Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman on Steno.fm

Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

The New Statesman is the UK's leading politics and culture magazine. Here you can listen to a selection of our very best reported features and essays read aloud. Get immersed in powerful storytelling and narrative journalism from some of the world's best writers. Have your mind opened by influential thinkers on the forces shaping our lives today.Ease into the weekend with new episodes published every Saturday morning.For more, visit www.newstatesman.com/podcasts/audio-long-reads Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Tue, February 13, 2024
The UK’s leading romance fraud specialist
How did one detective take on an international network of romance fraudsters? This episode was written Stuart McGurk and read by Will Dunn. The commissioning editor was Melissa Denes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, November 11, 2023
The great private school con
They no longer have a stranglehold on Oxbridge and would lose tax breaks under Labour. So what is elite education really selling? At the Labour Party conference in Liverpool in October, the Independent Schools Council hosted a forlorn drinks reception: not one of the more than 40 MPs showed up. ‘We are not the enemy,’ one private school headmaster complained to a sympathetic Daily Mail . But if Labour does win the next general election, it has committed to removing tax breaks on business rates and 20% VAT on private school fees – raising £1.6bn to be invested in state schools. On top of this, Starmer’s cabinet (as it stands) would be the most state-educated in history – with only 13% having attended private school (against Rishi Sunak’s 63%). Can elite education survive – and cling on to its charitable status? In this week’s audio long read – the last in this series – the New Statesman ’s features editor Melissa Denes attends three school open days to understand how these winds of change might affect them. She also follows the money, calculating that – allowing for tax breaks - the average taxpayer subsidises an Eton schoolboy at a far higher rate than a state school one. As the gaps in spending between the two sectors grow, and society strives to become more fair, will an expensive education evolve into a luxury service rather than a charitable concern? Written and read by Melissa Denes. This article originally appeared in the 10-16 November edition of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this article, you might also enjoy The decline of the British university by Adrian Pabst. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, November 04, 2023
How Rishi Sunak became the first Silicon Valley prime minister
On 2 November 2023, Rishi Sunak closed his global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park by interviewing the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk. The mood was deferential (the PM towards the tech billionaire). Was Sunak eyeing up a post-politics job in San Francisco, some wondered , or calculating that Musk’s Twitter might be an effective campaigning tool come 2024? In this week’s audio long read, the New Statesman contributing writer Quinn Slobodian examines the origins of Sunak’s “fanboy-ish enthusiasm” for the billionaire tech disruptors. These lie in the publication of a 1997 business book, he writes: The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State , by the American venture capitalist James Dale Davidson and William Rees-Mogg, father of Jacob. The book has become cult reading among tech leaders, and influential on the alt-right: its world view of a libertarian internet and the rise of economic freeports and tax havens chimed with a wealthy elite who saw a chance to get much, much richer. In Sunak, Slobodian argues, we see the arrival of the sovereign individual in Downing Street: “a ‘two-fer’, as they say in America: both its first Silicon Valley prime minister and its first hedge fund prime minister”. Written by Quinn Slobodian and read by Will Lloyd. This article originally appeared in the 2 November 2022 issue of the New Statesman ; you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion by Sophie McBain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, October 28, 2023
Israel, Hamas and the unravelling of the West
What might be the long term impact of the Israel-Hamas war on global alliances? In this week’s audio long read, the New Statesman ’s contributing writer John Gray reflects on three weeks of bloodshed, beginning with the massacres of 7 October, and their wider consequences. An escalating conflict will empower Iran and Russia , he writes, as well as strengthen swing states such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar . The United States might abandon Ukraine , or dilute its commitment to defending Taiwan from China. And with a presidential election on the horizon, does the White House have the stamina for a protracted foreign war? Already support for both Israel and Palestine has become sorely contested across the West, as Keir Starmer faces pressure from Muslim (and non-Muslim) MPs in the UK, while Emmanuel Macron has banned pro-Palestinian protest. Egypt and Lebanon have said they will not accept Palestinian refugees. For Gray, the events of 7 October mark the point at which the post-Cold War order finally fractured. “We have entered a world of imperial rivalries like that before 1914, which ended in Europe’s suicide in the trenches,” he writes. If America rose to become the global superpower after the second world war, that influence is now coming to an end. Written by John Gray and read by Melissa Denes. This article originally appeared in the 27 October-2 November edition of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy listening to The Dawn of the Saudi Century, by Quinn Slobodian . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, October 14, 2023
Has your AI therapist got your back?
In May this year, an American woman sought the help of a chatbot on an eating disorders website. The bot, named Tessa and running on an evolving, generative AI, advised her to start counting calories. Perhaps she should get some calipers, it suggested, to measure her body fat. When it emerged that Tessa had given similarly dangerous advice to others, the bot was taken down. As countries around the world face a mental health crisis, exacerbated by the pandemic and a lack of human therapists, a new tech goldrush has begun. Can the latest self-help chatbots help meet a desperate need, delivering “microtherapy” sessions on demand? Do they have a place in disaster zones - or do people in crisis deserve human attention and support? In this week’s audio long read, freelance reporter and author of Sex Robots and Vegan Meat Jenny Kleeman talks to the people behind the latest incarnations of AI therapy in the UK and the US, as well as the technology’s critics. Written by Jenny Kleeman and read by Zoe Grunewald. This article originally appeared in the 13-19 October edition of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy The psychiatrists who don’t believe in mental illness by Sophie McBain Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, October 07, 2023
How Britain became a dangerous place to have a baby
What are the roots of today’s maternity crisis? Recent research by the Care Quality Commission has found a “concerning decline” in England, with over half of maternity wards rated substandard. Donna Ockenden’s review of Shrewsbury and Telford maternity trust found that, between 2001 and 2019, 201 babies and nine mothers had died avoidable deaths. In this week’s audio long read, the editor of the New Statesman ’s Spotlight magazine Alona Ferber traces the origins of this decline – from the advent of woman-centred care in the 1980s to today’s more frayed and divided landscape. Are austerity and political indifference the key factors, and does an ideological split over ‘natural’ and ‘medical’ birth play a part? “Thirty years ago,” Ferber writes, “when power moved from the institution to the individual, that shift was radical, progressive and revolutionary. It was about women’s rights and politics, as much as it was about health. But today the system is so stretched that the nexus of power is nowhere. It is not with clinical staff, nor with families. Instead, we muddle through.” Drawing on interviews with practitioners and her own birth experiences, she pieces together the elements of an ongoing crisis. Written and read by Alona Ferber. This article was originally published on 30 September 2023 and you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like Sophie McBain on The ADHD decade: what’s behind the boom in adult diagnoses Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, September 30, 2023
A year inside GB News: "We’re going to disrupt"
For today’s Audio Long Read we’re bringing you one from our archives, which is suddenly extremely prescient. This week GB News is in the spotlight once again, this time for broadcasting misogynist comments made by Laurence Fox about a female journalist, Ava Evans. The channel has suspended Fox, along with host Dan Wootton, and has apologised for broadcasting the comments. But this is the latest in a long line of incidents in which GB News has pushed the boundaries of what is acceptable in broadcast journalism. In 2022 we published Stuart McGurk’s investigation into the origins of the right-wing news channel, speaking to insiders working in the founding team including senior journalists, editorial and production staff, and the chief executive himself. Stuart’s article, which is both alarming and hilarious, sheds light on the tumultuous origins of GB News and provides context for its current battle to be taken seriously. This article was originally published online on the New Statesman in April 2022; you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also like Cancel culture comes to GB News , by Clive Martin. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, September 23, 2023
The philosopher and the crypto king: Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
At the time of writing, the crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is due to stand trial on 3 October 2023. He stands accused of fraud and money-laundering on an epic scale through his currency exchange FTX. Did he gamble with other people’s money in a bid to do the maximum good? In this week’s long read, the New Statesman ’s associate editor Sophie McBain examines the relationship between Bankman-Fried and the Oxford-based effective altruism (EA) movement. The billionaire was a close associate and supporter of William MacAskill, the Scottish moral philosopher who many consider EA’s leader. It was MacAskill who had persuaded him – and many other young graduates – to earn more, in order to give more. But how much money was enough – and what should they spend it on? Was EA just “a dumb game we woke Westerners play”, as Bankman-Fried told one journalist? In conversations with EA members past and present, McBain hears how the movement was altered by its enormous wealth. As the trial of its biggest sponsor approaches, will effective altruism survive – or be swallowed by its more cynical Silicon Valley devotees? Written and read by Sophie McBain. This article originally appeared in the 22-28 September 2023 edition of the New Statesman ; you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also like Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth , by Jenny Kleeman. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Tue, September 19, 2023
How Chile (almost) democratised Big Tech
Fifty years after Salvador Allende was ousted, might his greatest legacy be his battle with the emerging tech giants? On 1 August 1973, a seemingly mundane diplomatic summit took place in Lima, Peru. But there was nothing mundane about its revolutionary agenda. The attendees – diplomats from Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – aspired to create a more just technological world order, one that might have prevented the future dominance of Silicon Valley. As the Chilean foreign minister lamented even then: “500 multinational corporations control 90 per cent of the world’s productive technology”. Could a new international institution - a tech equivalent of the IMF - ensure that developing countries had access to all the benefits of technological progress? Six weeks later, Salvador Allende’s government was toppled, paving the way for General Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship of Chile. In this week’s audio long read, the author and podcaster Evgeny Morozov considers Allende’s legacy. Often viewed as a tragic but hapless figure, his government in fact oversaw a number of radical and utopian initiatives - many of them to do with technology. Might Chile under Allende have evolved into the South Korea or Taiwan of South America? Read by Catharine Hughes and written by Evgeny Morozov, who hosts The Santiago Boys: the Tech World that Might Have Been podcast series. This article was originally published on newstateman.com on 9 September 2023; you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also enjoy Would climate change have been worse without capitalism ? Download the New Statesman app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to our weekly Saturday Read email https://saturdayr
