How did the boundaries between Europe and Asia come to be drawn in the first place? How were immigration and borders managed by the ancients in Greece and Rome? How do the stories we tell about our collective history in Europe shape contemporary political thought? And in an age of mass migration, who gets to be European today – and why?

Digging into the dark money that flows through Westminster, Kojo and Dalia find out what made Stephanie quit her job hiding rich people’s assets, why Peter couldn’t find anyone to publish his story about Labour corruption, and what normal people can do to challenge the global system of wealth extraction.

Listen to Death in Westminster, hosted by Dalia and Kojo Koram, in the Novara Media podcast feed. Follow Peter’s work through the Democracy For Sale newsletter.

In China in the 1990s, the arrival of the internet was swiftly met with the ‘great firewall’: a complex matrix of censorship, surveillance and state control. Since then there have been two internets: the World Wide Web, and the Chinese internet. ​

Aaron Bastani talks to China analyst Yi-Ling Liu about the cultures and innovations that have evolved in this separate digital ecosphere. How have feminist and LGBTQ+ movements manifested through the Chinese internet? How has the Chinese Communist Party negotiated the promise and threat of the internet, and now AI? And why is the West suddenly so obsessed with China?

Yi-Ling Liu’s book is The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.

In this episode Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder why hobbies tend to mutate into jobs, which hobbies are appropriate for commoners, whether men and women approach their hobbies differently, and why having a hobby is often framed as uncool.

It’s a weird-left spin on private pastimes with ideas from Engels and Gary Cross and music from Television Personalities and Shonen Knife.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

For fifty years, Alfred McCoy has exposed covert operations. In 1972 he uncovered the CIA and French intelligence’s complicity with the heroin trade during the Vietnam War – research that the CIA tried to suppress.

He’s the author of many books, most recently Cold War on Five Continents, which gives a comprehensive account of late 20th century geopolitics, decolonisation, and covert operations.

But now he’s warning of a New Cold War. Is it over for the US empire?

He talked to Richard Hames about the strange parallels between the 1956 Suez Crisis – a turning point in global British influence – and the 2026 war on Iran and the new Chinese World Order.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make life possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

With Michael Walker, David Wearing and Daniel Levy.

Today on Downstream, the ideas we call liberal or centrist are up for scrutiny, as Aaron Bastani interviews Adrian Wooldridge. Wooldridge is a liberal insider, having been a journalist at the Economist magazine for thirty years. His new book, Centrists of the World Unite! The Lost Genius of Liberalism is an account of his own sense that liberalism in 2026 is in a state of crisis. It must reinvent itself, he argues, or die.

So what exactly is liberalism, where did it come from, and how can we characterise it today? What was the historical relationship between liberalism and slavery? Why are liberals always so reluctant to acknowledge this aspect of their history? In times of crisis, do liberals always defect to the fascist far-right? And what must centrists do today, if they want their ideas to organise the 21st century?

They talked about Hannah’s landslide victory, her first few weeks in Parliament, and what a wealth tax would actually look like. What approach did Faiza and Hannah take with Reform voters when they went canvassing? What lessons should progressives learn from past failures? And what are the conspiracy theories swirling about Hannah online?

Listen to Death in Westminster, hosted by Dalia and Kojo Koram, in the Novara Media podcast feed.

Is compulsive scrolling a modern symptom of boredom? Why are spiritual practices often based around tedious repetition? Do bored workers make better organisers? What about the “stuckness” experienced by migrants, or the drudgery of housework?

The gang offer their theories of Boredism (and Post-Boredism) in a perfectly mind-numbing Trip, with ideas from Lukács, Gramsci, the Pet Shop Boys and loads of 1970s punk.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

So where are the massive organisations that big mobilisations brought in the 20th century? They don’t exist. For all the increased political activity, society hasn’t become much more organised.

This has produced what Anton Jäger calls ‘hyperpolitics’. He’s the author of Hyperpolitics: Extreme Politicisation without Political Consequences as well as a columnist at The New York Times and a lecturer at Oxford University.

He explained to Richard Hames how we got so isolated, why fascism isn’t even the biggest threat right now, and whether the worldwide organising around Palestine, anti-ICE uprisings in the US and the Gen Z Revolutions have already hurtled us into yet another era of political struggle.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

Together before a live audience at EartH Hackney, Ash and Aaron dug into the question of what has changed since the book was published. What can be learned from Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York? Does the left hate Britain? What do we need to do, in order to establish a ‘majority rule’? And is there such a thing as a middle-class dog?

Henry Ford gave his name to Fordism. According to Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, we’re entering a globe-spanning era of capitalism we might soon call ‘Muskism’.

Those two are the authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed. It’s a whistle-stop tour of the world that made Musk, from the fortress futurism of Apartheid South Africa to the financial fabulations of the Bay Area. And, of course, the cyborg world that Musk is now making for us all.

They told me about what they see as Musk’s ongoing land grab in space, about what’s really going on with his plan for brain implants, how our supposed climate saviour became obsessed with prepping for the end of the world, and how Musk came to define an entirely new way of making technology – and not making it, but at least making it seem like you might.

Do Your Own Research is a new show about the systems that make modern life possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

On Downstream with Aaron Bastani this week is Clara Mattei, professor of economics at the University of Tulsa, and author of ‘Escape From Capitalism: Economics Is Political and Other Liberating Truths’. Mattei’s PhD was on the relationship between austerity and fascism in inter-war Italy, and her book is a comparative study of Britain and Italy in that period.

What, they ask, is the relationship between austerity and fascism – both then and now? Is capitalism a ‘natural fact’, as its proponents would have you believe, or a contingent set of affairs designed and propped up by governments? And if capitalism is in fact a choice, how can we go about building an alternative?

Marek Poliks is the co-author with Roberto Alonso Trillo of Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits. Together, they are the co-hosts of the Disintegrator podcast.

He speaks to Richard Hames about the head-spinning world of AI economics, what the left gets wrong about technofeudalism, and what will happen to all of us bags of meat when capitalism can simply run itself.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are available from Dice.

Full credits and more information: https://novara.media/westminster
Produced by Planet B Productions and distributed by Novara Media.

Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are available from Dice.

Full credits and more information: https://novara.media/westminster
Produced by Planet B Productions and distributed by Novara Media.

Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are available from Dice.

Full credits and information: https://novara.media/westminster
Produced by Planet B Productions and distributed by Novara Media.

Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are available from Dice.

Full credits and information: https://novara.media/westminster
Produced by Planet B Productions and distributed by Novara Media.

On Downstream this week is the author and essayist Rana Dasgupta, whose latest book, After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order, tackles these questions head-on. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, they discuss: What is a nation-state? How did they come to replace the role of religion in the liberal era? Do states need their citizens to have rights? What are the most salient challenges to the nation-state today? And were the gains in workers’ rights of the last century a sign that progress and democracy will triumph in the end, or something more like a historical blip?

Following their Trip episode on Ecology, the ACFM crew take a closer look at Zack Polanski’s party as it nudges past Labour in the polls.

From the ’60s dream of ‘steady state economics’ to the anarcho-green convergence of ’90s rave culture, the Green tendency is mapped out by Nadia, Jem and Keir, with ideas from Playboy, Zack Goldsmith, David Icke and some sensible people too.

Follow our Spotify playlist of all the music discussed on ACFM and subscribe to the ACFM mailing list to get weirder and leftier.

Music by Matt Huxley.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Help us build people-powered media: https://novaramedia.com/support

And the changing shape of war means changing flows of money and power. The primes, which have dominated the military industrial for decades, now face competition from Silicon Valley companies like Palantir and Anduril.

But does their tech actually work? Or does it just drag the US into wars it doesn’t even know why it’s fighting?

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media mapping the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

This is the argument made by John Rapley in his latest book ‘Icarus Economics’.

In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Rapley discusses how the West’s growth has reached certain limits, most notably those imposed by the natural world in which we are all embedded. Has a focus on the wrong kind of growth in the West reduced resilience to shocks from the natural world? Are the majority of us already in a recession, despite what GDP figures tell us? And what can the Global North learn from the Global South?

On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar talks to Eric Schlosser about what’s changed since 2001, and what remains unreformed. How have we developed one food system for the rich and another for everyone else? Could the food industry operate – and America eat – without migrant workers? And did Eric foresee that marijuana edibles would become the new fast food?

Jem, Nadia and Keir find themselves dwarfed by the concept of ecology in this planetary-scale episode, which touches on cybernetics, systems thinking, ecofeminism and actor-network theory. Their ACFM guide to ecological thinking includes ideas from Rachel Carson, Peter Kropotkin and Donna Haraway, plus music from Joni Mitchell, Brian Eno and Marvin Gaye.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

On a global scale, we now make so much food that farmers will sometimes destroy it just to keep the prices high.

How is there so much food? And, amid all these calories, how are so many people still malnourished? Why is it suddenly all so expensive? And is it all about to come crashing down?

Charles C. Mann tells Richard Hames about the historical power of bird shit, the strange reason Indian scientists put wheat in a nuclear reactor, and how the genius who made modern farming possible also invented the gas that was used to murder millions in the Holocaust.

Music by Iglooghost

According to this week’s guest, this scandal isn’t an anomaly, but an inevitable outgrowth of the New Labour politics that have shaped Britain since Tony Blair took office in 1994.

Maurice Glasman is a Labour peer and founder of Blue Labour, a campaign group that unites culturally conservative values with left-wing economic policies. He sat down with Ash to talk about meeting Steve Bannon, Tottenham Hotspur, and what Marx got wrong.

On Downstream this week, Aaron Bastani talks to Oliver Bullough about his latest book: Everybody Loves Our Dollars: How Money Laundering Won. Bullough explains how money laundering, as a global phenomenon, is estimated to be worth trillions of dollars a year. What makes such industrial-scale crime even possible is, ironically, the basic infrastructure that permits globalised trade in the first place: a basket of important currencies, centring on the American dollar.

So while the White House talks about the war on drugs, or the war on crime, the currency being issued by the Federal Reserve – America’s bank – is what makes much of that crime profitable at all. It turns out, according to Bullough, that while elected officials talk tough, they generally fail to take necessary steps to curb the global flow of dirty money.

While completely eliminating laundering may never be possible, making a start is easier than you think. What is money laundering, and why should you care about it? How does it look different in places like China and Russia when compared to the United States or Europe? Is it really like the TV shows? What do vape shops, NFTs and luxury watches all have in common? And is rampant criminal activity much more common, and closer to home, than we are led to believe?

Our guest on Downstream this week knows a thing or two about censorship. Artist Ai Weiwei holds the unusual position of having been censored in both China and Europe. In conversation with Ash Sarkar, they discuss how a rising authoritarianism in many Western nations represents a fragility at the heart of the liberal political project. What was it like being interrogated over 50 times by Chinese authorities, and what kind of relationship did Ai Weiwei develop with his captors? Why did he choose to be an artist, rather than a journalist? And what is his art in service of?

On Downstream this week is Keynesian economist, Ann Pettifor, to discuss her latest book, ‘The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People and the Planet.’ In conversation with Ash Sarkar, they discuss the state of the global economy, and the ‘shadow’ banking system that holds $217 trillion in financial assets – beyond the control of any taxman. How did Ann predict, with precision and foresight, the global financial crisis of 2008? Will the AI bubble burst, triggering the next economic crisis? And is the Green New Deal – which Ann helped to create – dead in the water, or a transformative plan B that we can turn to when the next crisis invariably comes?

In conversation with Aaron Bastani, this week on Downstream we are talking about the ways we remember – and misremember – the 20th century, and how these events have a long tail that shape our present and future. How significant was the cultural revolution in China, in sparking anti-colonial struggles across Asia? How do the dynamics of the Cold War still dominate the mainstream media? And who are the substantial political figures and ideologies set to dominate the next decades of the 21st century?

