Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Roads, and I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Kara Havens. She is a science writer. And on her medium series, a box of rocks, she exposes bad biological essentialist arguments and the sinister networks of racist pseudoscience

that still haught us and have an unfortunate amount of influence in the mainstream.

So Kira Havens, thank you so much for joining us.

Okay, Kurt, Affairs today.

Thanks so much for having me.

Great to be here.

I'm really glad that the series caught your eye and is interesting reading.

It is.

It's really good.

I recommend it into our listeners, Box of Rocks,

and I want to tell them what it is, because I, you know,

I got engrossed when I started reading it. Let's start with the name. Let's start with

why rocks? Tell us about the rocks. Well, it's a little bit of funny. I started writing the series

right as the FTX collapse happens, and Sam Bigin-Fried was in the news a lot.

And there was day by day just revelation after revelation coming out about how there was really nothing that could resemble good business practices anywhere in sight of this company.

Alameda had put up a spreadsheet that just kind of had a line item that said hidden funds or

something along those lines.

And it was just for me anyway, it sort of encapsulated this really aggressive race

towards the future without someone, like anybody really looking around

and saying, are these the people that should be in charge?

And I've always been interested in history.

And so paired that ambitious vision of the world with the vision that a gentleman named

...