Sat, September 09, 2023
The prime minister and the AI that solved the climate crisis
After the extreme heat of summer 2024, which saw children stretchered out of their exams, Britain’s prime minister calls a press conference in Westminster Hall. He has one eye on life after office (skiing in Aspen, a big gig in Silicon Valley), but before he leaves, he wants to unveil something truly ground-breaking: a large language model that has been trained by the best minds to solve the climate crisis. In this satirical work of speculative fiction, the New Statesman ’s business editor Will Dunn explores the government’s love affair with Big Tech, fast-forwarding to the dying days of a Conservative government. Climate protestors have been cleared from the roads - but the tarmac is melting and people want answers. Could an advanced AI called Tom provide the prime minister’s moonshot moment? Written and read by Will Dunn. You can read the text version at newstatesman.com If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy Edward Docx reading Boris Johnson: the death of a clown . Download the New Statesman app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to our weekly Saturday Read email https://saturdayread.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, September 02, 2023
Summer of Light: a new short story by Jonathan Coe
In the summer of 1924, a highly regarded painter falls – or is he pushed? – into the canal while celebrating his exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Two young women are heard running away into the night. In this dazzling new coming-of-age story first published in the New Statesman’s summer issue , the award-winning novelist Jonathan Coe explores the relationship between artist and muse, female friendship and male cruelty. Written by Jonathan Coe and read by Tom Gatti. If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy Then Later, His Ghost: a short story by Sarah Hall . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 26, 2023
Escaping Eden: life after the Plymouth Brethren
For those who leave the ultra-conservative Christian sect, separation comes at great personal cost. The New Statesman’s assistant editor Pippa Bailey had always been curious about the Plymouth Brethren, ever since discovering that her maternal grandparents had left the group in the 1960s. What might her life have been like if they stayed? Who were the cousins separated by a doctrine of isolation from non-Brethren ‘worldlies’? In this week’s deeply reported and moving magazine cover story, Pippa tells the story of the breakaway group, from its origins in 1820s Ireland to its modern-day incarnation as a global church and effective lobbyist. She speaks to former members, many of whom mourn the loss of family and friends to an organisation they consider repressive. It’s a fascinating journey, even if, as Pippa writes, her grandmother has no interest in resurfacing the past: “After all, she says, it’s all part of the Lord’s plan, and He does not test us more than we can bear.” This article originally appeared in the 25-31 August issue of the New Statesman; you can read the text version here . Written and read by Pippa Bailey. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy How to build a language: inside the Oxford English Dictionary , by Pippa Bailey, or our reported feature by Stuart McGurk, A year inside GB news . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 19, 2023
In defence of counterfactual history
What if the rush to war in 1914 had been averted? What if the Berlin Crisis of 1961 had led to nuclear war? What if the liberal revolution of 1848 had been successful? A new exhibition in Berlin considers a series of momentous what-ifs, an intriguing addition to the canon of counterfactual history. In this week’s long read, the New Statesman ’s contributing writer Jeremy Cliffe assesses the value of such rival realities, as explored in fiction and, increasingly, on social media platforms and alt-fic online communities. In contemporary British politics, the tumult of the past decade has inspired a new cottage industry of counterfactual histories. Often derided as pure speculation, Cliffe makes the case for their usefulness and, from his home in Berlin, reflects on the city’s many ghosts. “History is about facts,” he writes. “But those facts include intentions, imagined futures and visions that shape actual events even when – much more often than not – they never come to pass.” Written by Jeremy Cliffe and read by Chris Stone. This article originally appeared in the 28 July-17 August summer issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also enjoy Thomas Mann, German identity and the romantic allure of Russia, by Jeremy Cliffe . Download the New Statesman app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to our weekly Saturday Read email https://saturdayread.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 12, 2023
What Simone De Beauvoir knew about loss, by Ali Smith
The novelist Ali Smith first came across the work of Simone de Beauvoir in an Inverness bookshop, aged 18 or 19, and was instantly compelled by her “tough, troubling” prose. In this week’s long read, Smith reflects on De Beauvoir’s 1964 memoir A Very Easy Death, a slight, visceral book about her estranged mother’s death. What happens when an existentialist, bound ethically to a thinking life, confronts the end of life and thought? Why does a writer who prides herself on uncompromising truth tell her mother she is not dying of cancer, when she is? Smith blends the personal and the political in an essay that grapples with De Beauvoir’s power to disturb and provoke, sixty years on. Written by Ali Smith and read by Anna Leszkiewicz. This article originally appeared in the 28 July-17 August 2023 New Statesman summer issue. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also enjoy Karl Ove Knausgaard: a personal manifesto on the art of fiction . Download the New Statesman app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to our weekly Saturday Read email https://saturdayread.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 05, 2023
George Monbiot: how I escape climate despair
There is one question the environmental journalist and author George Monbiot is asked more than any other: how do you cope? When your job is to report on the climate crisis, where do you find hope? Monbiot’s answer is a very personal one: he goes sea kayaking – alone, often far off the coast, with (if he’s lucky) a pod of dolphins or a flock of shearwaters for company. In this evocative essay from the New Statesman’s summer 2023 issue, Monbiot explores the sea off the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, his former home in Cardigan Bay, and his new home in South Devon – a coastline “featuring cliffs and rocky coves, clefts and chasms, reefs and skerries, sandy and shingle beaches and several estuaries”. He relives the dangers and joys of battling the waves in a very small boat, most recently with an underwater camera fixed to the hull. There is no permanent escape from ecological distress, he writes, from the warming seas and the waste pumped into them, “but for hours at a time, I lose myself”. Written by George Monbiot and read by Chris Stone. This article originally appeared in the 28 July-17 August 2023 New Statesman summer issue. You can read the text version here . https://www.newstatesman.com/environment/2023/07/escpaing-climate-sea-kayaking-george-monbiot If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also enjoy Rebecca Solnit on hope, despair and climate action . https://www.newstatesman.com/podcasts/audio-long-reads/2022/10/rebecca-solnit-on-hope-despair-and-climate-action Download the New Statesman app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to our weekly Saturday Read email https://saturdayread.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer' href='https://ac
Sat, July 29, 2023
The 1922 committee: inside the Conservatives’ assassination bureau | Audio Long Read
The Conservative Private Members Committee, informally known as the 1922 Committee (or the ’22), is the Tory confessional, its trade union and backbenchers’ common room. If that makes it sound chaotic (and it sometimes is) it is also the assassination bureau that felled Margaret Thatcher , and, more recently, three prime ministers in four years: Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Will it come for Rishi Sunak before the next election? In this week’s richly detailed and highly entertaining long read, magazine writer Tanya Gold reports on the secretive committee’s inner workings, hearing from decision-makers past and present about what happens when a leader loses the party’s confidence. “The ’22 can be turgid for months, even years,” she writes. “But people talk about Committee Room 14 during a leadership crisis as they might about seeing Bruce Springsteen, or a riot.” And over the next 18 months, they could be busy. Written by Tanya Gold and read by Rachel Cunliffe. This article originally appeared in the 21-27 July 2023 edition of the New Statesman, and you can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy The making of Prince William by Tanya Gold. Download the New Statesman app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to our weekly Saturday Read email https://saturdayread.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, July 22, 2023
How Saudi Arabia is buying the world
When Saudi cinemas reopened in 2018, for the first time in 35 years, they screened the Marvel movie Black Panther. Many saw parallels between the kingdom and the fictional world of Wakanda, as crown prince Mohammed bin Salman unveiled ambitious plans for modernisation and an economy that would diversify away from oil, investing in futuristic projects such as Neom, a half-trillion-dollar city. Saudi Arabia has since sought to position itself as a global investment powerhouse, focusing on tourism, sports sponsorships, financial services, green hydrogen production, and the electric vehicle industry. Long dependant on oil, can the kingdom transform itself into a major global force in a post-carbon future? In this week’s long read and magazine cover story, New Statesman contributing writer Quinn Slobodian explores the consequences of Saudi dominance on international politics, the climate crisis and our technological future. Written by Quinn Slobodian and read by Chris Stone. Download the app: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to our weekly Saturday Read email https://saturdayread.substack.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, July 15, 2023
The Spanish election reveals the future of Europe
Since 2018, prime minister Pedro Sánchez has led a surprisingly durable and impactful Spanish government, implementing progressive policies such as improved rights for abortion, transgender people and migrants. His coalition government has repositioned Spain as a European “pivot” state, a bridge between north and south, east and west. Its economy is predicted to grow faster than that of Germany, France and Italy. But will any of this be enough to keep Sanchez in power after the 23 July general election? He faces significant challenges from the conservative People's Party, as well as new alliances on the left – an increasingly fragmented political environment that mirrors trends seen across Europe, as identity politics, the climate crisis, and demographic shifts reshape many once stable two-party systems. In this wide-ranging essay, New Statesman contributing writer Jeremy Cliffe reflects on what Spain and its election tells us about the future of Europe. By 2030, he writes, “politics in many states will be defined by the normalised collapse of the cordon sanitaire between mainstream conservatism and the far right. It will be a landscape in which the left can only win by forging broad and canny coalitions.” If Silvio Berlusconi’s divisive authoritarianism presaged our present moment, Sanchez and his battles could point the way to our European future. Written by Jeremy Cliffe and read by Chris Stone. This article originally appeared in the 14-20 July issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you may also like A brief history of “woke”: how one word fuelled the culture wars . Subscribers can listen ad-free via the New Statesman app. Download it now: iOS: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/new-statesman-magazine/id610498525 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.progressivemediagroup.newstatesman&hl=en_GB&gl=US Subscribe to the New Statesman from £1 per week with our special podcast offer: https://newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Sign up to receive The Saturday Read - our weekly email highlighting the best writing from the New Statesman and around the web: <a href="https://saturdayread.subst
Sat, July 08, 2023
Is male fertility in freefall?