On Downstream this week is investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald, who’s best known for helping Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the NSA’s global surveillance program come to light, as well as investigations that led to Brazilian president Lula’s release from prison.

He sat down in his Rio De Janeiro studio to speak to Aaron Bastani about the differences in Trump 2.0’s foreign policy, how the last year has seen unprecedented corporate consolidation of media and whether the US empire is flexing a novel expansionist ambition or if the lashing out of the last week is a sign of decline.

In the intervening years, the British state has aided Israel in its response, a response that organisations including Amnesty & B’tselem have called a genocide in Gaza.

Peter Oborne is a journalist and author whose new book, ‘Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gaza’, provides a forensic account and set of references defying anyone denying Britain’s fuelling of genocide in Gaza.

Yet despite having dedicated his career to it, by the day before Hamas’ attack in October 2023, Norman had all but given up on the cause of Palestinian liberation. His most recent book on the subject had sold 370 copies. When news of the attack arrived, Norman knew people would want to hear from him. He wrestled with what to say, eventually coming to the view that Hamas’ actions could be viewed through the lens of the slave rebellions in the early 1800s: heinous acts of violence borne out of desperate circumstances: acts that he could not condemn.

​In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Norman tells the story of his parents’ lives before the war, and the life they built in the shadow of the Holocaust. Could they speak about what they had been through? How did their experience impact Norman’s work and his devotion to the truth? What was it like arguing with his mentor, Noam Chomsky? And what is Israel’s endgame?

Jem, Nadia and Keir explain the emergence of Mainstream’s ‘radical realists’ – who include Andy Burnham and Clive Lewis – by exploring the lesser-known history of political tendencies that have shaped and split the Labour Party since the second world war.

Further reading: Jem’s recent piece in Tribune.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Help us build people-powered media: https://novaramedia.com/support

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian scholar whose doctoral thesis on Hamas was published in 2018 as a book, ‘Hamas Contained’. The book drew on interviews with the organisation’s leaders and their archives. Tareq’s goal when writing it was to ‘get out of the way’ and let the group speak for itself. Tareq’s newest book, ‘A Fire in Every Direction,’ is a memoir about growing up as a queer Palestinian man in Amman. The title is a reference to Tareq’s activist mother, who fought for Palestinian liberation from exile.

In conversation with Ash Sarkar, Tareq traces the group from its inception in the Muslim Brotherhood, to an armed resistance group, and then a democratically elected party. How did the group rise to power in Gaza? What were the conditions under which they adopted violence as a strategy? Did October 7 go as planned, or was there a miscalculation? And how is Tareq making sense of this moment in time, in the face of the ongoing genocide by Israel against the people of Palestine?

Cory Doctorow, this week’s Downstream guest, has a word for this phenomenon: ‘Ensh*tification’. He’s written a book about it too. In front of a live audience at EartH Hackney, Aaron Bastani sat down with him to discuss it, and the implications of an internet that just gets worse.  

Ensh*tification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It explains the destruction of the internet by monopolistic, multi-trillion dollar forces. Silicon Valley, once a source for technologically-infused optimism, is now destroying the information space we all share. The internet still brings immeasurable value, of course, but the cost-benefit for society, and users, is increasingly up for debate. And things are only headed in one direction. 

Doctorow argues that the rise of conspiracism, surveillance, addiction, and fraud is no accident. Instead, he claims, all are inextricably linked as Big Tech, led by some of the world’s wealthiest people, seeks to extract maximum value by undermining our very sense of reality. 

So why does our online public square increasingly resemble a dumpster fire? How come, where I could once follow friends and loved ones, I’m now bombarded by AI slop? And is this deteriorating experience of the internet now bleeding into the physical world too?

Over 90 minutes Aaron and Cory discuss the book’s most eye-opening case studies, unpicking the insidious tactics employed by the tech giants, and revealing just how unscrupulous these companies are. Their end goal is, in many ways, at odds with a civilised, democratic society.

Is ‘woke’ the new mainstream? Can there be a mainstream if we don’t all have access to the same culture? Is Tommy Robinson shifting the Overton Window? Why is nonconformity associated with coolness? And who engineers the ‘typical girl’? The gang answer these questions and more, with ideas from Raymond Williams and Perry Anderson, and music from Pulp and The Slits.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He joins Ash Sarkar fresh from his latest stint in prison, where he wrote a treatise for Your Party that sets out his vision for an emancipated future, and strategies for how to get there. But does Your Party still have potential? Does he still believe in sending activists to prison? And will Zoom calls be part of the revolution?

Sign up for Downstream in your inbox: novara.media/downstreamnewsletter

In front of a live audience at EartH Hackney, Zack tells the story of his first few months in office, and how the party’s plans from two months ago are already outdated. What are the core values, red lines and top priorities for the Greens in this new era? How broad a church will the Green party be? Is it a socialist party, or a party with socialists in it? And what exactly is their strategy to take on the floundering Labour party, as well as the looming threat of Reform?

Sign up for Downstream in your inbox: novara.media/downstreamnewsletter

In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Branko answers all of Aaron’s burning questions about modern economic history and where things are heading. How significant is the rise of Asia today, compared to the seismic historic shift of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century? What was the cause of World War I, and why don’t mainstream accounts understand the real roots of it? Who are the new elite, and why is it so hard to break their hold on wealth? And how likely is a conflict between China & the USA?

He tells Ash Sarkar about the cache of leaked emails that revealed the secret dealings of Morgan McSweeney – an adviser who’s risen through the ranks to become perhaps the most powerful man in the Labour party – and explains how McSweeney’s faction, Labour Together, sabotaged the Corbyn project.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

On Downstream this week is Serhii Plokhy, professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University. He offers a deep history of Russia and Ukraine, the conflict, where it comes from, and where it sits within the broader sweep of collapsing empires. He’s also got a new book out, about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy: The Nuclear Age. They discuss what is driving Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, almost four years after it began. What does Putin’s stated aim of ‘de-Nazification’ really mean? What role does Russia’s nuclear arsenal play in determining the shape of the conflict? And, in an increasingly multipolar world where history has indeed come back, is nuclear proliferation within the next ten years likely?

What expectations do leftwing voters have for Your Party? Does the Corbyn faction distrust the membership? Is Zarah a politician or a poster? And does ‘Yorp’ stand a chance of overtaking the ascendant Greens? Nadia, Jem and Keir analyse a turbulent few months in British left politics.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Help us build people-powered media: https://novaramedia.com/support

On Downstream this week is Vali Nasr, professor of Middle East Studies and International Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, and author of a new book, Iran’s Grand Strategy. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Nasr traces the roots of Iran’s foreign and domestic policy, from western imperialism through the revolution, and into the present day. What have been Iran’s failures and successes, domestically and beyond its borders, in the years since the revolution? Why does a country with no real military or economic base find itself enmeshed in so many conflicts overseas? Does Iran sincerely support the cause of Palestinian liberation? Why would it want nuclear capability? And as the revolutionary guard grows old, what will Iran do next?

This October marked two years since the high-intensity genocidal assault on the people of Gaza began, though the attempt to erase Palestine and ethnically cleanse its people began a century before. To mark the occasion, we hosted a live event at EartH Hackney to raise awareness and raise money for Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Kieran Andrieu is a political economist, journalist, and activist with six siblings living under Zionist occupation in the West Bank. Earlier this year, he joined the Global Sumud Flotilla, a fleet of over 40 boats and 500 activists, taking humanitarian aid to Gaza in an attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade of the strip. In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Kieran tells the whole story for the first time. What was it like being kidnapped at sea by amphetamine-using IDF soldiers? How were tactics of sleep deprivation used against them? How did the activists maintain morale in such circumstances? And what were the political victories of the mission?

Ahmed Alnaouq is the host of Palestine Deep Dive and the co-founder of ‘We Are Not Numbers’, an organisation that provides international mentors for Palestinian writers.

Yara Eid is a war journalist, born and raised in Gaza, who has worked for Amnesty International and been published in The New Arab.

Tareq Baconi is the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah, and the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance.

Aaron spoke to Ahmed, Yara and Tareq about whether the ceasefire gives them hope, what really shifted on 7th October 2023, and how the genocide has changed them.

All of the guests’ work features in the new book, Gaza: The Story of A Genocide, which is available from Verso.

Nadia, Keir and Jem discuss, with reference to the Paris Commune, Unite the Right, Abigail’s Party and Jem’s own party, Beauty and the Beat, and music from Fred Wesley and The Beastie Boys.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This week’s guest is philosopher and author William MacAskill. One of the leading thinkers in the Effective Altruism movement, MacAskill is the author of several highly influential books, including Doing Good Better and What We Owe The Future.

His work explores not only on how to live a life of purpose, but how we also shouldn’t discount the interests of generations yet to be born.

What new technologies, medicines, and workflows might AI invent? How could AI affect the distribution of power and resources across the planet? Will democracy, as a political system, be able to manage it? And what might it mean to live a good life in a world of intelligent machines?

They discuss the Hegelian Master-Slave dialectic, is patriarchy harmful to the perpetrators, as well as women? Did Tony Blair do more to privatise Britain than Margaret Thatcher? Does Keir Starmer have a plan?

And how does fascism end up destroying not just those it deems to be its enemies, but the motherland as well?

Sign up for the upcoming Downstream Newsletter here: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters/the-downstream-newsletter/ 

Get tickets for the next Downstream IRL, ‘Gaza: The Story of a Genocide’ (with Aaron Bastani) at EartH Hackney on Mon 13 Oct at 6:30 pm:  https://link.dice.fm/N3e5f1cbd3ee

On Downstream this week is Myriam François, a broadcaster and journalist, whose conversion to Islam 20 years ago has profoundly shaped her life in Britain. In conversation with Ash Sarkar, she tells the story of how she was politicised by a trip to Palestine in the early 2000s.

Does she think Britain’s move to recognise the state of Palestine will make any difference to the lives of people on the ground in Gaza? What is ‘whiteness’ and how do those who are included in it wield power in society? Is Islamophobia getting worse? And is an end to racism possible, without an end to capitalism?

Find all the books and films mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Help us build people-powered media: https://novaramedia.com/support

He talks to Aaron Bastani about how the dissolution of empire shape Britain’s relationship to Europe, how the Labour party switched from Eurosceptic to Europhile, and what Farage learned from Powell. Between The Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945-2016 is available from Pan Macmillan.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Did young people always worry so much about their futures? Has the currency of emergency been devalued? Does conservatism have an idea of the future? Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder what’s next with ideas from Max Weber and Kate Raworth, and music from LTJ Bukem and FKA twigs.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In a Downstream IRL recorded at EartH Hackney, Aaron Bastani speaks to Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge University, about some lesser-known aspects of the ancient world, as explored in her book How the World Made the West.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

‘Re-migration’ is not a new concept conjured up by the far-right, but rather something that would be familiar to many Europeans of a century ago. What would those involved in these tragedies think of the direction in which the world is heading?

To answer these questions and more, Aaron Bastani is joined by Lea Ypi, Professor of Political Theory at the London School of Economics and author of a new book, ‘Indignity’.

She spoke about the myths surrounding migration, the surprising relationship between the British state and Balkan Communists and her grandfather’s time with Enver Hoxha.

Professor Jason Hickel argues that the mindless pursuit of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth isn’t just a bad thing, but is leading humanity to catastrophe. He is an expert on what climate collapse actually means, as well as the solutions available to us that could mitigate the crisis.

He and Aaron Bastani discuss where the current growth forecasts will lead humanity, and the planet we live on. How does Palestine fit into the broader geo-political picture? Is green growth a plausible economic strategy, or just a greenwashed version of capitalism? And does degrowth need a re-brand?

Find the books, music and Dunmore Pineapple mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Why has China been able to roll out high speed rail while America hasn’t? Why does so much of the anglophone world appear to be living in the ruins of industrial society? How did the one child policy come into being and has there been any reparation for the atrocities committed in its name? And is China today fundamentally left or right wing?

