Novara Media’s football podcast returns for another crack at the silverware! Every Wednesday until the Euro 2024 final, Juliet Jacques and Tom Williams provide political and tactical analysis of the tournament in an episode of two halves. This week: the strange spectacle of politicians pretending to like football, the changing status of women and LGBT+ […]
After investigating the politics of cool on the last Trip episode, the crew turn their attention to another distinctly modern sensibility: camp. 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 […]
Renewable energy technology is only getting cheaper. And yet it hasn’t increased its share of the energy mix for two decades. 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 […]
The right have ditched climate denial and found something worse. They’re doubling down on the exhaustion of people and planet alike, making us run ever-faster just to stay in place. Can we turn our collective exhaustion into a climate politics of rest and recuperation? That’s the urgent question Ajay Singh Chaudhary asks in The Exhausted of […]
The Indian election will be one of the largest the world has ever seen, with almost 1 billion people eligible to vote. It’s often said that India is the world’s biggest democracy. But what if that isn’t quite true? What if Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister for the last decade, has undermined the very building […]
What exactly is cool? Well, if it was that easy to describe, it obviously wouldn’t be cool. In this Trip, Keir, Jem and Nadia wonder if cool can ever be politically useful, and what happens when cool is used as a disciplining force. With ideas from Pierre Bourdieu, Norman Mailer and Paul Gilroy, and music […]
The difference between sex and gender is fundamental to how we talk about trans people. But what if it obscures the richness of life outside of gender norms? 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 […]
In the pouring rain and 20 points behind in the polls, Rishi Sunak has announced that a UK general election will take place on 4 July. Michael Walker and Moya Lothian-McLean report. Plus: Ireland, Spain and Norway have announced their intention to recognise Palestine as a state. Follow our election coverage on Novara Live every […]
The involuntary celibate community (aka ‘incels’) are often thought to be rightwing, white supremacist, and prone to violence. But how much of that is true? Ash Sarkar is joined by William Costello – a researcher whose work focuses on the psychology of incels – to discuss what we get wrong about incels, what incels get […]
No country has ever changed so fast as China. From the west, we see only the dazzling headline figures – 15% growth in some years. But it’s on the ground, in the huge shifts in the patterns of daily life, where the story comes alive. Journalist Yuan Yang’s first book Private Revolutions provides just that insight, […]
Common sense tells us that free-market economies maximise freedom and that planned economies, typically found under socialist governments, curtail it. But what if this is completely the wrong way around? 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 […]
George Bernard Shaw once joked that the US and the UK are “two countries divided by a common language.” Can the same be said of their conservatives? As we brace for a joint election year, Eleanor Penny talks to Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman, two expert guides to US conservatism via their podcast Know Your […]
George Galloway has been elected as a member of parliament for four separate constituencies – with only Winston Churchill beating him. Perhaps more remarkably still, he won on three of those occasions while not being a member of a major political party. Most recently, he became the MP for Rochdale in the north of England. […]
How do mainstream politicians and pundits contribute to the normalisation of far-right ideas, even as they claim to reject racism and populism? That’s one of many vital questions asked by Aaron Winter and Aurelien Mondon in their book, Reactionary Democracy. Following ACFM’s recent Trip about Fascism, Keir and Jem speak to Aaron and Aurelien about […]
In the ’00s, animal rights protestors nearly won their battle to ban vivisection in the UK, shutting down multiple breeding farms that were supplying laboratories with cats, dogs and guinea pigs. But at the last moment, the government made a dramatic U-turn, blocking their attempt to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences and throwing activists in […]
Teresa Thornhill is an author and former child protection lawyer. Throughout her long career, working for both local authorities and advocating on behalf of parents, she has been a first hand witness to how the system fails parents, social workers and, most importantly, children. Teresa sat down with Aaron to talk about the untrained volunteers […]
The exhortation to “read some effing Orwell!” is an old chestnut of the online left, whether ironic or sincere, or somewhere in between. But if we’re looking for a writer whose body of work truly anticipates the world we live in now – globalised, postcolonial, postmodern – we might instead turn to the American Marxist […]
It’s not what you know; it’s what you can prove. For years, Forensic Architecture has exposed state crimes against civilians, nature, and humanity. This week on Downstream, Ash Sarkar meets its director Eyal Weizman to discuss Israel’s settler colonial project, the police killing of Mark Duggan, and how the testimony of blindfolded torture victims helped […]
A lot of people are saying that fascism is on the rise. But what are we pointing to when we call a system, or a person, fascist? On this Trip, Nadia, Keir and Jem map out a complicated ideology, from its roots in 19th century industrialisation to its resurgence in ethnonationalism and eco-apartheid. Exploring how […]
London is a foodie metropolis: undoubtedly one of the best places to eat in the world. 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 […]
Centuries of colonial capitalism have reordered life on the planet and inside our bodies, from industrial farming and the uneven advances of modern medicine, to night shifts, chronic stress and inflammation. Has the system made us sick? That’s the concern of Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, who join Eleanor Penny to talk about the history […]
Abby Martin is an American journalist and activist, host of the interview series The Empire Files, and a co-founder of the citizen journalism website Media Roots. She joins Ash Sarkar to discuss her political journey after 9/11, working for the state broadcaster Russia Today, how Israelis really talk about Palestinians, and why she believes the […]
Why is it so expensive to rent in the UK? In a divisive new book, barrister Nick Bano places the blame squarely on price-gouging landlords, rejecting the conventional wisdom that calls for more new housing as a solution to the crisis. He goes head to head with Novara Live’s Michael Walker to explain the thinking […]
For a special edition of Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar is joined by philosopher, author, and one of the world’s most cited academics, Judith Butler. Their new book, ‘Who’s Afraid of Gender’ charts how a transphobic moral panic morphed into an all-our war on so-called ‘gender ideology’. Together, Ash and Judith explore how Britain became TERF […]
With hindsight, the wars waged by the US and Britain in Afghanistan and Iraq look like terrible failures, both strategically and politically: the Taliban are back in power in Afghanistan, and living standards are worse in Iraq than they were before Saddam Hussein. In his new book The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States […]
We’re living in a world of hurry and shortcuts, of intimacy on tap and just-in-time production. Immediacy, according to Anna Kornbluh, is the link between flow-states and Fleabag, between food delivery apps and a mistrust of political systems. She joins Richard Hames to explain the thinking behind her new book – Immediacy: Or, The Style […]
Peter Hitchens is an author and journalist whose contrarian takes on drug policy, education and foreign policy have found him occupying a singular place in the British media – with his brand of conservatism often angering audiences who would consider themselves staunchly conservative. He sat down with Aaron to discuss grammar schools, Gaza and Britain’s […]
From fecal transplants to the yoghurt-industrial complex, we’ve never been more absorbed in the workings of our gut. But can we trust it? 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 […]
Researching Black British history “often feels like a rescue effort, a race against time,” writes Jason Okundaye. In his first book, he narrates the mingled histories of seven astonishing lives in the Black gay community of South London during the 1980s. The narrative he pieces together from oral history, archival research and even gossip (a […]
Major General Charlie Herbert has stood out in recent months for his vociferous condemnation of Israel’s war on Palestinians. His media appearances have proven vital in synthesising a moral and strategic critique of war in which civilians are treated in a manner he characterises as unprecedented. He sat down with Ash to talk about serving […]
