The US Secretary of State Marco Rubio just announced his intention to “dismantle” the International Criminal Court “brick by brick.” Which raised some important questions. Like, what IS the ICC, actually? Where did it come from, and what power does it have? Why does the US want to dismantle it, and is that even possible? We sit down with Maria Elena Vignoli, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch who calls herself a “constructive critic” of the Court. She walks us through the Court’s history, its mission, and its fragile future.

“The United States does not recognize the authority of international bureaucrats an ocean away who seek to upend America’s 250-year history of self-governance and impose an illegitimate legal order on our sovereign nation,” says State Department Spokesperson Tommy Pigott. “America’s sovereignty is and always will be non-negotiable. A wide range of options are available to ensure the ICC is completely and utterly incapable of threatening the U.S. and our people. No diplomatic option will be off-limits in the campaign to dismantle the threat posed by the ICC to Americans.”

This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.

Further reading:

State Department Launches Campaign to Dismantle International Criminal Court’s Threat to American Sovereignty

Why does the US want to ‘dismantle’ the international criminal court? By Kenneth Roth

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Martha Gimbel, economist and cofounder of the Yale Budget Lab, is a normal, cool person, but she has the same disease as me: she’s obsessed with the US debt. How much our government has borrowed. Like me, she thinks constantly about what the potential consequences of all that borrowing might be. So what happens when we’ve borrowed too much? How will we know if it’s happened? Is it already too much? How will my life change once we are beyond too much?

Further Reading

"Americans Are Already Paying Dearly for the National Debt", The Atlantic

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The US dollar is completely dominant all around the world. It shows up in 90% of all foreign exchange transactions every day. Pretty much anywhere in the world, you can whip out a dollar and use it. Central banks around the globe hold dollars in reserve. And for the past few decades, US government officials have started to take advantage of that global dominance in a new way: using the dollar itself as a weapon of diplomacy, of economic warfare.

Edward Fishman was one such official. He worked at Treasury and the State Department as they were pioneering these novel tactics, and last year, he wrote a book about it, called “Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare.” In this week’s conversation, we go deep on peer-pressuring banks and sliding manila envelopes across tables, how abstract chokepoints stack up against physical ones, and what this new diplomatic strategy means for a world at war.

This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.

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It’s really hot. Extreme heat is one of the more invisible – and pernicious – climate-related threats that we have to figure out how to live with. It claims 2.3 million lives every year, and reduces productivity 2-3%, for every one degree Celsius above 20 degrees. Kathy Baughman McLeod, CEO of Heat Resilience Action, has been trying for figure out what tools we can borrow from financial markets and from the world of insurance to help mitigate the economic effects. She’s created insurance for nature, helped start naming heat waves like we do for hurricanes, and created tiny insurance for laborers that pays out when it’s too hot to work – which enabled thousands of people to safely sit out of the heat without losing out on wages. Kathy shows us a useful way to think about climate risks, and how simple it can be to price them.

This episode was fact checked by Francis Carr.

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Liaquat Ahamed is a legendary and Pulitzer-prize-winning author and economic historian who is obsessed with scouring history to find the worst possible unforced financial errors. He wrote The Lords of Finance, about 1929, and just published 1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, which tells the story of a bond-fueled boom, bubble, and bust. The events of that era set the stage for the world we live in. Liaquat jumps into some conspiracy-theory origins and defuses them with facts. He’s a celebrity to Mary, and she wanted to sit him down to find out what—if any— parallels we can draw and lessons we can extract from this history.

Further Reading:

The Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed

1873: The Rothschilds, the First Great Depression, and the Making of the Modern World, by Liaquat Ahamed

Smile, by Charlie Chaplin

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Bestselling novelist Gary Shteyngart has spent the past 20 years predicting, with trademark pessimism and terrifying accuracy, the immediate future. His novel Super Sad True Love Story was written and published in the internet-as-savior optimistic early-2010s but predicts all of the negative consequences of technology that most of us failed to even remotely anticipate. The MySpaceification of formerly objective information, the concentration of influence, the factioning of identity groups -- he saw it all coming. How?? Can we also learn to see like this? Is it useful or terrible to have this kind of vision?

Further Reading -

Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shtyengart

Lake Success by Gary Shteyngart

The Russian Debutante's Handbook by Gary Shteyngart

Confessions of a Watch Geek, The New Yorker

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Did you hear the one about the lady in Austin, Texas who bought a marble bust at a Goodwill for $34.99 and it turned out to be a Roman antiquity? Well. When she took it to an auction house to sell it, she learned it had been looted during WWII. Which meant it had all kinds of history. To untangle what to do, that lady called Leila Amineddoleh, a lawyer who works to repatriate art where it "belongs" — whatever that means.

FURTHER READING

Goodwill Sold a Bust for $34.99. It's an Ancient Roman Relic., The New York Times

Sotheby’s Just Lost Its Lawsuit Against Greece Over an 8th-Century BC Horse Statue—and the Decision May Have Lasting Implications for the Trade, ArtNet News

Alec Baldwin's Legal Tussle Over a Painting, The New Yorker

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Xochitl Gonzalez is a bestselling novelist, but, to me, she’s an economist. Her books are about collisions between economic classes; she captures precarity and luxury, access and scrappiness, often with gentrification as the site of these collisions. She has this freakishly astute lens because, she says, she herself has “changed economic classes,” not once but three times — an experience she’s now writing about in a forthcoming memoir.

Further Reading:

• Last Night in Brooklyn
• Need Blind: A Memoir of Class in America
• “I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?”, New York Magazine
• What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get, The Atlantic
• A Year of Confronting the Gentrification of Self, The Atlantic

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