He joins Ash Sarkar to talk about how media bias actually works, the history of the West’s support for Zionism, and how to deal with the weaponisation of antisemitism when it’s done to support a genocide.

Picking up where they left off last time they spoke on Downstream, Sarkar and Dalrymple had a wide-ranging conversation at the crossroads of empire, resistance, and the long shadows of colonialism.

From the rich histories traced in The Golden Road to the urgent realities of Gaza and the deeper fault lines of South Asia’s past, this was a discussion that cut across centuries—and continents.

Dalrymple brought his signature insight into how East shaped West, asking us to reimagine our sense of where power lay in the ancient world.

On the final episode, Richard Hames sat down with Aaron Bastani, James Butler and Ash Sarkar to talk about 15 years of Novara Media.

What have we learned from a decade and a half fighting a media landscape that insists nothing can ever change?

A new product will launch next month. Animated by the same complexity and depth as Novara FM, it will be available both on this podcast feed and YouTube.

Is it really true that the Baby Boomers stole the next generation’s future? Why do housing deposits fall out of the sky for some people when they turn 30? Is it a good thing that the middle classes are now being screwed over, too? And is class ultimately about identity, or access to money?

Nadia, Keir and Jem offer their weird-left take on growth, degrowth, radical abundance, ecomodernism and personal productivity, with ideas from Kate Soper and Kohei Saito and music from Minnie Riperton, 7 Samurai and Joanna Newsom.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Ash Sarkar travels to the James Connolly Centre in West Belfast to talk to Adams about the slow rise of his party, Sinn Féin, the emotional demands of leading a political movement, and his responsibility to the victims of IRA violence.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

A growing gulf between public opinion and state policy on Gaza reveals a liberal order in decline.

Richard Hames spoke to Simon Childs about where our society is going.

In his new book, The Golden Road, William Dalrymple busts that myth. He sat down with Ash to talk about the origins of algebra, Indian gems in Anglo-Saxon Britain and why Genghis Khan was scared of India.

You can see Ash and William live in conversation at EartH Hackney on the 29th July:  https://dice.fm/event/92dq5d-downstream-irl-ash-sarkar-in-conversation-with-william-dalrymple-29th-jul-earth-london-tickets?lng=en

Lewis finds that many of these workers are actually doing a good job, far from the stereotype of inefficient bureaucrats and the ire the likes of Trump and Musk direct at them. Why is Trump so effective at capturing public anger? Could Trumpism continue without Trump? What is Obama’s true political legacy? And what is the next major crisis?

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In this interview, Blindboy delves into the historical connections between Ireland and Palestine, going as far back as the 1920s when the two countries were occupied by the same units of the British army. How has this history shaped the politics of Irish rap group Kneecap? And how are anti-colonial folk songs being misappropriated by the far-right in Ireland today?

But the fight back has already started. The 2025 protests in LA sought to slow down enforcement of increasingly draconian migration rules.

Harsha Walia is the co-founder of ‘No One is Illegal’ and author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism. 

She spoke to Eleanor Penny about the global fight against borders – and what we need to do now.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching ‘ACFM’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Eskandar Sadeghi is the author of Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran.

He joined Richard Hames to explain the strategy and history of this conflict – and what it means for the future of geopolitics.

And, of course, remember that the purpose of this war was to distract us from the Gaza Genocide.

Slobodian tracks how neoliberal thought has changed since Friedrich Hayek’s vision of unfettered capitalism went mainstream 50 years ago.

In this conversation with Ash Sarkar, Slobodian talks about the reasons behind the new far-right’s obsessions with collapse, race, gold, and IQ.

Who are the current crop of neoliberals influencing politics? What is their vision of the future and how do they plan to get there? Why does Elon Musk have so many male children? And if Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ has now ended, will this new era offer us anything other than a frisson of excitement, before a time of deeper inequality ensues?

All this means that the working class actually already owns lots of the assets around us, from companies to houses.

But how much control do we actually have?

Michael A. McCarthy is the author of The Master’s Tools: How Finance Wrecked Democracy (And a Radical Plan to Rebuild It).

He spoke to Eleanor Penny about how we take back control of what is already ours.

This week’s guest was in the room where those crucial decisions were made, and argued that financial institutions should not be able to escape the consequences of their recklessness.

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and author of ‘The Road To Freedom: Economics and The Good Society’.

He sat down with Aaron to discuss the collapse of American democracy, his relationship with Milton Friedman and whether China is actually a socialist country.

Since the dawn of agriculture, peasants, farmers, landlords, and states have vied for control of the land.

Jo Guldi is the author of the The Long Land War: The Global Struggle for Occupancy Rights.

She spoke to Eleanor Penny about the history of that struggle, and how the struggle over the most basic condition of life is evolving now.

He joins Ash Sarkar to talk about Israel’s dehumanisation of Palestinians, Britain’s continuing support of Israel, and what lessons can be drawn from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. Alnaouq’s book, We Are Not Numbers: The Voices of Gaza’s Youth, is published by Penguin.

We need 1,000 new regular supporters to join our mission. Support Novara Media today: https://novara.media/support

Systems like ‘Lavender’ and ‘Where’s Daddy?’ reportedly speed up the process of tracking and targeting Palestinians.

The genocide’s brutality has been concealed behind the facade of technical neutrality.

So why are the companies working with the IDF also working with the NHS?

Eleanor Penny spoke to Matt Mahmoudi about the broken promises of big tech and war in the age of AI.

Since then, Vince has funded Just Stop Oil, become a major donor to the Labour Party, and bought Forest Green Rovers, the world’s first vegan football club. His next project? Creating an edible form of high protein-grass. He spoke to Aaron Bastani about his journey from new age traveller to multi-millionaire political player.

The next few years are critical. Help fund a new media for a different politics: https://novara.media/support

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Help us build people-powered media – pledge your support from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

But who was this titanic figure in the history of British racism?

And how did he shape the far right’s existential struggle to understand Britain once it ceased to be a formal empire?

Eleanor Penny spoke to Kojo Koram about how to understand his influence in a renewed moment of national decline, and how his ideas poisoned the very political waters we swim in.

We put the strategies of Pamela Fitzpatrick, Jamie Driscoll and Shockat Adam head to head: do we need a new party? Should it be led by Jeremy Corbyn, or someone new? Or do we just need more independent MPs?

They debate Reform UK, attacks from the mainstream media, and what class politics means now.

You can listen to the previous episodes in this series in this podcast feed.

With his new book, ‘Moral Ambition’, Rutger Bregman lays out a history of how societal change actually happens, and how we can learn from the agentic groups of thoughtful individuals who improved our civilisation.

In conversation with Aaron Bastani he discusses the true origins of abolitionism, what the left gets wrong about Elon Musk and why we might actually see the end of history.

The next few years are critical. Help fund a new media for a different politics: https://novara.media/support

Or, we could define it differently, as “the real movement that abolishes the present state of things”. That’s how Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels described it in the German Ideology.

Jasper Bernes is the author of The Future of Revolution, a book that aims both to clarify our ideas and to reignite our determination to make a fundamentally new kind of society.

He spoke to Richard Hames about the red thread of history, from the Paris Commune to Black Lives Matter, and on into the communist future.

In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt sets out his comprehensive diagnosis of the problems caused by the mass integration of smartphones into every aspect of most children’s lives.

In conversation with Aaron Bastani, Haidt takes square aim at Meta, Snapchat, and TikTok, the three companies he believes are wrecking childhood. They discuss whether targeting young girls with beauty adverts counts as abuse, and what it’s like going for dinner at the Zuckerbergs’. Haidt tells the story of how we are sleepwalking into this crisis, and shares his ideas for how to break out of it, before the damage is too great.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

How did we get to a situation in which the safety of the whole world is threatened by the occupation of Kashmir?

Richard Hames spoke to Kashmiri scholar Mohamad Junaid about the brinkmanship of India and Pakistan, what daily life is like under endless occupation, and, of course, The British Empire.

So how did he become one the most incisive commentators of the online left?

In conversation with Ash Sarkar, Jimmy The Giant discusses how he escaped the alt-right pipeline, why the establishment are so afraid of Gary Stevenson and why the left is consistently failing to connect with people.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Might it even win the next one?

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

But how much can one man, even one appointed by the Holy Spirit, do to transform one of the most powerful institutions in the world?

Richard Hames spoke to Matthew Sitman of the Know Your Enemy podcast about what role the church can play in our crisis-ridden age, and the contradictions of being a gay – and socialist – convert to Catholicism.

Are Nuns missing out on their lives, or living their best one?

And can attending church once a week provide a more healing alternative to modern wellness culture, not least because you’re forced to turn off your phone for an hour?

Seeking answers to all these questions, Ash Sarkar sits down for a conversation with Lamorna Ash, journalist and author of ‘Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever’.  They explore whether it’s true that the younger generation is searching for meaning in the teachings of Jesus, and what’s behind this unexpected turn towards religion.

They talk about Lamorna’s journey into faith, being queer at Bible Study, and why Christians – like communists – are so good at imagining a better world.

CN: This episode contains mention of suicide. For support with your mental health, contact samaritans.org.

Read Clare’s story about right-wing journalists infiltrating activist groups on Novara Media.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Final episode coming on 2 May.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

For 30 years, Kenneth Roth was the director of Human Rights Watch. In that time, his organisation exposed hundreds of human rights abuses and pressured governments to cease committing them.

On Downstream, Kenneth Roth told Ash Sarkar how human rights law actually works on the ground, and how exposure, shame, and the shaping of public opinion are essential tools for this work.

He also discusses his young life as a child of a refugee from Nazi Germany, how democracies are responding to mass migration, and the age-old question of whether political violence can be legally or morally justified.

Download the text and follow along as Nadia, Keir and Jem get their teeth into Make Way for Winged Eros! A Letter to Working Youth, published in 1923.Check out the AK-47 podcast mentioned in this show: https://kristenghodsee.com/podcast

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Help us build people-powered media – pledge your support from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

Episode 3 coming on 29 April.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

By blocking roads, climbing bridges and throwing soup at paintings, they made headlines – and became national hate figures in the process. We find out how four ordinary young people ended up as convicted criminals, at the sharp end of the government’s crackdown on protest.

Episode 2 coming on 24 April.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Help us build people-powered media:
http://novara.media/support

Help us build people-powered media: novara.media/support

Help us build people-powered media:
http://novara.media/support

And yet, argues Bahar Noorizadeh, the Islamic Republic has been, since before the 1979 revolution, a neoliberal state – and an imperial one as well.

It has suppressed the Kurdish and Baloch nations inside its own borders.

How can we show solidarity with feminist and national struggles inside Iran and resist the warmongering of the Trump regime at the same time?

Bahar spoke to Eleanor Penny about how to resist the appropriation of the feminist movement by the West, the question political Islam, and how feminist struggles are linking up from Palestine to Balochistan and Kurdistan.

It reconstructs events that states worldwide wants obscured, from Israel to the UK and from the Mediterranean to Ukraine.

In doing so, they have invented a whole new discipline of investigation.

On Novara FM, FA’s Assistant Director of Research, Samaneh Moafi, tells Eleanor Penny about their new report A Cartography of Genocide on the ongoing Gaza Genocide.

Aaron Bastani speaks to author, and Mail on Sunday columnist, Peter Hitchens. They discuss – from different perspectives – a country in crisis, the legacy of Thatcherism, and the elite obsession with Britain remaining ‘important’. If only they gave up such illusions, Hitchens argues, then they could focus on the country’s happiness and prosperity.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

But has there ever actually been an energy transition? Or do we just use more and more and more of everything?

As climate change accelerates, feedback loops in the climate system will start to speed it up even further.

All this is to say: we’re approaching the point when geoengineering will start to seem awfully tempting.

