For the first episode of Coming of Age, I asked Dr Tim McCarthy, a historian at Harvard, a question I can't answer on my own: will there ever be a time when everything is just?

His answer is honest. He hopes so, and he doesn't expect to see it in his lifetime. What follows is a conversation about the systems he thinks stand in the way, why he keeps working anyway, and why he reads even the present backlash as a strange kind of evidence that progress is real.

McCarthy is a historian of social movements and human rights. The views here are his, and they're worth sitting with whether or not you share them.

Chapters

00:00 The question

00:12 "I hope so, but I don't expect it"

00:24 The systems McCarthy says keep the world unjust

03:07 Not to dream, but to do

03:47 Leaving the world more just than yo ...