In recent decades, studies have shown a significant decline in sperm quality and count. The average sperm count has fallen by 62% since the 1970s, impacting male fertility – a factor that is often overlooked in the broader conversation about parenthood and the declining birth rate in developed countries. In this engrossing long read, New Statesman associate editor Sophie McBain talks to men who have faced fertility issues and the people exploring the contested science behind them. Are environmental toxins a key factor, or exposure to prescription medicines in the womb? Does a historic focus on female fertility mean our understanding of male infertility is relatively new? And why, given the potentially catastrophic consequences of a global baby bust, is there not more political will to engage with the science? Written and read by Sophie McBain. This article originally appeared in the 26 May-1 June issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also Sophie's other article: How did parenthood become an unaffordable luxury? Listen here: https://pod.fo/e/183b9b Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, July 01, 2023
What we learned from the Wagner mutiny
On June 23 the New Statesman ’s contributing writer Bruno Macaes visited Ukraine’s head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov in Kyiv. They discussed the progress of the war, Russian propaganda (Budanov had been declared dead or dying), the 2022 Nord Stream attack and Russian plans for an attack on Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Just three hours later, Yevgeny Prigozhin announced that his private military, the Wagner Group, would march on Russian army headquarters in Rostov-on-Don, as a punishment for its poor leadership. Shortly after midnight on 24 June, Prigozhin’s mutiny entered Russia and began marching on Moscow. By the end of the day, he had called it off. Why did Prigozhin do it – and why did he stop? Was Putin’s authority terminally damaged? In this on-the-ground dispatch, Macaes looks at the roots of the mutiny, as well as what it reveals about the weaknesses of the Russian state: “It should,” he writes, “be regarded as a laboratory test for understanding Putin and his regime, and inform Western actions for what remains of the war in Ukraine .” Written by Bruno Macaes and read by Will Lloyd. This article originally appeared in the 30 June-6 July issue of the New Statesman . You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also like What drives Emmanuel Macron? By Jeremy Cliffe Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 24, 2023
A warning from the godfathers of AI
On 31 March this year, the British scientist Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google, where he had directed AI research for a decade. Artificial intelligence, he argued, had reached the point where it could rapidly surpass human intelligence, and potentially take control: it was now an existential risk. One of the three ‘godfathers of AI’, Hinton won the Turing Award, the Nobel of computing, in 2018. Now the three scientists who share the award are divided: Yoshua Bengio shares Hinton’s fears and is calling for caution, while Yann LeCun believes AI will bring positive change. In this New Statesman cover story, Harry Lambert visits Hinton at his home in London for a fascinating extended profile of the man at the heart of today’s debate about AI. He talks to Hinton’s critics, who might disagree on the pace of change but agree that further research and oversight are needed. Are we looking at an existential threat, humanity’s salvation, or both? This article originally appeared in the 24 June issue of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here . Written and read by Harry Lambert. If you enjoyed listening to this, you might like Margaret Atwood: why I don’t write utopias . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 17, 2023
The risky rise of medical self-diagnosis
Recent years have seen a proliferation of health charities in the UK, raising awareness and funds - but also contributing to impossible demands on the NHS. Is too much self-diagnosis creating unnecessary anxiety, and even leading to harmful interventions? How sick are we really? In this week’s long read, the New Statesman ’s medical editor Dr Phil Whitaker examines the unintended consequences of the boom in awareness campaigns, drawing on several personal stories. What have been the impacts of post-pandemic NHS initiatives such as “Help Us Help You”, or the nationwide prompt to see a GP simply if something doesn’t “feel right” ? Whitaker looks at the economic forces at work: the pharmaceutical companies who benefit and the rise of the preventative health industry, with its high-street blood tests and liquid biopsies. We ignore these shifts at our peril, he argues: if the NHS is to survive we need to understand our health, and our health services, better. This article originally appeared in the 16 June edition of the New Statesman . You can read the text version here . Phil Whitaker’s new book, “What is a Doctor?”, will be published by Canongate in July. Written by Phil Whitaker and read by Adrian Bradley. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also enjoy A brief history of woke: how one little word fuelled the culture wars . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 10, 2023
How did parenthood become an unaffordable luxury?
The UK is now one of the most expensive places in the developed world to have a baby. Our childcare costs are the highest, with a full-time nursery place for a two-year-old costing £15,000 a year (and much more in London). A recent survey found that six in ten women who have an abortion cited childcare costs as one of their reasons, while one in four parents were cutting back on essentials such as food and clothing to make ends meet. “It is hard to fully account for the loss and disappointment, the sense of stuckness, among many people in their twenties and thirties,” writes New Statesman associate editor (and mother of three) Sophie McBain in this week’s richly reported and often personal audio long read. She looks at the costs to the UK economy (one think tank put this at £27bn a year), as well as what the current crisis says about our relationship with work and care. Can this government – or a future Labour one – reimagine parenthood entirely? What would that look like? This article originally appeared in the 22 March 2023 issue of the magazine, and you can read the full text here . Written and read by Sophie McBain. If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might like The psychiatrists who don’t believe in mental illness . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 03, 2023
How the rich got richer: welcome to the age of ‘greedflation’
In a bid to curb inflation, the Bank of England has raised interest rates 12 consecutive times – but the cost of goods continues to rise. The poorer have been hit hardest, as the price of household staples such as bread and milk rockets. Meanwhile some of the world’s biggest corporations have been “rebuilding their margins”: Starbucks increased its operating margin to 19.1 per cent last quarter (with takeaway coffee up 11 per cent); McDonalds, Tesco and other supermarket chains are also making higher profits on higher prices What is driving today’s current cycle of greedflation? Usually ,when a company’s costs rise, its profit margins fall. In this week’s long read, the New Statesman ’s business editor Will Dunn examines the economic forces at play, explores proposed solutions, and explains how ‘greedflation’ worsens inequality. Written and read by Will Dunn. This article originally appeared in the 2-8 June edition of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy listening to The great housing con by Will Dunn. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 27, 2023
Inside the Conservative party’s radical right
May 2023 saw two significant gatherings of the Tory right: the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) in Bournemouth, and the National Conservative Conference in London. The latter was organised by the US-based think tank the Edmund Burke Foundation, and drew heavily on its ideas about family, faith and the failures of globalism and liberal individualism. The former was emphatically not a ‘Bring Back Boris’ convention (the ex-prime minister did not attend), though it numbered several of his political cheerleaders and delegates nostalgic for the boosterism of the Johnson years. In this week’s long read, the New Statesman ’s commissioning editor and writer Will Lloyd attends both conferences, and explores the origins of their discontent. Is he witnessing “the final crack-up of British conservatism, or the birth of a new, harder-edged ideological programme that will dominate the party for years to come”? Will American populism shape the next generation of Tories? Through conversations with ministers, delegates, journalists and assorted hangers-on, Lloyd pieces together a darkly entertaining portrait of the Conservative right. Written and read by Will Lloyd. This article originally appeared in the 26 May-2 June edition of the New Statesman. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this, you might also enjoy listening to The strange death of moderate conservatism by Jeremy Cliffe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 20, 2023
‘It’s a state of terror’: inside Haiti’s descent into chaos
In May 2023, the UN reported that 600 people had been killed in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince in the previous month alone – victims of gang violence and the near total collapse of law and order. In April the UN secretary-general, António Guterres, warned that insecurity in the country had “reached levels comparable to countries in armed conflict” and called for the deployment of an international force. In this powerful reported piece, freelance writer and former Haiti resident Pooja Bhatia talks to contacts on the ground, as well as historians and US State Department officials. She traces the origins of the current crisis through successive governments – from Papa and Baby Doc to Jovenel Moise - and through waves of US intervention. Between 2004 and 2017, UN peacekeeping forces brought cholera and 10,000 deaths to the country. Today cholera is back, with 40,000 suspected cases since October 2022. Against a backdrop of escalating violence and political corruption, many Haitians have come to see escape to the US (under Joe Biden’s “humanitarian parole programme”) or foreign intervention as the only way forward. But will any nation step up? This article was originally published in the 12-18 May issue of the New Statesman magazine. You can read the text version here . Written by Pooja Bhatia and read by the New Statesman ’s global affairs editor Katie Stallard. If you liked listening to this episode, you might also enjoy A journey through Ukraine at war . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 13, 2023
Why Liverpool bet big on Eurovision
Liverpool has a rich musical history, from the Beatles to Echo and the Bunnymen, and beat six other British cities to become the 2023 host of Eurovision. Can the annual jamboree of geopolitics and high camp help the city overcome recent scandals? In this entertaining long read, the New Statesman ’s culture writer Kate Mossman visits the city and meets contestants from Moldova, Beatles tour guides and Brian Nash of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who believes that successive councils have “done more damage to this town than the Luftwaffe”. Where does Liverpool’s “casual musicality” come from? Will Sonia perform at the opening ceremony? All is revealed as the city prepares for the party it hopes will revive its cultural fortunes. This article was originally published in the 12-18 May 2023 issue of the New Statesman . You can read the text version here . Written by Kate Mossman and read by Anna Leszkiewicz. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy listening to I was Joni Mitchell’s “Carey” . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 06, 2023
Inside the mind of King Charles III
Since 1993, the king has been visiting a village in deepest Romania – once a year, alone. He owns two houses there, and is revered by the locals, for whom he has installed a sewage system and worked to protect their traditional way of life. What draws him there? In this fascinating and deeply reported long read, New Statesman commissioning editor Will Lloyd traces the roots of the king’s obsession – from his often lonely childhood, through an unhappy marriage and a forceful rejection of modernity. Is there a darker side to his enthusiasm for green policy initiatives – a more troubling engagement with the past? The answer lies in Transylvania. Written and read by Will Lloyd. This article was originally published in the New Statesman 5-11 May 2023 issue. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like listening to What is left of Princess Diana? or The making of Prince William . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 29, 2023
The slow, sad death of the print newspaper
The freelance journalist Tim de Lisle is a lifelong newspaper addict, and still buys two papers a day, three at weekends. In this elegy to their demise, he tracks his own love affair with them, from a schoolboy in search of the football results, to sports reporter, music critic and media studies lecturer. Is the future of news entirely digital, or could some form of print survive – as vinyl and cinema have survived streaming? In this rich, personal piece, De Lisle talks to industry-watchers and travels to Scotland to meet two of the UK’s most successful local newspaper editors. With print, one feels “released from the clammy embrace of the algorithm”, he writes. “You get past the cacophony of politics to read about real life, from families to food. It’s better for your mental health, your general knowledge, your membership of the human race.” But can anyone afford to fund it – and is its audience a dying breed? The singer Katy Perry, for one, hopes not. She recently tweeted: “One of my favorite [sic] sounds ever is the sound of a crisp new newspaper being read over breakfast for an hour or so… The popping out of it, the folding, the scribbling on the crossword… I hope it never goes out of fashion in our digital world. It is too romantic.” Written by Tim de Lisle and read by Rachel Cunliffe. This article was originally published on the Newstatesman.com on 15 April 2023, and in the 21-27 April print edition. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy listening to the battle for the soul of English cricket . Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 22, 2023
Xi, Putin and the new world order