Richard Hames spoke to Laurie Laybourn, executive director of the Strategic Climate Risks Initiative, about what we do when that temptation arises.

In an extensive conversation about the shifting sands of global security, the author of The Racket also discusses the elimination of USAID, America’s U-turn on Russia, and the rearmament of Europe.

Downstream IRL: Israeli historian Ilan Pappé will join Aaron Bastani for a LIVE conversation at EartH in East London on 22 April. Tickets are available now on Dice.

Help us build people-powered media and set up a donation for as little as £1 a month: novara.media/support

She talks to Eleanor Penny about a vision of class struggle led by the ‘servant vanguard’.

Comments, corrections, suggestions? fm@novaramedia.com

But what if Britain’s relationship to the United States was, in fact, deeply damaging to its interests – and the living standards of its citizens? What if, rather than a partner, Britain was instead a vassal of the American empire? What if – despite the herd thinking of the establishment – Britain got remarkably little in return?

These arguments aren’t new, indeed they’ve been around since the Second World War, but as the Trump presidency explicitly embraces a different kind of geopolitics – centred around calculation and interest, rather than appealing to values – it’s worth asking: what precisely does the United Kingdom get from its relationship with the world’s greatest power? And is it time to try something different?

And if Britain is losing out in its relationship with America what does that look like? Is it purely economic, or has it compromised our political system too? Does Britain even have a military capable of acting without the consent of the White House?

On this episode of Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined for the second time by Angus Hanton, businessman and author of ‘Vassal State: How America Runs Britain’.

Comments, corrections, suggestions? fm@novaramedia.com

In a world still dominated by the American military, what does it matter? And what could we do instead?

Khem Rogaly, a senior research fellow at Common Wealth, has proposed a ‘Lucas Plan for the 21st Century’ that would put the fight against climate change, and not war, at the centre of European economic growth.

Comments, corrections, suggestions? fm@novaramedia.com

To discuss this, Aaron is joined by Jonathan White, Deputy Head of the European Institute and Professor in Politics at the LSE and author of In the Long Run: The Future as a Political Idea.

They discuss Dan Edelstyn and Hilary Powell’s Power Station, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, the Gaza Free Circus,
Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark, Blood of the Condor (1969), the writer Edouard Louis, Billie Holiday’s ‘Strange Fruit’ and the artist-activist Jay Jordan.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Help us build people-powered media – pledge your support from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

In The History of the World in 6 Plagues, Edna Bonhomme investigates how fear, power, race science and colonial violence have shaped the most powerful plagues and pandemics in history, shaping our societies in turn.

Comments, corrections, suggestions? fm@novaramedia.com

In 2025, with the continued rise of China to superpower status and a revanchist Russia, it’s tempting to think Huntington was right. Rather than a global civilisation – based on market competition and the rule of law – we are edging towards a world of multipolarity and civilisation-states. But what if civilisational thinking is itself mistaken? What if the idea of plural ‘civilisations’ is a product of the 19th century? Where does such civilisational thinking really come from? What even is a ‘civilisation’? And what, in particular, is ‘the West’?

Josephine Quinn is one of Britain’s most respected historians of antiquity. Chair of Ancient History at Cambridge, her most recent book, “How the World Made the West”, was a book of the year for The Economist, The Sunday Times and The Guardian. In this conversation Josephine and Aaron go from the very dawn of ancient European history, through the Bronze Age Collapse, to the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. How similar were those people to us? And what lessons does the distant past hold for the challenges of the 21st century?

David Adler is co-general coordinator of the Progressive International, a group that brings together forces from across the progressive left. He tells Richard Hames that far from being aradical change, Trumpism is the culmination of decades-long project: the Reactionary International.

Comments, corrections, suggestions? fm@novaramedia.com

While the days of Empire are long gone, over the last several decades the importance and comparative wealth of Europe has declined at an extraordinary pace. Indeed for many countries, from Britain to Germany and Greece, living standards have stagnated or even declined.

Now, in what seem like the final months of the war in Ukraine, Europe can no longer rely on security guarantees made by the United States. Technologically dependent on a superpower across the Atlantic, the countries of Europe are economically, militarily and politically weaker than at any time in centuries. All while China ascends to the category of superpower, and Russia returns to the politics of expansionism.

So how bad are things for Europe? Has its entire political class just been discredited? If so, what will be the consequences? Could Russia target other states, like Lithuania or Estonia, if it succeeds in annexing large parts of Ukraine? Is there a model Europe can pursue beyond vassalage to Washington? And how might it relate to China in an increasingly multipolar world?

James Schneider, Jeremy Corbyn’s former Director of Comms, argues for a new party. But who would it speak to? Would it be democratic and in what ways? And what could it actually achieve in the volatile terrain of British Politics?

Zack Polanski, Deputy Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, says we don’t need anything new. There is, after all, a socialist party in the UK already: it’s the Greens. And, unlike a new party, it already has everything it needs.

They spoke to Richard Hames about democracy, the challenge of combatting Reform, and a radical left vision for our collective future.

Lots of this episode was formed by comments we received on the first episode. If you’d like to shape future episodes in this series, please email fm@novaramedia.com

Now she has written her first book, ‘Minority Rule’. It chronicles the rise of identity politics – left and right – and how social attitudes changed as our economic model became ever more rigged over the 2010s. Has identity politics been damaging for progressive change? What does it get right? And what does left-wing politics look like in a moment when ‘woke capitalism’ has subsided?

But disability campaigners fear that people who don’t want to die might be pressured to let themselves be killed.

Ellen Clifford is the author of The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of a Human Catastrophe. She spoke to Richard Hames about one of the most fraught debates of our era.

Joining them to make sense of concepts like sovereign debt, structural adjustment and international ratings agencies is Heidi Chow, executive director of Debt Justice. She explains how and why countries borrow money, why Global South countries end up mired in debt, and how the climate crisis will affect national borrowing.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Help us build people-powered media – pledge your support from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

How, if at all, should the left reconstitute itself? Should everyone join the Greens? Or do we just need Mick Lynch to start a new party?

In this episode, Richard Hames is joined by Rachel Godfrey Wood, Joe Todd, and Oliver Eagleton to thrash it all out and arrive at the One True Answer.

We’re keen to hear from you on this topic! Lets us know your comments, criticisms and key strategic insights at fm@novaramedia.com

He wrote about that, and his time at Citi, in his bestselling memoir ‘The Trading Game’. In this, his third Downstream with Aaron, Gary talks about the rise of Reform, why the political establishment could be facing extinction; why Elon Musk’s wealth is a threat to democracy; and how the plan is to make you poorer – forever.

From credit cards to dowries, they discuss the reality and fantasy of debt, with ideas from David Graeber and Deleuze and music from Crass and Gwen Guthrie.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

But how did he go from Obama-era liberal darling to giving a Nazi salute at Trump’s second inauguration?

Historian of ideas Quinn Slobodian has traced the relationship between big tech and the far right for years. His books include Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy.

He speaks to Eleanor Penny about the world that made Elon Musk possible.

Quinn Slobodian previously appeared on Novara FM in late 2023.

This week, Kristian Niemietz, a director at the IEA and a long-time Novara Media hater, sits down with Aaron for a debate about trickle-down economics, why he’s a neoliberal, and who really funds his employer.

And who funds Novara Media? That’s easier to answer: you. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Brett Christophers is a geographer, author and former management consultant. According to him, it’s the commitment of parties like Labour and the US Democrats to the prevailing economic orthodoxy that has brought about the collapse of ‘woke capitalism’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Help us build people-powered media – pledge your support from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

But blockchains could also be used to empower local economies. And why should the left stay attached to a money system controlled by the state?

Sam Hart is a developer, writer, and editor of the Cryptoeconomic Systems journal. He spoke to Richard Hames about the promises and perils of the new era of blockchain technologies.

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Following Novara FM’s investigation into Die Hard, Eleanor Penny tackles another festive Alan Rickman vehicle with Nathalie Olah, author of Bad Taste and Steal As Much As You Can.

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media.com/support

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

So what will happen to this once deeply consequential world power, and what does its story tell us about the future of Europe and the upending of global power in the 21st century?

Wolfgang Münchau has a thorough understanding of this story. A writer for the FT on European and German matters for over 20 years, his new book Kaput tells us an awful lot about why Germany is in the state it currently is.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Stefania Maurizi is a journalist who worked with Wikileaks and Glenn Greenwald on the Edward Snowden revelations. She’s also the author of Secret Power: Wikileaks and Its Enemies.

She sat down with Richard Hames to explain how Wikileaks achieved so much, how the state tried to destroy them, and how they fought back and won.

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Ibrahim joins Ash to talk about the making of Hollywoodgate, which is currently available to watch in the UK on BBC iPlayer as part of the Storyville series.

*

People-powered media needs people to power it. Please consider supporting Novara Media by donating an hour’s wage per month, or whatever you can afford. Head to https://novaramedia.com/support

Is cultural production the same as political action? What’s the difference between an ally and a comrade? And why do some communists end up as right-wing turncoats?

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Now climate change is ravaging the Sahel region, and many of those nomads are being forced to settle down. And Russia and China have arrived to replace the long tail of French colonial domination. As has Al-Qaeda.

So what does this all have to do with the far-right anti-imperialism of Steve Bannon?

James Pogue is a journalist with an extraordinary range. He has reported from Mauritania and the Central African Republic, from the private gatherings of JD Vance and the militias of Oregon.

In this episode, he tells Richard Hames about how violence, money, racism weave together at the end of an empire – and perhaps the beginning of another.

For neuroscientist Ariel Zeleznikow-Johnston there is another alternative, however. He believes that the human brain could be fully mapped and digitally reproduced – with the first part of that process possible within a century. He talks to Aaron Bastani about living forever.

*

People-powered media needs people to power it. Please consider supporting Novara Media by donating an hour’s wage per month, or whatever you can afford. Head to https://novaramedia.com/support

With Labour in power, big changes could be afoot, but legalising sex work could harm sex workers as well.

That’s the view of the English Collective of Prostitutes, one of the leading sex worker right organisations in the UK. Their new report ‘Proceed Without Caution’ shows how the law keeps women in sex work, and keeps punishing them for being there.

Their spokeswoman Laura Watson joined Eleanor Penny to discuss poverty, power, whether sex work can ever be abolished, and the case for decriminalisation.

On this episode of Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined by author and railway engineer Gareth Dennis. They discuss the rationale behind HS2, why Hyperloop was always destined to fail and the real reason Britain has so many potholes. Plus: does every major city really need a tram system? And how come Britain is so bad at building new infrastructure?

Despite a long list of treaties attempting to prevent it, space is now a militarised zone. Nuclear-laden ICBMs and weapons systems on satellites are just the tip of a secretive iceberg of new risks, whose enormous power threatens us all. And next year Elon Musk, avatar for this new era of space expansion, will take up a key position alongside the Trump administration.

Eleanor Penny sat down with Daniel Deudney, author of Dark Skies: Space Expansionism, Planetary Geopolitics, and the Ends of Humanity to talk about the perils, promises and progress of our expansion out into our vast and indifferent universe.

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In this Downstream, Andreas Malm, human ecologist and author with Wim Carton of Overshoot: How the World Surrendered to Climate Breakdown spoke with Ash Sarkar about the delusions of climate change politics, if we should put a big mirror in space to reflect sunlight, and whether the politics of Colombia might be our best hope.

Recorded at Peckham Levels in front of a live audience on November 5th 2024. Set decoration provided by After Noah. Stills by Blaze A. Emin.

On this Trip, Jem, Nadia and Keir unpack the political uses and abuses of disruption and the ‘creative destruction’ inherent to capitalism. Featuring music from Björk, Disrupters and Stormzy and ideas from Joseph Schumpeter, Michał Kalecki and the Communist Manifesto.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Perhaps no one knows the world of online politics better than Joshua Citarella, an artist and political theorist whose 2018 book Politigram and the Post-Left kickstarted a flurry of investigations into new political cultures. His Doomscroll podcast looks at the development of online politics now.

