Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by Dr. Stephen Thrasher. He is the Daniel Renberg Chair of Social Justice in Reporting and Assistant Professor of Journalism at the Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism.

He's also the author of the book, The Viral Underclass.

Professor Thrasher, thank you so much for joining us on current affairs today.

Thank you for having me.

Well, I actually, before we get to the subject of your book, let's talk about

Columbia, because you were there recently. This is one of the biggest things going on in the

country. And you talked about what you saw recently on Twitter. And I really liked it because

you had what I thought was a totally different

or challenging narrative. I think these things are often portrayed in the press as unruly,

angry. You portrayed it as beautiful, inspiring, and I want you to tell us about that.

Thank you, yeah. I also, it was unusual for a journalist to actually report from the place

that it was happening. I did find it really beautiful. I had gotten onto the campus. The

Columbia campus is quite large. You could avoid this entirely if you wanted to. But what I

saw was really quite beautiful. And the first

thing that sort of drew me into the Gaza Solidarity camp was I saw a young woman really diffused a situation

between a couple of Zionist students very effectively. And when I was congratulating her on how

deftly she had brought the temperature down on the situation. She actually invited me to come onto the lawn

where it was only students,

or mostly students and people they invited on.

And it was really beautiful to see the way

that they were experimenting with creating

a different kind of society.

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