In the postwar world, Stalin and the Soviet Union wielded greater power over Mao Zedong's new communist China. Today, following China’s rise as an economic superpower and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it is Beijing that has the upper hand – and on whom Russia’s future depends. When Xi Jinping arrived in Moscow for a three-day visit in March 2023, he was greeted with elaborate ceremony and deference. With Russia cut off from the West, China now supplies 40 per cent of its imports, a proportion that will only grow. The leaders are united, too, in their fight against the US for global dominance – but there are tensions and limits within that alliance. In this magazine cover story, the New Statesman ’s global affairs editor Katie Stallard looks at the parallels with the Sino-Soviet alliance of the 1950s, and the two countries’ shared and sometimes violent history, from the first official Russian expedition to Beijing in 1618 to today’s alignment. She hears from others on why their explicitly anti-US world-view has an appeal in the Global South, particularly in Africa. Will the relationship survive China’s growing economic and diplomatic supremacy? And how dangerous is it for the rest of the world? Written and read by Katie Stallard. This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 19 April 2023. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy The strange death of moderate conservatism. Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 15, 2023
Confessions of a philosopher: Bryan Magee’s final interview
As a philosophy student in the 1980s, the New Statesman ’s editor-in-chief Jason Cowley learned more from Bryan Magee than from any seminar or lecture. Magee’s 1987 BBC television series The Great Philosophers , described by one critic as “two boffins on a sofa”, examined some of life’s most recondite questions in an accessible way. Magee was also a prolific author (of philosophy, poetry and fiction), a Labour and then an SDP politician. But when Cowley later met Magee, sent to interview him by the Times in 1997, he was struck by something the philosopher said as he left: “I get the impression that you feel I am lonely and unfulfilled.” Was he? Eleven years later, now editor of the New Statesman , Cowley visited Magee in a nursing hospital in Oxford, shortly after publication of the 87-year-old’s book Ultimate Questions. The issues that had made Magee restless in his sixties still loomed large: “What the hell is it all about?” he asked, and compared himself unfavourably to Bertrand Russell and Karl Popper, men he had known (“they were a whole class above me in intelligence”). In this rich and beautifully observed profile, Cowley explores these themes, as well as the formative years of one of Britain’s most interesting thinkers. Written and read by Jason Cowley. This article originally appeared in the 08 April 2018 issue of the New Statesman . You can read the text version here. Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app If you enjoyed listening to this, you might enjoy Grayson Perry on the rise and fall of the Default Man Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 08, 2023
Inside the migrant revival of British Christianity
According to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the face of British Christianity is changing rapidly. London is now home to the greatest concentration of African churches outside Africa – many of them in bingo halls and warehouses, schools and community centres, where they also serve as social and charitable hubs. Outside the capital, the prospects of a religious revival are relatively bleak: weekly Church of England attendance is below 2 per cent of England’s population, and 20 Anglican churches are closed for worship every year. Is secularisation “almost entirely a white British phenomenon”, as the Birkbeck political scientist Eric Kaufmann puts it? In this week’s long read Tomiwa Owolade, a New Statesman contributing writer, explores this divide and looks at the migrant roots of London’s Christian revival. He finds that, largely because of its religious population, the capital has become the most socially conservative city in the country, with a higher percentage of Londoners disapproving of sex outside marriage and homosexuality. “This is awkward for conservative thinkers,” Owolade writes, “who complain about the decline of Christianity, and about large-scale immigration to Britain. Without immigration, the decline of Christianity would be even more profound. But it is also tricky for progressives: many of these immigrant communities espouse values on gender and sexuality that are far from liberal.” Will the African Christian revival be dampened by a wider secular culture – or will it expand? Written and read by Tomiwa Owolade. This article originally appeared in the 31 March-13 April New Statesman spring special. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might like the battle for the soul of English cricket Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 01, 2023
Why Taiwan is already under attack
In January 2023, a leaked memo from the US air force general Mike Minihan revealed that he expected to be at war with China over Taiwan by 2025. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had raised the stakes, as had Beijing’s consistent refusal to rule out military action. But is a full-scale invasion the real threat, or is the territory’s struggle for independence already well under way? On a recent trip to Taiwan, the New Statesman ’s China and global affairs editor Katie Stallard visits Kinmen, site of the last major confrontation between Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army and the Kuomintang forces of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. There are relics of past conflicts everywhere, from the wall of loudspeakers that broadcasts propaganda at the Chinese coast, to the tunnels and air raid shelters that protected the Taiwanese from bombing in the 1950s. Now they face more subtle threats – “grey-zone tactics” such as the severing of internet cables from Taiwan to the Matsu islands, and “cognitive warfare”, or a sophisticated disinformation campaign, alongside the alienation of Taiwan’s traditional diplomatic allies (down from 22 to 13 formal partners, as countries such as Honduras switch allegiance to Beijing). In Taipei, Stallard hears how a more conventional military offensive might unfold, and the ways in which anti-US propaganda has gained traction – particularly in the wake of its exit from Afghanistan. Can Taiwan hold its ground? Written and read by Katie Stallard. This article originally appeared in the 31 March – 13 April spring issue of the New Statesman . You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might like to listen to What Trump’s 2024 bid means for the US, Russia and China . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, March 25, 2023
Are we headed for another banking crisis?
After a series of bad bets on the post-pandemic economy, California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) lost 60% of its value on the evening of 8 March 2023, and $42bn in withdrawals the following day. Its collapse triggered panic across the US, and in Europe, where Switzerland’s second-largest lender Credit Suisse (already dubbed ‘Debit Suisse’) was already looking shaky; its subsequent bail-out was the first the world’s big banks had received since the 2008 crash. In this week’s magazine cover story, the New Statesman ’s business editor Will Dunn explores the unique factors which led to the current crisis, and looks at what has changed since 2008. With inflation at record highs, the economic shocks of a Russian war, and the ever-accelerating pace of tech, there has never been more fertile ground for panic, he writes. Did SVB’s billionaire depositors deserve their bailout, and what are the moral hazards of underwriting bad behaviour? Will such tremors curb the current move towards deregulation in the UK markets? Written and read by Will Dunn. This article originally appeared in the 24 March 2023 print edition of New Statesman magazine. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this episode, you might also enjoy listening to The great housing con: why the coming crash will rewrite the economy . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, March 18, 2023
The long shadow of the Iraq War: how one town honoured Britain’s fallen soldiers
It started as an accident of geography: after one RAF runway closed, the bodies of British soldiers killed in action were repatriated from Iraq and Afghanistan to RAF Lyneham and then through the Wiltshire market town of Wootton Bassett, on their way to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. From April 2007 until August 2011 the town became the site of unofficial national mourning: relatives, tourists, foreign media, politicians and dignitaries came to pay their respects as the funeral corteges made their way down the high street. In 2010 the town became a site of political conflict: Anjem Choudary’s Islam4UK threatened to protest the murders of Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, and was met by a pre-emptive rally of Tommy Robinson’s far-right English Defence League. In this rich and deeply reported long read, the New Statesman ’s editor, Jason Cowley, revisits the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq invasion. He tells the story of one fallen soldier – a relative – and of the town at the centre of England’s response to wars that were increasingly unpopular. He talks to Tony Blair, who justifies the invasion as an opportunity for Britain to redefine its role in the world; and to the former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt, who describes it as a “disaster... because Blair used his presentational skills to persuade people of something that turned out not to be true, namely the existence of weapons of mass destruction”. Twenty years on, the consequences are still being felt, in the chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021 – and in the small market town of Wootton Bassett. Written by Jason Cowley and read by Hugh Smiley. This article originally appeared in the 17 March edition of the New Statesman , and is an edited extract from the new edition of Jason Cowley’s Who Are We Now? Stories of Modern England, published in paperback on 31 March (Picador). You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might enjoy listening to “Nothing prepares you”: a journey through Ukraine at war Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. Se
Sat, March 11, 2023
The long and stupid decline of the British university
Once the envy of the world, British universities are being hollowed out by a managerial class, argues Adrian Pabst, a New Statesman contributing writer and professor of politics at the University of Kent. Instead of intellectual excellence and civic responsibility, the emphasis is increasingly on “churning out graduates who will serve the interests of City firms and the non-governmental organisation industry”. Where did the rot set in, and can it be cured? Pabst traces the university’s decline from the advent of the student loan and a 1990s proliferation of “Mickey Mouse” degrees, via New Labour and the Cameron-Clegg coalition’s embrace of marketisation and bureaucracy. As degrees have become more expensive, the work that goes into them has become more mediocre – with tutors and students assessed against arbitrary metrics. The universities' "corporate capture... is a profound cultural loss," he writes. In this excoriating essay, originally published as the New Statesman ’s 10 March 2023 cover story, Pabst diagnoses the causes, examines the costs – and proposes solutions to the current crisis. You can read the text version here . Written by Adrian Pabst and read by Emma Haslett. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like The great housing con: why the coming crash will rewrite the UK economy . Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, March 04, 2023
The strange death of moderate conservatism
Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the woes of centre-left parties across the West – some of it prematurely, as Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Spain’s Pedro Sánchez, Australia’s Anthony Albanese and perhaps soon Keir Starmer in Britain can attest. The bigger and quite possibly more lasting story of political decline, however, is on the centre-right. A decade ago, moderate conservative figures like David Cameron and Angela Merkel were pre-eminent. Today the tendencies those leaders represented have largely been sidelined, the parties in question having moved to the right, been ecclipsed by more hardline forces, or both. In this long read Jeremy Cliffe, the New Statesman ’s writer at large, charts that international pattern, from Trumpism in the US to the rise of the hard-right in European countries such as France, Italy, Spain and Sweden. He also explores the deeper structural forces behind those shifts and how the electoral and sociological foundations that long sustained moderate conservatism – and made it the dominant Western political tendency for much of the past seven decades – are breaking up. What, he asks, does the future hold for right-of-centre politics? Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe This article was originally published as the New Statesman ’s 15 February 2023 magazine cover story. You can read the text version here. If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy: Era of the rogue superpower: what Trump’s bid means for the US, Russia and China. Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, February 25, 2023
The rise and fall of Nicola Sturgeon
The New Statesman ’s Scotland editor Chris Deerin has been reporting on the SNP since 1996, when as a young political correspondent he sparred with its then leader Alex Salmond. The party was then an outlier, with only three Scottish MPs to Labour’s 49. Just over ten years later, in 2007, Salmond became first minister and appointed a shy, ambitious protégé as his deputy: Nicola Sturgeon. In this definitive account, Deerin traces Sturgeon’s political journey – to the top of her party, through the 2014 independence referendum, a bitter fallout with Salmond, and ultimately her resignation. Was her commitment to new gender recognition legislation, and to a second independence referendum, a miscalculation? How will she be remembered in Edinburgh, Westminster and beyond? Written and read by Chris Deerin. This article was originally published as the New Statesman ’s 24 February 2023 magazine cover story. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, you might also enjoy: World Prince: what drives Emmanuel Macron’s global ambitions Subscribers can get an ad free version of the NS Podcast on the New Statesman app Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, February 18, 2023
Can literature teach us how to grieve?