As the results of the US election were still coming in, he spoke to Richard Hames about the disasters of vibes-based liberal politics, how the Trump campaign spoke to a bloodlust in the American people, and where the American left goes from here.

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Peter Heather, a historian of antiquity, and John Rapley, a political economist, talk to Aaron about the uncanny parallels and productive differences between ancient history and the present day. What do most historians get wrong about the fall of Rome? Was 1999 the peak of civilisation? And can anything stop western decline?

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

At the forefront of those investigations is Marek Poliks, a composer, theorist and co-host of the Disintegrator podcast, where he and Roberto Alonso explore the frontiers of human-AI relations with guests from all disciplines.

He joins Richard Hames to talk about what’s next for AI now that it’s ingested the entire internet, how the concept of ‘lift’ helps us understand how AI will impact capitalism, and why there’s no point asking if AI is capable of ‘creativity’.

Marek and Roberto’s book, Choreomata: Performance and Performativity After AI, is published by CRC/Taylor and Francis.

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He talks to Aaron to talk about the lack of a viable left in Israel, why nation-states haven’t worked in the Middle East, and why the British Empire is ultimately to blame. Pappé’s new book, A Very Short History of Israel-Palestine Conflict, is available now.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

One of America’s most energetic thinkers talks to Rivkah Brown about putting the pol back in idpol, understanding the IDF, navigating the US election, and why we might need to suck it up and ‘bear hug’ our enemies.

Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He sat down with Ash to explain how a bumper crop of grass powered the Mongol empire, how the two world wars irreversibly changed the planet, and to wonderif the global north can ever come to terms with the need to consume fewer resources.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This is what Richard Seymour, a writer, theorist and founding editor of Salvage magazine, calls disaster nationalism. He joins Richard Hames to discuss the current irruption of riots, pogroms and genocide, the global south’s incipient fascism, the far-right impulse towards a ‘heroic death’, and why the left must to harness popular resentments to bring about a ‘sober class hatred’.

His new book, Disaster Nationalism, is published on 29 October by Verso.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Dave Goulson is an entomologist and ecologist whose books communicate the majesty of insects and arthropods – along with a grave warning about their demise.

He talks to Aaron to Bastani talk about the critical lack of scientific expertise in government, the allure of dung beetles, and how to make your garden a haven for insect life.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Richard Hames is joined by Elia Ayoub, a Lebanese-Palestinian researcher and writer based in the UK, to sketch the political roots and strategic goals of Hezbollah.

He explains the group’s complex links with Iran and Syria, why the killing of its leader Hassan Nasrallah was a PR win, and how Hezbollah became Israel’s ‘best enemy’.

Elia is the author of the Hauntologies newsletter, the founder of The Fire These Times podcast and a co-founder of the From the Periphery media collective.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

She sat down for a remote conversation with Ash to discuss debt, Liz Truss and whether you really need to tax the rich.

You can watch the trailer for ‘Finding The Money’ here.

And you can learn more about the film and watch it in it’s entirety here. 

Jem, Nadia and Keir think about how industrialised workers were taught to prepare for death, why powerful men are obsessed with their legacies, why we failed to ritualise or remember the Covid dead, and their fear of being desensitised to killing.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Much of this apprehension stems from one of the most influential works of psychology ever written, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind. Unfortunately, Le Bon’s big idea – that crowds produce derangement and violence in even the most rational subject – was not based on any actual research.

So why the lingering suspicion? In his new book, Multitudes: How Crowds Made the Modern World, journalist and author Dan Hancox traces our fear and attraction to mass gatherings.

He talks to Eleanor Penny about how mass crowds take shape – from Nazi rallies and student protests to urban riots and insurrections – and how the state tries to stamp them out.

Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

To answer these questions and more, Aaron is joined by Olivia Cheung, author of “The Political Thought of Xi Jinping”. They discuss his early difficulties with the CCP, his treatment of the Uyghurs and how China is manoeuvring it’s soft power in Africa.

You can buy Olivia’s book here: https://novara.media/BuyCheung

In this investigative episode of Novara FM, series producer Richard Hames is joined by Simon Childs, commissioning editor at Novara Media, to expose the authoritarian turn inside the British state that is driving the crackdown on Palestine solidarity.

From Suella Braverman’s demonisation of “hate marchers” to Michael Gove’s attempts to redefine extremism, from Britain’s collusion with Israeli arms manufacturers to its special treatment for probable war criminals, this is a story about how the supposedly neutral institutions of the state have been used to silence a movement.

Featuring Huda Ammori, co-founder of Palestine Action, Ben Jamal, director of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Kevin Blowe from police monitoring organisation Netpol, and Tim Crosland from the Defend Our Juries campaign.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In his new book, The Golden Road, William Dalrymple busts that myth. He sat down with Ash to talk about the origins of algebra, Indian gems in Anglo-Saxon Britain and why Genghis Khan was scared of India.

He talks to NM’s head of audio Chal Ravens about the strange forms of resistance that emerge when even your boss has no idea how the system actually works. Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management and the New Struggle for Control at Work is available now through Verso Books.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He joins Ash to discuss Israel’s continuing annexation of the West Bank, the role of Christian Zionists, and the origins of western hypocrisy.

Jem, Nadia and Keir take a closer look at the make-up of the rioters and the reaction from the public, the media and politicians.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Produced by Matt Huxley.

In her forthcoming book, critic and journalist Sarah Jaffe looks at the many kinds of grief that shape our social and political lives, from family bereavement and mass death during a pandemic, to factory closures and the spectre of climate breakdown.

She joins Eleanor Penny to talks about the ghosts of the industrial worker, the fate of capital’s “sacrifice zones”, how Israel tries to weaponise Jewish grief, and what to do when we are denied the means of mourning our lost futures.

From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire is out in the UK on 10 October.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Someone with has a distinct perspective on this new world order is Anne Applebaum, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and the author of Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World.

Anne sat down with Aaron to discuss Putin’s rise to power, the problem of misinformation, and how Israel fits into the network of autocratic states who share little but a desire to consolidate each other’s power.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In her new book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood, literary scholar and historian Helen Charman tells the story of motherhood in the UK and Ireland from the 1970s to the 2010s. From Margaret Thatcher’s weaponisation of femininity to Stella Creasy’s support for the capping child benefit, she explains how the relationship between mothers and the state is never anything but awkward – and often violent.

Charman joins Rivkah Brown to talk about both the repressive uses of mothering and its liberatory potential.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Keir, Jem and Nadia consider all the different ways we avoid work, from holy days and vay-cays to grand tours and gap yahs. Does travel make fools of us all, or is there a smarter, more ethical way to go sightseeing? Is the promise of an annual getaway the only thing keeping the working population docile?

Featuring ideas from John Urry, David Harvey and Arun Saldanha, plus music from Dead Kennedys, Cliff Richard and Madonna.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Vast and destructive almost beyond imagination, mining is nevertheless essential to the green transition: without the minerals that we pull from the Earth, we cannot wean ourselves off fossil fuels.

Thea Riofrancos is associate professor of political science at Providence College and an expert on the politics of resource extraction, green energy transition, the global lithium sector and the Latin American left.

She tells Eleanor Penny about the contradictions that mining throws up for the left, how our mining operations have already started terraforming the Earth, and the surprisingly radical history of Opec.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

So what?

It’s part, perhaps, of a cultural change in Silicon Valley: a swing decisively to the right in a state famed for its contributions to radical politics, from the Black Panthers to the counterculture.

There’s no one better to understand this change than Malcolm Harris, author of Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World.

He explains to Richard Hames how military tech links the sunny settler colonies of California and Israel, how Elon Musk became indispensable to NATO, and whether or not computer have their own politics, man. 

Aaron is joined by Carla Denyer, co-leader of the Green Party and MP for Bristol Central, to talk about the challenges ahead.

Help us build people-powered media: novara.media/support

Should we cultivate humility to cope with political weakness? Is fear of humiliation a product of patriarchy? Can humility help us be better political thinkers and organisers? And who’s the humblest ACFM host of them all?

Nadia, Keir and Jem apply their weird-left lens to the topic with ideas from Nietzsche and Lyotard, and music from Erik Satie, Kendrick Lamar, Ravi Shankar and Joni Mitchell.

Find the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Follow our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

*

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Avi Shlaim is a historian and author of “Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew”. He joined Ash to talk about the Israeli right, Mossad’s covert operations in Baghdad and what it means to have hyphenated identities.

But if football is part of what makes England England, it’s equally part of the story of how Europe became Europe.

In this Pro Revolution Soccer season finale, Tom Williams and Juliet Jacques tell this story of oddballs, war, oligarchs, dodgy deals and footballing genius.

Along the way, they discuss how football relates to what is ‘pragmatic’ in politics, why Gareth Southgate is a bit like a good David Cameron, and explain the only certainty in the beautiful game: that there will always be more football.

Music by Matt Huxley.

He sat down with Aaron Bastani to discuss that achievement, Labour’s performance more generally, the success of other independents elsewhere – and what the future holds for party politics in the UK. Are we moving towards a different kind of politics? One rooted in community, local networks and public service?

Macron called snap elections, hoping to crush both the left and right. He failed. Instead, the far right briefly surged, coming top in the first round before a newly cohesive French left took the largest share in the second, decisive round.

Is this the end of the Fifth Republic?

Olly Haynes tells Richard Hames about the long crises of French politics, the absurdities of Macronism and whether France is heading for a fascist party in power.

Listen to our previous podcast on the French left, Tout Le Monde Déteste La Police (everyone hates the police)

They also process England’s shock win against Switzerland, TV pundits’ criticism of Southgate, and the silence around Cristiano Ronaldo.

Music by Matt Huxley.

Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

To discuss this, Aaron is joined by Angus Hanton, author of ‘Vassal State: How America Runs Britain’.

To find out why it feels like nothing works in Britain anymore, Moya Lothian-McLean talks to Dom Davies, author of The Broken Promise of Infrastructure. He explains how democratic ‘public works’ were replaced by neoliberal ‘infrastructure’, why colonial railways linger in our collective imagination, and whether Labour can get Britain running again.

Watch our rolling #ElectionSesh coverage on 4 July from 9.30pm on Novara Media’s YouTube.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

They also discuss the incoming Labour government’s vision for football and take a moment to dwell on England v Slovakia.

Tune in next Wednesday for the final episode in our Euro 2024 miniseries.

Music by Matt Huxley.

To discuss the world of corporate media, secret intelligence services and the problem with liberal think tanks, Ash is joined by Matt Kennard, head of investigations for Declassified UK and author of The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire.

To paint a picture of Britain at this historic crossroads, Eleanor Penny is joined by Novara Media co-founder and LRB contributing editor James Butler.

Watch our rolling #ElectionSesh coverage on 4 July from 9.30pm on Novara Media’s YouTube.

Support people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Plus, we talk about what’s going on with Southgate’s strategy. Has pragmatism become dogmatism for England?

Music by Matt Huxley. Design by Pietro Garrone. Produced by Chal Ravens.

This week’s guest is Israeli historian and author Ilan Pappé. His new book details the origins of zionism and the struggles against it throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. He joins Aaron to discuss Harold Wilson, Nye Bevan, AIPAC, Labour Friends of Israel and the Christian roots of Zionism.

Ilan’s new book is ‘Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic’

He joined Ash Sarkar to discuss leveraging Keir Starmer, the importance of council housing and why it’s vital that people vote for the Labour Party.

Support Novara Media: https://novara.media/support

From the 80s to the 10s, the Labour left endured almost three decades of isolation and exile.

The difference this time is that their ideas are still popular.

Will they be back once more, or have they now truly been left for dead?

