's just an algorithmically driven continuous feed of rage, disinformation, and subterfuge. Natalie Wynn, known for her YouTube channel ContraPoints, proves that good things are still happening on the Internet. Part philosopher, part performance artist, and wholly genre-defying, Wynn crafts gorgeous and ethereal video essays on everything from TERFS and J.K Rowling to the rise of incels. There’s no one on the Internet quite like Natalie Wynn, and she joins to tell us how she does it. 

Here in the United States, things are closer to normal than they have been in a long time. Businesses have reopened, gatherings have started to resume, and COVID cases and deaths continue to fall to levels that we have not seen since the very beginning of the pandemic. But even three months ago, it was not clear that this would be the point we are at. So how did the government ramp up its vaccine campaign to get us to a closer normal? This week former White House senior advisor to the COVID response, Andy Slavitt, joins to talk about how the Biden Administration tackled the vaccine distribution problem as well as his new book about the US COVID response, "Preventable". 

How does the human body take in and use energy? It is a simple question, but one that we still do not have a definitive answer to. This week Associate Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, Herman Pontzer, joins to shed light on these evolutionary mysteries. How did our bodies get to be the way they are? How do we take in and expend energy? And how do we keep ourselves happy and healthy in the modern world we have built?

What we call history isn't a fixed thing; it's a narrative, contested and fought over, changing over time. Right now, the United States is in the midst of a massive historical battle over its own narrative, specifically the legacy of slavery and race in America. The backlash to that fight is spilling into public policy as Republican state legislatures push to regulate the way students are taught about the founding of our country. In Clint Smith's new book "How The Word is Passed", Smith studies our understanding of slavery through the stories we tell of it. He travelled to the cemeteries and plantations and prisons home to these stories to see up close how they reckon with - or fail to reckon with - their own relationship to our country's legacy.How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America by Clint Smith

What is gender-affirming health care? Around the country, there’s a Republican campaign to legislate and regulate the lives of trans youth. The most destructive of these efforts would bar trans youth in certain states from accessing gender-affirming treatment. Dr. Izzy Lowell runs Queer Med, a private clinic that specializes in providing accessible health care to trans patients ranging from kids to adults. Her practice covers 10 states across the South – and half of those have anti-trans health care bills on the docket. If they pass, it would become criminal for her to provide this care to many of her patients. Dr. Lowell joins this week to break down what exactly we mean when we talk about gender-affirming care, how the decision is made for kids and teens ready to transition, and the potentially devastating impact this legislation would have on their lives.

What causes violent crime rates to rise? It probably won’t surprise you to learn that 2020 was the deadliest year in American history but what you may not know is that 2020 also saw a staggering rise in homicides and violent crime. It’s impossible to separate the two – the indefinite closure of crucial community spaces and abrupt economic upheaval were felt nationwide but hit hardest in areas most vulnerable to increased interpersonal violence. To understand what happened last year, it’s worth looking back at the last major wave of violence in the United States – what caused the spike then and what caused it to go down? Sociologist Patrick Sharkey’s book, “Uneasy Peace”, lays out the most successful strategies cities used to decrease violent crime and joins to lend his expertise on what we got right – and what we’re getting wrong.READ MORE:Uneasy Peace: The Great Crime Decline, the Renewal of City Life, and the Next War on Violence by Patrick Sharkey

We largely hear about China in the news through the lens of what the Chinese government is doing, but it is a country with billions of people and a history thousands of years old. For as large and influential as it is, Americans do not consume Chinese cultural exports in the same way that China does in the reverse. Chinese made movies are not screened in most theaters across the United States. We do not watch Chinese sitcoms dubbed. While China and other countries regularly consume American culture that show peaks of what life is like in United States, we don’t have the same regular access to those windows of everyday China. So, what is life like in China? This week journalist and author Te-Ping Chen joins to talk about her time as a student and journalist in China and her new book of short stories In the “Land of Big Numbers”.

Back in 2019, a panel of health experts declared that of every country in the whole world, the United States was the most prepared for handling a pandemic. So what went wrong? Acclaimed author Michael Lewis is unparalleled in unearthing the most compelling characters to tell an unexpected story – it’s no wonder he’s had multiple books turned into movies (The Blind Side, Moneyball, The Big Short). Now, Lewis has done it again with his latest book, “The Premonition”, following the people who spent years preparing for a pandemic only to be ignored at the most crucial juncture – to devastating results. READThe Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

How does bitcoin work? Where did it come from, why does it exist, and will it ever be used for everyday purchases? Far from some passing fad, bitcoin has been around for more than a decade now and shows no signs of going anywhere. We figured it was long overdue to understand the most well-known cryptocurrency and the problem it is trying to solve. Lucky for us, Bloomberg editor Joe Weisenthal came prepared.