When her mother died Johanna Thomas-Corr, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, fretted that she was misremembering her somehow. “I kept reaching for my own figures of speech, only for them to writhe out of my hands,” she writes. “Writing about her was easy: she was so distinctive. But writing about my relationship with her – this was a slippery business.” In this essay, struggling to find a language for her loss, Thomas-Corr turns to literature for answers. She draws on a rich tradition of writing about grief – from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief (2021), Ian McEwan’s novel Lessons (2022), to Deborah Levy’s The Cost of Living (2018). Through their pages, she explores our inevitable entanglements with our mothers and grief in all its phases – the anticipatory, the humorous and the weird. “I have come to like images of myself, simply because they remind me of her,” she writes. “I used to be so self-conscious... but I rather like the fact I now look a bit like my mother did. I find I am not fighting it.” Written by Johanna Thomas-Corr and read by Emma Haslett. This article was originally published in the 25 Jan 2023 issue of the New Statesman ; you can read the text version here. If you enjoyed this episode of the audio long read, you might enjoy listening to How does a music writer grieve? With playlists, of course. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, February 11, 2023
The great housing con: why the coming crash will rewrite the UK economy
Every year since 2009 new records have been set for UK house prices , and every year people have asked how long the market can continue to defy gravity. But this year is different. Mortgage rates have risen steeply, while the cost of living accelerates; the past four months have seen the longest sustained drop in property prices since 2008. And it’s a global issue, as central bankers make borrowing more expensive in an attempt to curb inflation. Is this a necessary correction or the dawn of a calamitous crash – one that will drive an unaffordable rental market, negative equity and a dearth of social housing? In this definitive account of the property crash, the New Statesman’s business editor, Will Dunn, explores Britain’s doomed love affair with bricks and mortar – from the boomer “house-blockers” at the top of the chain to the Gen Zers with little prospect of buying their own home. “It is a mass exercise in self-deception,” he writes, “a substitute for economic growth. It was a substitute people accepted: the expensive house that sucked up a lifetime’s wages became the savings account, the pension, the inheritance. That wealth is now beginning to dissolve.” This article was originally published as the magazine’s cover story on 3 February 2023; you can read the text version here . Written and read by Will Dunn. If you enjoyed this episode of the audio long read, you might enjoy listening to What drives Liz Truss? The people and ideas behind her economics . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, February 04, 2023
“Nothing prepares you”: a journey through Ukraine at war
In late January 2023 the New Statesman ’s Bruno Macaes travelled to the front lines in Ukraine. In the Donbas, in the east, he found scenes of total devastation – levelled villages and burned forests, the remaining residents “walking the streets like ghosts”. At the front the Russian army is sending wave after wave of troops in the hope of making the Ukrainians despair, making them believe that the war will only be won when they have killed every one of them. In this vivid and sometimes surreal dispatch, Macaes talks to the soldiers and medics for whom this has become everyday life. How long is the gap between the warning siren and a shell, he asks? Two minutes, they joke: first the shell and then the siren. From the Donbas he travels to Kyiv, where he meets President Volodomyr Zelensky’s adviser Mikhail Podolyak, still living with the president in a bunker beneath the palace. Can Ukraine really win the war? Yes, says Podolyak: “You vastly overestimate the collective intelligence of the Russian Federation. They will not be able to notice the moment when they objectively have begun to lose. They will miss it.” Nearly a year after the invasion, this is a fascinating account of a country under attack, told through its leaders and those living in the deepest fog of war. This article originally appeared in the New Statesman magazine on 3 February. You can read the text version here . Written by Bruno Macaes and read by Katie Stallard. If you enjoyed this episode, try The Belarusian ultras who took on Alexander Lukashenko Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, January 28, 2023
Lea Ypi on mothers, the motherland and the cruelties of UK immigration
In November 2022 Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, told parliament that the south coast of England faced “an invasion” of small boats. “If Labour were in charge,” she said, “they would be allowing all the Albanian criminals to come to this country.” Since then, others have suggested that the nearly 200 unaccompanied children found to have gone missing in the UK were Albanians “willingly joining” organised gangs. In this moving and often funny personal piece, Lea Ypi reflects on life as an Albanian in the UK and the everyday cruelties of the country’s immigration system – from having to share romantic letters to her husband with officials, to the fact her brother has never been allowed to visit. But it was when her mother was denied a visa soon after she gave birth that the cruelties hit home hardest. “The UK’s immigration system does not find criminals,” she writes, “it creates them. It projects criminal intent well before any criminal act has occurred.” Lea Ypi is professor of political theory at the LSE. Her book “Free: Coming of Age at the End of History” (Allen Lane) won this year’s Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize. This article was originally published in the magazine on 7 December; you can read the text version here . Read by Rachel Cunliffe. If you enjoyed listening to this you might enjoy Operation warm welcome: the hotel that became home to 100 refugees Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, January 21, 2023
A doctor’s prescription for saving the NHS
In south-west England, where Phil Whitaker practises as a GP, his colleagues have frequently resorted to driving critically ill patients to hospital – because there are no ambulances, or because the queue for emergency care is typically eight hours long. In January 2023 the Royal College of Emergency Medicine estimated that 500 patients were dying weekly because of delays and, along with other NHS bodies, it has called on the government to take emergency action. After a sleepless night in a hospital corridor (there is no bed for his 85-year-old mother), Whitaker contemplates what that action should be. A third of the hospital’s acute beds are occupied by patients who are medically fit, but who can’t be discharged because of a lack of social care. This is half the problem. The other half is that there are too many patients who shouldn’t be here. Listening to their stories with a GP’s ear, Whitaker estimates that only two of a dozen cases in the corridor require hospital treatment. In this personal essay, the New Statesman ’s medical editor diagnoses the long-term decline of the NHS, and suggests his own prescription for radical change: starting with more GPs and a rapid expansion of social care. Can we treat the present crisis with the urgency we did the Covid pandemic? And can we do it without spending more money? Read by Tom Gatti. This article was originally published in the New Statesman on 20 January 2023. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed listening to this article, you might enjoy What does a doctor do? by Phil Whitaker. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, January 14, 2023
The good social network: what Twitter could learn from the coffeehouse
As Twitter and Facebook stumble through Elon Musk’s takeover and Mark Zuckerberg’s insistence on the metaverse, questions abound about the future of social media. What sort of news and discussion should it host and encourage? What should be its attitude to participation, networking, user rights and free speech? What should be its business model? What societal role should it seek to play? What, ultimately, is it for? In this essay for the New Statesman ’s special Christmas issue of 2022, Jeremy Cliffe imagines the improved, restored social network of the future by drawing on the heritage of the coffeehouse, “the original social network”. It was here, as the German theorist Jürgen Habermas has argued, that the concept of the public sphere arose: a space for news and discussion dominated neither by the state nor the market. Cliffe explores the history and literature of the coffeehouse tradition to find lessons for the troubled social media platforms of today – and those who would seek to challenge them. Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe. This article appears in the 07 Dec 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Christmas Special . You can read text version here . If you enjoyed this episode, listen to Are ‘Substackademics’ the new public intellectuals? Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, January 07, 2023
From the archive: Trotsky in Mexico; Angela Carter on the maternity ward
In a second archive edition of the audio long read, we bring you two classic magazine articles. In the first, the then editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, visits Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1937, where the Russian communist revolutionary was the guest of the artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (here referred to only as “Rivera’s wife”, though she was also Trotsky’s lover, or about to be). Martin wanted to ask the exile about the show trials then being held in Moscow, in which Stalin extracted confessions of sedition from Trotskyists. Why, he asked, had his supporters not been bolder and stood their ground? He came away from the encounter, beside a “bright blue patio where the bougainvillea blazes in the sunshine”, with more questions than he brought. In the second article, the ground-breaking novelist Angela Carter writes about her experiences on a London maternity ward in 1983, shortly after becoming a mother for the first time at the age of 42. As in her fiction, she captures a strange mix of emotions and characters – the insulting doctor, the bossy nurse, the struggling NHS hospital, the bliss of breastfeeding her son, “who is doomed to love us, because we are his parents”, she writes. “The same goes for us. That is life. That’s the hell of it.” Read by Adrian Bradley and Melissa Denes. You can read text versions of Martin’s article here , and of Carter’s here . For more about Carter’s life and work, read A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp (her friend and literary executor) and The Invention of Angela Carter: A Biography by Edmund Gordon. If you enjoyed this episode, listen to From the New Statesman archive: when HG Wells met Josef Stalin . Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, December 31, 2022
From the archive: when HG Wells met Josef Stalin