To find out, Eleanor spoke to Andy Beckett, author of The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies

Throughout the twentieth century, Labour governments have been involved in some of Britain’s most disastrous colonial acts: the partition of India, the counter-insurgency in Malaya, and the Nakba.

So, what can we expect this time?

Eleanor Penny asks David Wearing, author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain.

Support independent journalism: https://novaramedia.com/support/

This week on Pro Revolution Soccer, Juliet Jacques and Tom Williams look at the connections between football and fascism, and explain how the same forces that allowed a tiny elite to take over the game are now reopening the door to the far-right.

Music by Matt Huxley. Design by Pietro Garrone. Produced by Chal Ravens.

Israel has swung hard to the right in the last few decades, with self-described fascists now in government. But a left remains, calling not just for a ceasefire in the war on Gaza, but for the end to the apartheid regime as a whole. What power do they have?

Comedian and activist Noam Shuster-Eliassi and +972 Magazine journalist Haggai Matar talk to Rivkah Brown about the terrifying consequences of resistance to the Israeli state, how Jewish ethnic minorities are treated within Israel, and how to survive in a society that treats ‘leftist’ as a slur.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

This week: the strange spectacle of politicians pretending to like football, the changing status of women and LGBT+ players and fans, what Starmer will do for the game, and England’s prospects after a flat showing against Iceland.

Music by Matt Huxley. Design by Pietro Garrone. Produced by Chal Ravens.

Digging into Susan Sontag’s formative 1964 essay on the camp aesthetic, Nadia, Keir and Jem think about how elements of the artificial, the theatrical and the sentimental come together in camp objects, from porn movies to Tiffany lamps to risqué radio comedy.

Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

*

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

So what explains this paradox: cheap green energy with incredibly slow adoption?

According to Brett Christophers, there is a straightforward explanation for this seeming paradox: the capitalist need for profits. And green energy projects are not as profitable as oil and gas.

So can capitalism address the climate crisis? Does the state need to play a decisive role? How is it possible that China is both a global leader and a laggard in greenhouse gas emissions? And is Europe over?

You can buy Brett’s book, “The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won’t Save the Planet” here.

That’s the urgent question Ajay Singh Chaudhary asks in The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. He tells Richard Hames about the strange new alliances forged by climate change, what we can learn from global peasant struggles, and the possibilities buried in a world coming apart at the seams.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

To discuss the caste system, political assassinations and state-sanctioned pogroms, Aaron is joined by anthropologist Alpa Shah, author of ‘The Incarcerations: BK-16 and the Search for Democracy in India’.

With ideas from Pierre Bourdieu, Norman Mailer and Paul Gilroy, and music from OutKast, Gwen Stefani and Miles Davis, the gang adopt a blank expression to explore the mysterious rules of this singular modern concept.

Check out all the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm
Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

*

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

There is so much more to gender non-conforming people than this academic, middle-class, distinction – so says Jules Gill-Peterson, a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of A Short History of Trans Misogyny.

In conversation with Eleanor Penny, Gill-Peterson reaches back into the past to explain what it means to be a queen, why trans women do sex work, and how to reignite the celebration of femininity as a cornerstone of feminist politics.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Plus: Ireland, Spain and Norway have announced their intention to recognise Palestine as a state.

Follow our election coverage on Novara Live every weekday at 6pm on YouTube, and subscribe to the podcast by searching “Novara Live” in your app.

Journalist Yuan Yang’s first book Private Revolutions provides just that insight, revealing the individual lives behind the increasing lines on the graphs. Born in China, Yang moved to the UK at the age of 4 but in 2016 returned to her home country to become deputy Beijing Bureau Chief for the Financial Times.

Now back in the UK, where she is running to become Labour’s MP for Earley and Woodley this year, she spoke to Richard Hames about how the disruptions of China’s recent history have set it on its present path and how the left’s love of China is misplaced.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

On this episode of Downstream, Aaron is joined by economist and author Grace Blakeley to discuss Henry Ford, Boeing and the nature of democracy.

You can buy Grace’s new book here: Vulture Capitalism: Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom

They discuss the differences between US and UK conservativism, the different factions that have jostled for supremacy since the 1950s, the rupture that Trump’s presidency represented, and what they expect from the upcoming elections.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

But is his latest success merely the swan song in a rollercoaster political career? Or is it the beginning of something much bigger? Could George Galloway’s Workers Party of Great Britain become a genuine threat to the Labour Party – particularly on issues of foreign policy – over the years to come?

Aaron Bastani speaks to one of the most controversial figures in British politics about the failed ‘War on Terror’, the wars that Tony Blair wanted to fight but never could, and Galloway’s increasingly public religious convictions.

Following ACFM’s recent Trip about Fascism, Keir and Jem speak to Aaron and Aurelien about the making of the “woke conspiracy”, how illiberal politics absorbs liberal rhetoric, and why the left has to stop falling for reactionary narratives – and give up “debating” the far-right.

Follow our Spotify playlist of all the music discussed on ACFM and subscribe to the ACFM mailing list to get weirder and leftier.

Produced by Matt Huxley.

How did this winning campaign fall apart? Why was the war on terror a crucial turning point? And what might the Palestine movement learn from its tactics?

Rivkah Brown is joined by Tom Harris, an activist with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and author of Your Neighbour Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement.

Novara FM now has its own inbox – email your comments, criticism and suggestions to fm@novaramedia.com

Teresa sat down with Aaron to talk about the untrained volunteers deciding children’s futures, whether drug policy matters, and how austerity will have costs for decades to come.

She’s also the author of In Harm’s Way: The memoir of a child protection lawyer from the most secretive court in England and Wales.

He’s just turned 90 and, in characteristically productive style, has three new books out this year. But where to start? To get a grip on Jamesonian thought, Richard Hames invites Sianne Ngai and Matthew Beaumont, both incisive critics in their own right, to discuss the breadth of his life and work, from postmodernism to the political unconscious to Jaws.

Sianne and Matt recommend that new readers of Jameson start with The Geopolitical Aesthetic or the essay ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture‘.

Read Sianne and Matt’s recent essays on Jameson over at the Verso blog.

Novara FM now has its own inbox – email your comments, criticism and suggestions to fm@novaramedia.com

Exploring how different political traditions try to explain fascism, they look for signs of the f-word in contemporary politics and play music from Woody Guthrie, Heaven 17 and Black Sabbath.

ACFM will be recording a live episode at How The Light Gets In, the philosophy and music festival at Hay-On-Wye in Wales, on 27 May. Listeners can get 20% off festival passes over at the How The Light Gets In website by applying the discount code NOVARA20.

See the books and music mentioned in the show: https://novara.media/acfm

*

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

But eating in London is also, like everything else in the city, shaped by its history as the capital of a globe-spanning empire.

How did the contraction of this formal empire change infamously terrible British cuisine? How did multiculturalism become an excuse for underpaid racialised labour? And how did landlords ruin Chinatown?

The essay collection London Feeds Itself, now in its expanded second edition, is one of the most ambitious attempts to ask all of these questions.

Eleanor Penny sat down with its editor Jonathan Nunn, also editor of Vittles, and contributor Amardeep Singh Dhillon to tuck into the history and present of food in the capital.

Novara FM now has its own inbox – email your comments, criticism and suggestions to fm@novaramedia.com

That’s the concern of Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, who join Eleanor Penny to talk about the history of medical injustice and environmental toxicity, and what can be done start the healing process. Their book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, is available from Penguin.

This episode first aired in August 2022.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Send your comments, criticisms, corrections and provocations to fm@novaramedia.com

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He goes head to head with Novara Live’s Michael Walker to explain the thinking behind Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis, out on Verso Books.

This episode was produced in a collaboration with the Crash Course With Michael Walker podcast.

*

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Send your comments, criticisms, corrections and provocations to fm@novaramedia.com

In his new book The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the Middle East, 1979-2003, veteran American journalist Steve Coll looks at British and American foreign policy through the lens of one man: Saddam Hussein. He sat down with Aaron to explain why it’s a mistake to avoid talking to your enemies.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

She joins Richard Hames to explain the thinking behind her new book – Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism – and what the effects of immediacy both reveal and conceal about our world.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Nadia, Jem and Keir investigate the mysterious connections between mind and body, reason and instinct. How did capitalism separate our minds from our bodies? Is a belief in intuition filling the gap left by religion? And will reclaiming our biomes be a win for anti-capitalism?

They digest their thinking with music from Björk and Olivia Rodrigo and ideas from Max Weber and Daniel Kahneman.

Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Books and films: Jeanette Winterson – 12 Bytes / 
Chinatown
 / Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski – The New Spirit of Capitalism / Daniel Kahneman – Thinking Fast and Slow / Jeremy Gilbert and Alex Williams – Hegemony Now / The Last of Us

Tracklist:
 Devo – Gut Feeling / FSOL – Stomach Acid / FSOL – Papua New Guinea / Frenzy – Fire in my Gut / Guts – Voyaging Bird / John Cale – Guts / Björk – Sweet Intuition / Olivia Rodrigo – Love is Embarrassing

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

*

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He talks to Moya Lothian-McLean about undoing stereotypes of Black Britishness, working with a disappearing archive, and the creative art of non-fiction. Revolutionary Acts: Love and Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain is the first book from Okundaye, whose essays on politics and culture have appeared in the Guardian, GQ and the London Review of Books.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He sat down with Ash to talk about serving in Northern Ireland in the 80s, conscription and why Israel’s plan for Gaza will not work.

So say Andy Burnham and Steve Rotheram, the mayors of Manchester and Liverpool. In a new book, they propose sweeping changes to fix this problem, from a Basic Law that guarantees equal living standards across the country to a transformed upper chamber.

Craig Gent, Novara’s new North of England Editor, speaks to them about their vision for the North and when we might see an Andy Burnham premiership. ‘Head North: A Rallying Cry for a More Equal Britain’ is out now.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

They discuss the death of Alexei Navalny and the prospects for Putin’s opposition, the impact of Nato expansion on Russian nationalism, and the demise of Wagner PMC chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose ill-fated rebellion strikes Wood as “one of the craziest things ever to happen.”

Apologies for the uneven sound quality in this episode.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

But to really understand how aliens influence our thought – and what our belief in E.T. says about ourselves – we have to go to the movies.

In this Microdose, Keir, Jem and Nadia sweep through a century of aliens on screen, from Martian invaders to Mulder & Scully to talking heptapods.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Films, TV & Books: H. G. Wells – The War of the Worlds / The Day the Earth Stood Still / Invasion of the Body Snatchers / Quatermass / The Midwich Cuckoos / The Blob / Solaris / Close Encounters of the Third Kind / Alien / The Thing / E.T. / They Live / The X-Files / Men in Black / The Host / Godzilla / Cloverfield / District 9 / Sector Zero / The Expanse / Arrival / Nope

Produced by Matt Huxley.

But beneath the fleeting prosperity lurked a culture of cruelty. It was palpable in politicians’ disdain for single mothers, in the media’s vilification of chavs, and in TV producers’ obsession with pointing and laughing at just about everyone – but don’t worry, it’s only a joke.

Juliet Jacques is joined by cultural critic Owen Hatherley and Novara Media’s Ash Sarkar to talk about why the Noughties were so nasty, from TV and music to architecture and politics.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Following South Africa’s case against Israel at the ICJ last month, legal scholar Rob Knox joins Eleanor Penny to offer an urgent account of the logic and limitations of international law.

What makes war legal – or illegal? Why do powerful states bother with international law? How does the language of humanitarianism end up producing violence? And can international courts do anything to protect the people of Gaza?

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In his new book Empireworld, journalist and historian Sathnam Sanghera rejects this “balance sheet” reading of history in order to wrestle with the contradictory legacies of imperialism. But does the obvious complexity of this history really make it impossible to make any moral claims about the empire overall?