HG Wells’s interview with Stalin in 1934, and the debate that followed, was one of the most striking episodes in the history of the New Statesman . Wells – the novelist and socialist famous for science fiction such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds – used the interview to try to coax Stalin into a more conciliatory position, challenging (too gently for some) his views on international relations, the rhetoric of class war and freedom of expression for writers. The interview took place in Moscow at a time when many British socialists and fellow travellers were journeying to the Soviet Union seeking inspiration in the communist project. Wells was on the lookout for signs that his socialist world state was coming into being, and the interview with Stalin was conceived as a foil to his meeting with Roosevelt the previous year. The intention was to make a comparison between Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Soviet Five Year Plan, and to harness the progressive potential of both. Wells thought they were similar projects and hoped that they might somehow meet in the middle. As he put it to Stalin, “Is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas and needs, between Washington and Moscow?” But Stalin’s insistence on the antagonism between the two worlds more accurately prefigured the Cold War to come. The interview, which was criticised from both sides as either too indulgent or too critical of Stalin, showed the dying ideals of Edwardian liberalism chastened by an encounter with modern totalitarianism. It provoked strong reactions in the letters pages of the New Statesman from George Bernard Shaw and John Maynard Keynes (the co-founder and the then chairman of the magazine), resulting in a clash between three intellectual giants that revealed a great deal about the tensions within the left in the 1930s. Kingsley Martin, the editor of the New Statesman, thought the interview and the letters interesting enough to be republished as a pamphlet. Today, it remains a fascinating reminder of the role the literary intelligentsia played in political debate during what WH Auden called, perhaps unfairly, a “low dishonest decade”. Read by Adrian Bradley, Chris Stone and May Robson. Read the text version here . It was first published in the New Statesman in 1934 and re-published on the website on 18 April 2014. If you enjoyed this listen to Stalin and Putin: a tale of two dictators Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit <a href="http://www.newsta
Sat, December 24, 2022
Then Later, His Ghost: a Christmas story by Sarah Hall
It is 23 December, some time in the future, and a storm rages outside the house. Inside there are supplies and an expectant mother sleeps. Is it safe to venture out and fetch her gift? In this post-apocalyptic story the novelist and short story writer Sarah Hall ( The Electric Michaelangelo , Burntcoat ) imagines a mysterious landscape ravaged by weather: is it still Christmas, when the world seems to have stopped? Warning: contains scenes that younger listeners may find disturbing. Read by Emma Haslett. You can read the text version here . This article was published in the New Statesman in 2014. If you enjoyed this listen to Margaret Atwood: why I don’t write utopias Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, December 17, 2022
Karl Ove Knausgaard: a personal manifesto on the art of fiction
Why do we read? In this essay, the Norwegian author explores meaning and purpose in the novel, from the work of Claire Keegan to Dostoevsky and DH Lawrence. The form’s power lies in its openness, he writes, its capacity to defy the absolutes of politics, philosophy or science: “It pulls any abstract conception about life… into the human sphere, where it no longer stands alone but collides with myriad impressions, thoughts, emotions and actions.” Knausgaard considers how best to achieve this – through the emotional realism of Lawrence, or the more experiential modernism of Joyce and Woolf? For the latter two, “it was about getting near to the moment – and in the moment there is no story, only actions and thoughts”. It is also about eschewing big themes or strongly-held opinions, and instead “striving towards an actionless state of being”. Persuasively argued, and rooted in close readings – particularly of Keegan’s Small Things Like These – this is an edited version of the 2022 New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture, delivered at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London on 22 October. It was first published in the New Statesman magazine on 28 October; you can read the text version here . Written by Karl Ove Knausgaard and read by Tom Gatti. If you enjoyed this listen to How to grow old in America Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, December 10, 2022
A brief history of “woke”: how one word fuelled the culture wars
Speaking in the House of Commons on 18 October, the Home Secretary Suella Braverman denounced the opposition to her proposed Public Order Bill as “the Guardian -reading, tofu-eating wokerati”. The next day, she posted her resignation letter on Twitter. It had been a busy 24 hours in the war on woke. On TalkTV, Piers Morgan had bemoaned the rise of the “ultra-woke”. In New York, Elon Musk was finalising the paperwork for his takeover of Twitter, after his ex-wife Talulah Riley urged him to “fight wokeism” on the platform. Donald Trump Jr launched another platform for “non-woke” businesses – and in the Commons, Keir Starmer (who had been advised to avoid woke issues) faced a Conservative front-bench who had stoked them relentlessly. How did we get here? How did this headline-friendly, hashtag-neat, four-letter word that still officially means “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice” come to mean so many things that it now means almost nothing at all? In this deeply researched, illuminating and often funny article, the freelance writer Stuart McGurk takes us from the word’s origins in the 1960s (the US novelist William Melvin Kelley’s 1962 essay “If You’re Woke You Dig it”) through protest movements, corporate co-option, backlash, to its present day use as one-size-fits-all insult. He reveals how the word became a powerful weapon in a war, and was co-opted by the right: a way to win a debate by not having one. Though, some would argue, that’s what the woke were doing all along. Written by Stuart McGurk and read by Chris Stone. This article was published in the New Statesman magazine and online on 7 December 2022. You can read the text version here . You might also enjoy listening to A year inside GB News . Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, December 03, 2022
World Prince: what drives Emmanuel Macron’s global ambitions?
If Europe today has a dominant leader, it is Emmanuel Macron. He has big, deeply thought-through ideas about his country's role in Europe and the world, and grand ambitions for enhancing it. Following his re-election as French president in April, he is now secure in office until 2027. And having lost his legislative majority at elections in June, he is turning to the world stage with all the more vigour. Now, then is a good time to ask: what is the Macron Doctrine? In his cover essay for the magazine, Jeremy Cliffe explains that the doctrine has two main pillars: a traditional vision of France as an independent global “balancing power” and a more novel emphasis on “European sovereignty”. The pursuit of these two goals, combined with Macron’s distinctly self-confident and hyperactive personal style, defines the president’s foreign policy record to date, its achievements and missteps, and his foreign-policy ambitions for his second term. But, Cliffe argues, he will only succeed in realising his ambitions if he applies the lessons from the past five years. Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe. This article originally appeared in the New Statesman’s 3 December 2022 issue. You can read the text version here . You may also enjoy listening to Travelling through Macron's France, from the Channel to the Mediterranean. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, November 26, 2022
Are 'Substackademics' the new public intellectuals?
Roy Jenkins, while serving as president of the European Commission, used to spend his mornings writing. The heads of state who visited him were often keener to speak about his biographies of Asquith or Gladstone than about new legislation. This integration of politics, scholarship and the media was once a feature of British intellectual life, from AJP Taylor to CP Snow, but today the space to think and work has become ever more constrained. It is difficult to imagine Ursula von der Leyen, the current president of the European Commission, blocking out chunks of her diary for an unfinished novel. As our universities and political institutions bow to the pressures of specialisation and professionalisation, where do today’s public intellectuals reside? The answer, often, is on Substack – a platform that allows its authors to monetise content and easily engage with its users. But it is a cut-throat world, and one that requires continual self-promotion. Reliant on crowdfunding, and on relatively closed conversations with like-minded individuals, how healthy is it really for intellectual life? In this essay, originally published on newstatesman.com on 20 October 2022, the Cambridge history professor Chris Bickerton examines the decline of the public intellectual. You can read the original text here . Read by Adrian Bradley. If you liked listening to this you might also enjoy How does a music writer grieve? With playlists, of course Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, November 19, 2022
Era of the rogue superpower: what Trump’s bid means for the US, Russia and China
On 15 November, despite a poor showing in the US midterm elections for the candidates he had backed, Donald Trump surprised no one in announcing his second run for the presidency. What does his official return to the political stage mean for the Republican Party – and for America, Russia and China? In this essay, the New Statesman ’s China and global affairs editor Katie Stallard reflects on the ugly civil war on the right of the Republican party between supporters of the Florida governor Ron DeSantis and Trump loyalists, as well as looking ahead to the international challenges facing America’s next president. Meanwhile, Stallard writes, in Russia has reached what the scholar Andrei Kolesnikov calls his “Stalin phase”: isolated, paranoid, and convinced of his own omnipotence. And in China, Xi Jinping has removed his rivals and ordered the military to “prepare for war” as he reasserts the country's claim on Taiwan. Tensions with the Biden White House have escalated, and both Putin and Xi will be counting on political dysfunction in the US – maybe even Trumpism – to consolidate their power. This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 16 November and in the 18 November edition of the magazine. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this podcast, you may also enjoy listening to The making and meaning of Giorgia Meloni Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, November 12, 2022
Margaret Atwood: why I don’t write utopias
In 2001 Margaret Atwood began writing the novel Oryx and Crake . She started from the idea of species extinction, including human extinction. How long have we got? And would we bring about our own demise? The premise of Oryx and Crake was that, since we have the capability to bioengineer a virus capable of wiping out humanity, someone might be tempted to do just that – in order to save everything else. In this imagined future, humans have been replaced with a vegan, peace-loving, self-healing upgrade. Twenty years after the novel was published, Atwood writes, as the climate crisis accelerates, there is a high probability a Crake might appear among us to put us out of our misery. And in the real world, there would be no new replacement. Atwood’s novel continues to have relevance, as does a question she is frequently asked: why write dystopias? Why not imagine worlds where there is greater equality, not less? In this essay, she explores the 19th-century boom in literary utopias, from William Morris to Edward Bellamy, and then their 20th-century demise, as “several nightmares that began as utopian social visions” unfolded. As a thought experiment, Atwood imagines what a 21st-century utopia might look like and how it might address the many contradictions of civilisation. Could she write a practical utopia? And would anyone want to read it? Written by Margaret Atwood and read by Amelia Stubberfield. You might also enjoy listening to Wrestling with Orwell: Ian McEwan on the art of the political novel This article appeared in a special issue of the New Statesman on 21 October 2022 guest edited by Greta Thunberg. You can read the text version here , and more from the issue here . The essay is also included in “The Climate Book”, curated by Greta Thunberg and published by Allen Lane. It is available with a 15 per cent discount here , using the promo code ClimateNS (purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops). Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, November 05, 2022
The ADHD decade: what’s behind the surge in adult diagnoses?
On both sides of the Atlantic, the number of people being diagnosed with ADHD is rising. Psychiatry UK, which provides both private and NHS-funded assessments, reports that it is receiving around 150 ADHD referrals a day; in 2022 the organisation expanded its prescribing team from ten to 60. Why are more people being told they have ADHD? Partly, this is a course correction: adults who were diagnosed with depression or a personality disorder are now receiving a more nuanced, helpful assessment. But there is also a more complex story to tell, about the social and cultural forces at play. It is not a coincidence that diagnoses have risen alongside the growth of the internet’s attention economy – a vast infrastructure designed to capture and monetise people’s focus. Nor is it a coincidence that they have increased during an era of cut-throat capitalism, in which ever more people are consigned to desk-bound jobs that place huge demands on their time. In this environment, what is the “right” amount of attention, and what should we give our focus to? In this deeply reported piece, New Statesman associate editor Sophie McBain talks to psychiatrists and patients about their experiences of treating and living with ADHD. Disorganised and distracted herself, might she have the condition? In the absence of a precise scientific benchmark, what counts as disordered thinking – and what is merely a response to our always-on, multitasking lives? McBain revisits the earliest research into ADHD, its treatment with amphetamines, and explores the modern search for a root cause. If anxiety was one of the defining disorders of the early 21st century, are we now entering the ADHD decades? This article originally appeared in the 4-10 November 2022 issue of the New Statesman magazine; you can read the text version of the article here . Written by Sophie McBain and read by Emma Haslett. You might also enjoy listening to The psychiatrists who don't believe in mental illness by Sophie McBain. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, October 29, 2022
Britain after a nuclear attack: the BBC film that shocked a generation
Four years ago, the New Statesman published a long read by Jude Rogers marking the reissue of two landmark British films released at the height of the Cold War: Threads in 1984, and When the Wind Blows in 1986. Both films explore the devastating effects of nuclear attacks on ordinary people, and hoped to educate the public, as well as politicians, on the danger. For anyone who has seen these films, both will have lingered long in the mind. When this piece was published, the nuclear threat was re-emerging, with tensions between America and North Korea. Four years on, the lessons these films can teach us are much more urgent. This article was first published on newstatesman.com on 14 March 2018, and appeared in the 16 March 2018 issue of the New Statesman magazine. You can read the text version here. Written and read by Jude Rogers You might also enjoy listening to “The movie that doesn’t exist (and the fans who think it does)” by Amelia Tait. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, October 22, 2022
Rebecca Solnit on hope, despair and climate action
Rebecca Solnit has been writing about hope for nearly 20 years, starting with her 2003 essay "Hope in the Dark", which became a bestselling book of the same name. What began as a response to the cynicism that followed the invasion of Iraq ("we didn’t stop the war, we have no power, we can’t win") has evolved into a sustained argument for the value of protest. You have to take the long view, says Solnit, to see the positive social and political changes that have occurred in the past half-century: “history is full of ruptures and surprises”. In this powerful new essay, specially commissioned for Greta Thunberg’s guest edit of the New Statesman , Solnit examines the privilege of “climate despair”. It is easy for those who are safer from the impacts of global heating to surrender, she writes, or to decide that climate action is too difficult or too late; those who are in harm’s way – many of them in the Global South – do not have that luxury. Solnit looks at successful protests, from those against the Keystone XL pipeline to undocumented farm workers' fight against McDonald’s, and through them makes the case for hope. She writes, too, about how she keeps her own hope alive: “I’ve learned that the feeling that nothing will change is just mental weather, and that the record is all in favour of change… I try to distinguish between despair as a feeling and a forecast.” Rebecca Solnit is the author of Orwell’s Roses , Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and recently launched the climate project Not Too Late ( nottoolateclimate.com ). This essay originally appeared in a special issue of the New Statesman guest edited by Greta Thunberg and featuring contributors including Margaret Atwood, Amitav Ghosh, Ai Weiwei, Adam McKay and Björk. You can read the text version of Solnit’s essay here , and more from the issue here . If you enjoyed listening to this, you might also enjoy Wrestling with Orwell: Ian McEwan on the art of the political novel . Written by Rebecca Solnit. Read by Emily Tamkin. Hosted on Acast. See <a style='color:grey;' target='_blan
Sat, October 15, 2022
Grayson Perry on the rise and fall of Default Man
In 2014, the Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry guest-edited the New Statesman on the theme of the “Great White Male”. Perry, who is known for his subversive ceramics and tapestries as well as his cross-dressing alter-ego Claire, wanted to explore issues of gender, masculinity, Britishness, class and the grip that white male power still exerts on the UK’s culture and politics. In his signature essay for the issue, he characterised this force as “Default Man”. Default Men are middle-class, heterosexual and usually middle-aged: they comprise a tiny global minority but, with “their colourful textile phalluses hanging round their necks”, Perry writes, “they make up an overwhelming majority in government, in boardrooms and also in the media.” By closely examining Default Man’s tribe – dress, behaviour, identity – he discovers that, though it masquerades as “normal”, it is in fact deeply odd and, at times, disastrous for society. Perry argues that Default Man’s dominance was weakening – and that has been borne out in the years since the article was first published by the changing shape of the British establishment: the percentage of women MPs, for example, has risen from 24 per cent to 34 per cent. In September 2022, Liz Truss’s cabinet became the first to have no white men holding any of the four great offices of state. But in the same period, figures such as Jordan Peterson have popularised the idea that masculinity is “under assault” and must be reasserted. The global “men’s rights movement” has amplified this message. In this context, Grayson Perry’s advice for Default Man – to relax, ditch his macho baggage, and allow his grip on power to loosen – seems as prescient as ever. Written by Grayson Perry and read by Tom Gatti. This article originally appeared on newstatesman.com on 8 October 2014 and in the 10 October issue of the magazine. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this, you might want to listen to “How to grow old in America” by Geoff Dyer . Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, October 08, 2022
Grow-your-own steak: seeking a cure for the planet’s meat addiction
Even the most ardent carnivore might struggle to argue that meat is a force for good. The global livestock industry produces more greenhouse gases than the exhaust from every form of transport on the planet combined. And while doctors try to curb antibiotic prescription, 80 per cent of antibiotics used in the US are administered to healthy animals to minimise infections on crammed farms. Industrial animal farming is also a major cause of deforestation, water waste, water pollution, eutrophication and diseases. One solution, of course, is to stop eating meat. Another, posited by scientists and entrepreneurs in the US and UK, is to start growing it. In this magazine long read, reporter Jenny Kleeman (author of Sex Robots and Vegan Meat ) looks at two start-ups – a shiny Silicon Valley facility and a “farm” on an Oxford industrial estate – which aim to do just that: multiplying stem cells in bioreactors, creating in-vitro chicken nuggets, burgers and steaks. For now, it is an expensive and time- and energy-consuming process – but some have predicted the global market for such products will reach $250bn by 2030. Is there demand, and how much do humans need meat, anyway? Written by Jenny Kleeman and read by Emma Haslett. This article originally appeared in the 22-28 April 2022 issue of the New Statesman , and on newstatesman.com on 20 April. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this, you might want to listen to " The psychiatrists who don’t believe in mental illness” by Sophie McBain Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, October 01, 2022
What drives Liz Truss? The people and ideas behind the PM’s economics
On 23 September 2022, the UK’s new prime minister and her chancellor delivered their explosive “mini-Budget”, cutting taxes for the richest in society and increasing government borrowing. Global markets were alarmed – but should the reality of Trussonomics have taken anyone by surprise? In this reported long read, the New Statesman ’s writer at large Jeremy Cliffe looks at the ideas, institutions and thinkers who have shaped Truss’s politics for decades, from a society of free-market thinkers who gathered at Lake Geneva in 1947, to today’s libertarian think tanks in Massachusetts Avenue, Washington DC, and Tufton Street, London (where many of the current cabinet have worked). Cliffe talks to those who have followed Truss’s rise most closely, and who detect the influence of Thatcher, Reagan and even Khrushchev in her thinking. But is her government now too radical even for her former colleagues? And where will a prime minister who some believe “actually wants to destabilise things” go next? Written by Jeremy Cliffe and read by Rachel Cunliffe. This article originally appeared on 28 September on newstatesman.com and in the 30 September – 6 October issue of the magazine. You can read the text version here . If you enjoyed this, you may enjoy “Boris Johnson: The death of the clown” by Ed Docx Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, September 24, 2022
The making and meaning of Giorgia Meloni
Giorgia Meloni started out as the awkward outsider, a woman from humble Roman roots in an Italy whose politics have long been dominated by alpha men from the north – Silvio Berlusconi, Matteo Renzi, Beppe Grillo, Matteo Salvini. Now the post-fascist party she fronts - Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy, or FdI) – is widely expected to take the largest share of the vote in the 2022 general election. How did it get there, having scraped 4% in 2018? Earlier this month, the New Statesman writer at large Jeremy Cliffe travelled to Italy to find out, starting with a Turin rally more heavily policed than any he had covered before. In this richly reported essay, he traces Meloni’s ideological journey, as well as that of the far-right in Italy, from the fascist war years to today’s political landscape – one that is described to him as “extreme political fickleness combined with institutional stability”. Is Meloni’s rise explained by Salvini’s fall, as one newspaper editor tells him, or is there more at play? What does this mean for the rest of Europe? Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe. This article originally appeared in the New Statesman’s 23 September 2022 issue. You can read the text version here . You might also enjoy listening to Nixon, Trump and the lessons of Watergate . Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, September 17, 2022
Would there have been climate change under socialism?