Eleanor Penny finds out, asking Sathnam about our different interpretations of historical legacies, how Britain exported racism around the world, and the ecological impacts of empire, from national parks to quinine production.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Robeyns tells Ash Sarkar what a wealth cap could do for the world, how the global north is living off stolen money, and why she’s reluctant to call herself a communist.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Keir, Jem and Nadia discuss the connections between UFO conspiracies and right-wing thought, why some communists think aliens will bring about world revolution, and whether Fermi’s paradox means we’re not alone, with music from Sun Ra, The Carpenters and true believers Blink 182.

Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Books: Mark Pilkington – Mirage Men / Susan Lepselter – The Resonance of Unseen Things / Carl Jung – Flying Saucers / Erich von Däniken – Chariot of the Gods / H. G. Wells – The War of the Worlds / A. M. Gittlitz – I Want to Believe / Kim Stanley Robinson – Aurora

Music:
 Blink 182 – Aliens Exist / Sheb Wooley – The Purple People Eater / Sun Ra – Interplanetary Music / The Carpenters – Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Space / Pink Floyd – Interstellar Overdrive / Flying Saucer Attack – The Season is Ours / Radiohead – Subterranean Homesick Alien / The Byrds – Hey Mr. Space Man / Radiohead – Subterranean Homesick Alien

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

In the bestselling book The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, archaeologist David Wengrow and the late anthropologist David Graeber offer a radically different story of our social evolution.

Drawing on groundbreaking research gathered over a decade of collaboration, the book challenges just about everything we thought we knew about the origins of farming, property, slavery, democracy and civilisation.

Wengrow tells Eleanor Penny about the book’s 10-year gestation and what their heretical conclusions mean for our understanding of humankind.

Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

No longer are we in a world where, essentially, the US run the show. And this has huge global implications, especially for Europe.

Philip Pilkington is a macroeconomist and podcaster who co-hosts the ‘Multipolarity’ podcast. He sat down with Aaron Bastani to talk about what we get wrong about China, cheap high quality weapons technology and what we can learn from the Treaty of Versailles.

From hip-hop campaign boosters to new wave takes on British imperialism, from anti-landlord lyrics to a requiem for the post-war dream, it’s a narrated playlist revealing the manifold methods of musical persuasion.

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Music: Marlena Shaw – Woman of the Ghetto (1969) / Iggy and the Stooges – Ballad of Hollis Brown (1973) / Max Romeo – Rent Crisis (1974) / Stiff Little Fingers – Alternative Ulster (1978) / Elvis Costello & The Attractions – Oliver’s Army (1979) / Pink Floyd – The Gunner’s Dream (1983) / Bronski Beat – Smalltown Boy (1984) / Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel – Jesse (1984) / Midnight Oil – Beds Are Burning (1987) / Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy – Television, The Drug of the Nation (1991) / Asian Dub Foundation – Jericho (1995) / Le Tigre – My My Metrocard (1999) / Ms. Dynamite – It Takes More (2002) / Gina Birch – Feminist Song (2021) / The Coup – The Guillotine (2015)

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

Yet some of the most important revolutionaries in history have turned to literature in times of crisis. Mao Zedong started writing poetry during the Chinese Red Army’s retreat, adopting traditional Chinese forms to do so. Leon Trotsky, founder of the Russian Red Army, having just won the Russian Civil War, turned his mind to the question of literature in a communist society. And Friedrich Engels wrote that he had learned more from the novelist Honoré de Balzac than from any historian, economist or statistician.

For another episode in our series on class, Juliet Jacques and Nihal El-Aasar talk to Mark Steven about revolutionary literature and the struggle for a better world. His book Class War: A Literary History is available from Verso Books.

Help us build people-powered media: novara.media/support

Author and broadcaster Gaia Vince argues that we also need to focus on how we’ll deal with with’s already happening and about to get much much worse: huge swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable and 2 billion people needing to find somewhere new to live.

She argues the solution to this problem is a radical reframing of how we think about migration.

She sat down with Aaron to talk wet bulb temperatures, demographic aging and the Japanese nappy market.

Gaia’s book Nomad Century is available from Penguin.

Travel has changed almost beyond recognition since then: staged authenticity is the norm, and the places you’re most likely to visit are sourced from Trip Advisor and Instagram. Plus, tourism is now shrouded in environmental guilt – what the Swedish call ‘flygskam’.

Fifty years after The Tourist, Novara Media contributing editor Moya Lothian-McLean speaks to MacCannell about disaster tourism, how sightseeing became sacred, and our destructive search for authenticity.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He sat down with Aaron to talk about the future of Europe, his theory of white holes, and why we’re not actually living in a simulation. His book White Holes: Inside The Horizon is available from Penguin.

*

A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

Cultural critic Juliet Jacques and Pro Revolution Soccer host Tom Williams unite for a conversation inspired by Mickaël Correia’s book, The People’s History of Football. They talk about the commodification of football, how a politics of resistance has inspired teams from Cairo to Clapton, and why a supporter-owned club would ever want to sell up to Disney.

*

A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

From clouds brightening to prospects dimming, it’s a conversation with a surprisingly high level of off-brand festive cheer. This conversation was recorded live in London on 7th December.

*

A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

Unwrap to find sci-fi blaxploitation, comedy history, gobby glam-punk, Judge Dredd analysis, a fresh angle on Silicon Valley billionaires and much more.

Thanks for listening to the show and for all your support this year – we couldn’t do it without you. https://novara.media/support

Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters
Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

Is it a film about capitalism? Angels? Individual liberty? The subversion of community values? The trauma of the second world war? James Butler, co-founder of Novara Media and a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, and host Eleanor Penny reflect on their very first viewing (!) of the movie.

*

A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

Author and academic Brett Christophers sets out to answer this question in his new book, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World. He sat down with Aaron for a crash course in the world of asset management, discussing the dangers of financialisation, how UK infrastructure has been gutted by privatisation, and what we can learn from the case of the City of Chicago vs. Morgan Stanley.

*

A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

The gang confront a contentious topic in this Trip. Do “A to B” marches ever achieve anything? What about joining hands around an RAF base? Digging up roads? Refusing to pay your taxes? Is squatting a form of direct action?

They discuss Irish hunger strikers, Montgomery bus boycotters, Greenham Common women and the people that Suella Braverman calls “hate marchers”, with music from Lowkey, the Plastic Ono Band, Steel Pulse and more.

Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Music: Rolling Stones – Street Fighting Man / Dylan – Masters of War / Samba extract / Public Enemy – 911 is a Joke / Lowkey – Ghosts of Grenfell / Steel Pulse – Handsworth Revolution / The Plastic Ono Band – Give Peace A Chance / John Lennon – Working Class Hero

Book: Charles Tilly – Social Movements: 1768-2004

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

In 2019, translator and editor Basma Ghalayini asked 12 Palestinian authors to imagine their world in 2048 – a century after the Nakba that violently dispossessed them of their land and rights – for a collection of sci-fi short stories. Some of the dystopias imagined by these authors proved gravely prescient this year.

Ghalayini, who grew up in the Gaza Strip and now lives in Manchester, joined Eleanor for a conversation about literature, symbolism, land and memory in the days after the collapse of the ceasefire. She talked about survivors’ guilt, why disability crops up so frequently in the stories, her experiences at a peace camp in the ’90s and her vision for a peaceful future. Palestine +100 is available from Comma Press.

*

A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

He sat down with Ash Sarkar to talk about the failure of the Oslo Accords, the central role of Gulf monarchies in negotiations, and how Israel responds to being labelled as an apartheid state.

*

We need 1,500 more people to become monthly supporters in order to hit our fundraising target. Can you help?

Become a supporter from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

In this extended interview, they discuss the relationship between Hamas and Hezbollah, the use of human shields, and whether US pressure can restrain Israel’s “high-tech massacre”.

Subscribe to the Novara Live podcast for news and analysis five times a week: https://novara.media/live

*

We need 1,500 more people to become monthly supporters in order to hit our fundraising target. Can you help?
Become a supporter from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

Blindboy sat down with Ash for a freewheeling discussion about everything from Eminem’s ’90s style and the situation in Palestine to why cats are magical.

*

We need just 1,500 more people to become monthly supporters in order to hit our fundraising target. Can you help?

Become a supporter from as little as £1 a month: https://novara.media/support

But the philosopher Alberto Toscano, currently teaching at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, wants us to look beyond historical comparisons to think of fascism not as an aberration, but as an aspect of a much longer process of colonial domination.

He talks to Richard Hames about the uncomfortable connections between liberalism and fascism, drawing on ideas from Angela Davis, W. E. B. Du Bois and Theodor Adorno and thinking about racial fascism, conspiracy theory, climate denialism and the far-right in Israel.

Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis is available from Verso.

*

We’re up against huge power and influence, but Novara Media’s supporters keep us entirely free to access. We don’t have any ad partnerships or sponsored content.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

On the day of the ceasefire in Gaza, he guides Ash through the history of the Zionist project that created Israel and the basic facts of the 75-year struggle for Palestinian independence.

*

We’re up against huge power and influence, but Novara Media’s supporters keep us entirely free to access. We don’t have any ad partnerships or sponsored content.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

What sets these new cities apart from the skyscrapers and sprawling settlements that defined the 20th century? Quite a lot, as Richard Hames finds out with Canadian historian Quinn Slobodian. The author of Crack-Up Capitalism puts on his ‘They Live’ sunglasses to explore the history of special economic zones, Dubai’s ‘legal bubble domes’, and the appeal of these new cities to a global libertarian elite.

*

We’re up against huge power and influence, but Novara Media’s supporters keep us entirely free to access. We don’t have any ad partnerships or sponsored content. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

The MP for Coventry South sat down with Ash Sarkar to talk about the reality of being a Muslim woman in the Labour Party, her interactions with Starmer’s office, the Islamophobia she faces in the public sphere, and why the majority of her Labour colleagues voted against a ceasefire in Gaza.

Olah’s new book, Bad Taste: The Politics of Ugliness, is an expose of the industries of taste-making in an image-obsessed world, as well as a critique of the impact that taste has on our sense of self-image and belonging.

In this episode she talks to Eleanor Penny about the allure of minimalism, why posh people don’t care about style, the evolving meaning of the hoodie and our right to eat supermarket pizza.

*

We’re up against huge power and influence, but Novara Media’s supporters keep us entirely free to access. We don’t have any ad partnerships or sponsored content. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Brett Scott is an author and former banker who is deeply committed to evaluating the dangers of removing cash as a payment system. He sat down with Aaron to talk about Bitcoin, gold and the central paradox at the heart of modern libertarianism. His new book, Cloudmoney: Why the War on Cash Endangers Our Freedom, is available from Penguin.

*

Novara Media’s supporters keep us entirely free to access. We don’t have any ad partnerships or sponsored content. Become a supporter: https://novara.media/support

Jeff Jarvis thinks we should look to the early print era, when Johannes Gutenberg’s invention caused a moral panic across Europe, for clues to our current predicament. A media journalist and associate professor at the City University of New York, Jarvis recently published The Gutenberg Parenthesis, an inquiry into the spread of print in the 1500s and the bureaucracy, censorship and mass politics that followed.

He talks to Aaron about the connection between the early print era and the ’90s dotcom bubble, whether the book was the first commodity, how journalism fails in its mission to inform society, and what civil war will mean in the age of digital media.

*

We’re up against huge power and influence, but Novara Media’s supporters keep us entirely free to access. We don’t have any ad partnerships or sponsored content. Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Slavoj sat down with Aaron for a typically provocative, freewheeling and humorous conversation spanning ideas from Stalinism to Zionism to Eurocentrism. He explains why he’s a “law and order leftist”, why popular movements like the Arab Spring don’t excite him, and what he thinks of the deepening stalemate between Russia and Ukraine.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

What’s the difference between being still and being stuck? When does a campaign turn into a movement? Why do we talk about feminism coming in waves? How can you tell you’re approaching a tipping point? The gang turn such abstract questions into concrete history, with examples from punk to Corbyn, and from Daoism to degrowth.

Find our ever-expanding playlist on Spotify by searching “ACFM”.
Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters

Books: David Easton – A Systems Analysis of Political Life / The Free Association – Moments of Excess / Aristide Zolberg – Moments of Madness / Gilles Deleuze – Difference and Repetition / Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari – Anti-Oedipus; A Thousand Plateaus / Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine

Music: Curtis Mayfield – Move on Up / Hiroshi Yoshimura – Urban Snow / Gang of Four – At Home He’s A Tourist / Moor Mother – Meditation Rag / Björk – It’s Oh So Quiet / Tony Scott – Za Zen / The Raincoats – The Dance of Hopping Mad

Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481




Kevin Okoth, a political theorist who grew up between Kenya and Germany, believes it’s time to reacquaint ourselves with the revolutionary politics of ‘Red Africa’ – the title of his first book. Rivkah Brown talks to him about the unfinished business of writers and activists like Amílcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Andrée Blouin, and asks if the nation-state can still be a vehicle for a liberation.

They also explore the legacy of decolonial studies on Black America, whether Beyoncé is a vehicle for Afropessimism, and what historical parallels might be found in the concept of ‘Judeopessimism’.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

American journalist Vincent Bevins talks to Ash about the pitfalls of protest and what lessons we can learn from these movements, several of which he experienced up close while working as a correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and the Financial Times. Vincent’s new book If We Burn is the follow-up to The Jakarta Method, a political history of America’s role in Indonesia’s mass killings.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In this episode, Richard Hames follows JSO activists as they prepare for direct action on the road to the Bibby Stockholm barge. Talking to protestors, climate researchers and activists from other campaigns, he finds out about the complexity of ‘climate migration’, the possibilities and limitations of non-violence, and the kind of mental preparation required to commit to a campaign that could last a lifetime.

On Wednesday, 25 October at 7pm BST, Just Stop Oil will host an online migrant solidarity panel discussing the ties that bind climate justice with migrant justice. Find more details on the episode showpage.

Written and produced by Richard Hames. Music by Matt Huxley.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In his latest book, The New Leviathans, his attention turns to the changing fate of the west and the revival of feudalism, religious orthodoxy and ultra-nationalism. Aaron sat down with John to discuss the nonsense of centrism, the opioid epidemic and why Dune is the greatest work of science fiction.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Since then, Mishra has published several novels – including last year’s Run And Hide – as well as numerous powerful essays and non-fiction works exploring empire, globalisation, populism and the life of the Buddha.

He joins John Merrick on Novara FM to talk about his latest return to fiction and why novels are indispensable for anyone hoping to make sense of their time. They also discuss the culture of Hindu nationalism, the promise of socialist fiction, and why class is so often ignored by contemporary novelists and critics.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

He joins Ash Sarkar to discuss his eventful career in journalism, his experiences of reporting in Soviet Russia, the current crisis facing the Labour Party and the time he spent 13 hours getting drunk with Maya Angelou.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In the third episode of our series on class, Lynsey talks to Juliet Jacques about whether anything like social mobility is possible in Britain today. They discuss autodidactism, the political impact of ’80s pop, and how squatting, grants and the dole briefly subsidised a flowering of working class culture.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

As Jay Owens tells Eleanor Penny, dust might seem like nothing much at all, but only by paying attention to the tiniest particles can we really understand the scale of our impact on the planet and our own health. From 15th century sea coal fumes to fires at the Foxconn factory, Jay draws attention to the unequal horrors of pollution over centuries of capitalist production.

Dust: The Modern World in a Trillion Particles is published by Hachette.
Produced by Chal Ravens and Richard Hames. Music by Matt Huxley.

But it was even more nuts for renowned journalist and author Naomi Klein, who noticed that she was being constantly getting mixed up with another author: Naomi Wolf. Klein found herself drawn into a strange mirror world as she tracked her doppelganger’s journey from feminist academic and liberal darling to gun-toting anti-vaxxer and friend of Steve Bannon.

Ash sat down with Naomi to talk about her unusually personal new book, the environmental consequences of Barbie and the current state of antisemitism. ‘Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World’ is out now via Penguin.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

It all starts with Haitian Revolution and its contribution to the radical Enlightenment – a movement that sought to overcome the racism inherent in the other, liberal Enlightenment.

Malik explains how this schism is at the root of our present day confusion about race, and makes the anti-racist case against identity politics in conversation with hosts Juliet Jacques and John Merrick.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Music by Matt Huxley. Produced by Richard Hames and Chal Ravens.

Nick sat down with Aaron Bastani to explain how ‘Big Pharma’ is run like a hedge fund, why the contracts between the government and Pfizer were redacted, and who’s scrambling to patent magic mushrooms.

Help us build people-powered: http://novara.media/support

He sat down with Richard Hames in Berlin to talk about the impact of his ideas on the movement, the promise of eco-libertarianism, the necessity of gallows humour in a crisis, and whether there is a climate politics beyond “doomerism”.

Jem’s new book is ‘Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse’.

Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

Three classy thinkers join FM to investigate: political researcher Nihal ElAasar, cultural critic Juliet Jacques and writer and Verso editor John Merrick. They begin the series with an introspective session on the meaning of class today, drawing on their very different upbringings in Egypt, the home counties and the north of England.

The series continues in two weeks with writer Kenan Malik exploring the clash between class and identity politics.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

With help from Bakhtin’s concept of the “carnivalesque” and Bataille’s “excess”, the gang discuss hippies and punks, counterculture and commerce, and the role of Glastonbury in the national imagination. Music under discussion comes from Banco De Gaia, Hawkwind, The Magic Mushroom Band and more patchouli-scented wanderers.

Subscribe to the mailing list: https://novara.media/ACFMnewsletter
Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Music: David Bowie – ‘Memory of a Free Festival’ / Pulp – ‘Sorted For E’s and Wizz’ / Seize The Day – ‘With My Hammer I Break The Chains’ / Hawkwind – ‘Silver Machine’ / The Magic Mushroom Band – ‘Revolution’ / Ozric Tentacles – ‘Dissolution (The Clouds Disperse)’ / Culture Shock – ‘Stonehenge’ / Autechre – ‘Flutter’ / Banco De Gaia – Excerpt from Deep Live

TV: Festivals Britannia (BBC)

Books & articles: Mikhail Bakhtin – Rabelais and His World / Jeremy Gilbert & Ewan Pearson – Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound / Georges Bataille – The Accursed Share / Frederic Jameson – Archaeologies of the Future / Penny Rimbaud / The Last of the Hippies

Micha Frazer-Carroll is a journalist and the author of Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health. She joins Novara Media’s Charlotte England to discuss how her own experiences of madness and diagnosis fed into the book’s reframing of everything from disability and psychiatry to racism, abolition and work.

Addressing the heated debate around Micha’s recent Novara article on mental health diagnoses, they also discuss the impact of the rise in self-diagnosis, whether the working day is itself a kind of dissociative state, and if we’ll still be mad after capitalism.

Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

Trevor Paglen is an American artist known for investigating the invisible through the visible. His practice has taken him to Afghanistan to uncover “black site” prisons, underwater to photograph the cables that carry the NSA’s data, and to the Californian desert to photograph the 350 unidentified objects currently orbiting Earth.

Richard Hames talks to him about the art of the psychological operation (or psyop), the continuing legacy of MK ULTRA and, of course, aliens.

This episode contains descriptions of torture at CIA black sites in its first half.

Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

Whether reporting on East Timor’s independence movement or following the pipeline protests at Standing Rock, Goodman has dedicated her career to reporting the facts that go ignored by the mainstream media – even if it means putting herself in harm’s way.

Ash Sarkar talks to her about the state of independent media in a year of mass layoffs and bankruptcies. They also discuss arrest warrants, influencer-journalists, and what to do when Bill Clinton calls into your show.

Help us build people-powered media: http://novara.media/support

Ash Sarkar is joined by Novara Live researcher Steven Methven to delve into the long history of sex scandals, from antiquity to the internet.

Help us build people-powered media: novara.media/support

Following Keir’s recent Microdose episode with Malcolm Harris, they discuss the connections between self-optimising techies and the pseudo-science of eugenics.

They also talk about digital hygiene, the “Californian ideology”, why the Soviets didn’t invent the internet, and whether psychedelic drugs were the driver of Silicon Valley’s dominance.

Music comes from The Fall, Le Tigre and the very online Lil Pump and Macintosh Plus.

Join the mailing list: novara.media/ACFMnewsletter
Help us build people-powered media: novara.media/support

Music: Knife Party – ‘Internet Friends’ / Le Tigre – ‘Get Off The Internet’ / The Fall – ‘Telephone Thing’ / The Penguin Cafe Orchestra – ‘Telephone and Rubber Band’ / Wiley – ‘Eskimo’ / Hannah Diamond – ‘Hi’ / Grimes – ‘Oblivion’ / Macintosh Plus – ‘リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー’ / Lil Pump – ‘Elementary’ / FKA twigs – ‘Ride The Dragon’

Books and articles: Daniel Levitin – The Organised Mind / Alison Winch & Ben Little – The New Patriarchs of Digital Capitalism / Benjamin Peters – How Not to Network a Nation / Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron – ‘The Californian Ideology’ / Malcolm Harris – Palo Alto / Jeremy Gilbert & Alex Williams – Hegemony Now / Nick Couldry & Ulises Ali Mejias – The Cost of Connection

The Kids These Days author tells a story that connects the founding of California, the violent removal of its native population, Stanford University’s eugenicist agenda and the parallel emergence of Silicon Valley and the military-industrial complex.

Is the entire project of personal computing and the internet tainted by this brutal history?

Malcolm’s book, Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, is out now.

They also discuss the political culture of Dan’s hometown in South Wales, what Corbynism got wrong about class, why university graduates are facing downward mobility and – perhaps inevitably – the state of the Labour Party.

Dan’s book, A Nation of Shopkeepers: The Unstoppable Rise of The Petty Bourgeoisie, is out now from Repeater.

In her provocative new book Meat Love, writer Amber Husain plucks examples from Greek tragedy to bourgeois restaurant culture to interrogate our most well-meaning assumptions, revealing the empty promise of “ethical” meat. Does eating the whole animal make killing it OK? Can you really love a creature and send it to be slaughtered? And why would Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall want to cosplay as a peasant?

Amber tells Eleanor Penny about the cultural conditions that sustain our desire for flesh while devaluing both human and animal life.

Julia Ebner has been charting this shift through her undercover work for years, infiltrating neo-Nazis, jihadists and Covid-sceptics to find out how ideas spread, as detailed in her books Going Dark and, most recently, Going Mainstream.

She joins Aaron to talk about how sceptics become extremists, the rise of Andrew Tate, and what it was like to be on the receiving end of Tommy Robinson’s hate campaign.

So why is household labour stuck in the past? If technology won’t save us, what kind of political fix will? And why does the list of chores just keep getting longer? These are some of the questions explored by Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek in their new book, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time.

Eleanor Penny visited Helen and Nick at home in Surrey to discuss the impact of automation on our domestic lives, the fixation on the nuclear family, the possibility of public luxury, and how raising their own family has informed their thinking on the promise of the post-work society.

To discuss the evolution of antiracism, Aaron is joined by writer Arun Kundnani, author of What is Antiracism: and Why it Means Anticapitalism. They talk about the linguistic roots of racism, the misunderstood legacy of Enoch Powell, and the challenges of bringing white people into a coalition against racism.

Now, as an organiser of the Right To Roam campaign, he’s leading the call for free and fair access to land and water throughout England, via political advocacy and planned trespasses on private estates.

Jon tells Eleanor Penny about the traumatic history that separated commoners from the land, the dangers of a rural monoculture, and why the left needs to get comfortable with ideas about place and belonging.