The idea that, without capitalism, the planet might not be facing so great a climate crisis is well established, appearing in works like Naomi Klein’s bestselling This Changes Everything (2014) and from the growing ranks of “eco-socialist” activists. But in this essay, the science writer (and committed socialist) Leigh Phillips argues that an entirely socialist 20th century would have resulted in global heating at least as bad, if not worse. He outlines a counterfactual history in which capitalism is vanquished everywhere by 1930, colonialism willingly unravelled – and industrialisation rolled out for everyone, not for the few. “Housing for all, electricity for all, fast and comfortable transport for all, and yes, even delightful plastic consumer tchotchkes for all,” he writes. “There would absolutely be a People’s Xbox under socialism.” In this clearly argued and imaginative essay, Phillips concedes that, yes, there would have been differences under socialism – and some benefits, once the harms of carbon emissions were realised. But we must start to see the climate crisis as the unintended consequence of largely beneficial (if uneven) economic development – and a problem that is very hard to solve under any single system. What is needed, he says, is not a move towards degrowth, anti-consumerism and other forms of eco-austerity – but a greater role for economic planning. Written by Leigh Phillips and read by Hugh Smiley. This article was originally published on the newstatesman.com on 10 August 2022. You can read the text version here . You might also enjoy listening to The lonely decade: how the 1990s shaped us by Gavin Jacobson. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, September 10, 2022
Queen Elizabeth II and the end of empire
In 1947, on her 21st birthday, Elizabeth Windsor promised that when she ascended the royal throne she would serve “our great imperial family”. By the time of her coronation six years later, the Crown’s ties with empire were already significantly weaker. Yet for the duration of her 70-year reign, Queen Elizabeth II would remain a human link to old imperial Britain – the original “global Britain” – and its virtues and principles, real and imagined. Her death is a rupture, a breaking of that final connection with an era that is long gone yet remains nation-defining for Britain today. In this reflection on her reign, the New Statesman 's writer-at-large Jeremy Cliffe considers the long shadow of empire and the ways in which it shaped both the second Elizabethan era and the UK’s sense of its place in the world. He looks, too, at the waxing and waning of the Queen’s authority; she was not a political figure, and so has been embraced during politically turbulent times such as these. Will her son, King Charles III, now manage similar feats of unification? Written by Jeremy Cliffe and read by Hugh Smiley. This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 9 September. You can read the text version here . You might also enjoy listening to The lonely decade, how the 1990s shaped us by Gavin Jacobson. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, September 03, 2022
What is left of Princess Diana?
The shock of her death on 31 August 1997 sparked mass public mourning, a crisis within the royal family, and a test of the prime minister Tony Blair’s leadership. A quarter of a century later, how is “the People’s Princess” remembered? Reporter Tanya Gold goes in search of the woman behind the myths, the movies and the conspiracy theories – visiting the Spencer family home, Althorp, where Diana is buried, and a walking trail of her London haunts and monuments. She meets the keepers of Diana’s flame, including the curator of an online museum of memorabilia (the princess’s Wellington boots, 50 handwritten notes to her hairdresser), a sculptor, a former colleague, and the staff of Madame Tussauds' waxwork museum, where Diana stands “opposite Henry VIII, who would have executed her”. This article was originally published in the 26 August-1 September issue of the New Statesman ; you can read the text version here . Written by Tanya Gold and read by Alix Kroeger. You might also enjoy listening to The making of Prince William by Tanya Gold. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 27, 2022
Archive: I was Joni Mitchell’s “Carey”
For 50 years, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs was an enigma. For the first time, he tells his side of the story to the New Statesman ’s lead interviewer, Kate Mossman. Kate and Cary Raditz met in Paris in late 2021 to talk about a love affair that began on the island of Crete in the spring of 1970, continued in California and England, and which became a part of Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue . Written and read by Kate Mossman. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Statesman website on 17 December 2021, and in the magazine on 7 January 2022. To receive all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 20, 2022
The battle for the soul of English cricket
On 16 November 2021, testified to parliament about his experiences of racism while playing for Yorkshire County Cricket Club. The off-spinner and former England youth captain said that, between 2008 and 2018, he had been repeatedly subjected to racial slurs, excluded and portrayed as a troublemaker. The fallout was catastrophic, at Yorkshire and across the professional game, with high-profile resignations and inquiries announced. Earlier this summer, the entire board of Cricket Scotland resigned on the eve of a report that upheld allegations of institutional racism. Three decades after the notorious “Tebbit test” – when the Conservative minister Norman Tebbit suggested nationhood could be determined by whether someone of Asian heritage supports England – why is cricket still unable to deal with questions about identity and inclusion? In this revealing and deeply reported piece, Emma John follows the fortunes of a grassroots team in London, and attends the last Eton vs Harrow match to be held at Lord’s, the “home of cricket”, as the sport attempts to rapidly diversify. She catches up with Rafiq and the scouts who decide which players make the leap into the professional game. As John writes, “English cricket has long been a refuge for a certain kind of conservative, a panic room padded with a fantasy of a vanished country.” Can it change? Do its gatekeepers really want it to? This article originally appeared in the New Statesman 's 29 July-18 August 2021 summer special. You can read the text version here . Written and read by Emma John , a freelance sport and travel writer. You might also enjoy listening to What does a doctor do? by Phil Whittaker. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 13, 2022
How the British university degree lost its value
Three years ago the New Statesman published a cover story showing how successive British governments have emaciated standards in UK university degrees, creating a generation of graduates with devalued qualifications, while costing the taxpayer billions. Since then, the “great university con” has continued unabated. Grade inflation has only increased, despite various declarations from ministers that something should be done to counter it. In this deeply researched and wide-ranging article, the New Statesman ’s senior politics correspondent, Harry Lambert, wrote that the number of Firsts awarded at British universities has quadrupled since 1994. Now, three years on, that number has quintupled. In this Audio Long Reads episode, Lambert argues that the forces driving this disintegration of academic standards remain in place. That is no surprise. The current system is useful for too many of those involved for the sector to agitate for change. But Britain is being sold short by this “university miracle” – of ever more students going into higher education, and more and more of them emerging with higher grades. How did we reach this point? Why has the value of a British university degree become so diminished? This piece offers answers to the questions that successive waves of students and their parents have been asking for years. This article was first published on newstatesman.com on 21 August 2019. You can read the text version here . Written and read by Harry Lambert. You might also enjoy listening to “ Operation Warm Welcome: the hotel that became home to 100 refugees ” by Sophie McBain. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, August 06, 2022
Thomas Mann, German identity and the romantic allure of Russia
Why, six months into Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine, is Germany still struggling to come to terms with the new European reality? For explanations, some point to the country’s reliance on Russian gas; others to the legacy of the Second World War or the Cold War. Yet, as Jeremy Cliffe argues in this essay from the New Statesman ’s 2022 Summer Special issue, to fully understand Germany’s instinct to maintain cordial relations with Russia, we have to go back much further than 1945 – into the nation’s cultural history and “the darker, older mists of the German psyche and imagination”. Fortunately, says Cliffe, “there is a guide”: Thomas Mann’s Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man , first published in 1918 and reissued in English in 2021. In it, the German novelist set out his nationalistic views in the wake of the First World War, but also his strong conviction (inspired by German romanticism) that a special kinship existed between Germans and Russians. The two peoples, Mann thought, were united by a profound appreciation of “culture”, which he contrasted with a rationalist, liberal, “Anglo-French” regard for “civilization”. In subsequent years his views changed drastically, as he shifted towards the liberal left and an embrace of democratic Western rationalism. Cliffe’s piece tells the story of Reflections , Mann’s political journey in the decades that followed and the related journey that Germany itself would also take. This progression, he argues, illustrates a dualism that continues to mark German identity – as torn between west and east, the rationalist and the romantic traditions, a liberal-democratic political vocation and an enduring cultural attraction to Russia. Understanding this tension, says Cliffe, helps to explain why Germany greeted the end of the Cold War with such euphoria three decades ago, and why it finds it so difficult to accept today that the era of post-Cold War optimism has come to an end. This article was published in the 29 July 2022 issue of the New Statesman . You can read the text version here . Written and read by Jeremy Cliffe. You might also enjoy listening to “ Wrestling with Orwell: Ian McEwan on the art of the political novel ”. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See
Sat, July 30, 2022
Euro 22: how women’s football became the more beautiful game
On Boxing Day 1920, 53,000 people watched the Dick, Kerr Ladies beat St Helens Ladies 4-0 at Goodison Park – the largest-ever crowd recorded for a women’s football match in England. The game had blossomed during the First World War, as lunch-break kickabouts at munitions factories evolved into 150 women’s clubs across the country. But months after the Boxing Day fixture, the sport was banned by the Football Association – deemed “unsuitable” and dangerous. The ban remained for 50 years. In this rich personal reflection on the women’s game, the New Statesman ’s podcast producer May Robson looks at how it has evolved since 1971 – both less well-funded but more inclusive and vibrant than the men’s game. Robson’s own grassroots club, Goal Diggers FC, now has over 200 members and an international reach; an exceptional England women’s won the Euro 22 tournament. How did they get here? In the words of the Dick, Kerr Ladies FC captain Alice Kells, more than 100 years ago: “We play for the love of the game and are determined to go on.” This article was first published on the newstatesman.com on 20 July 2022. You can read the text version here . Written and read by May Robson. You might also enjoy listening to I was Joni Mitchell's "Carey": an interview with Carey Raditz by Kate Mossman. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, July 23, 2022
Boris Johnson: the death of the clown
On 7 July 2022 Boris Johnson announced he would resign as Prime Minister. Despite surviving a series of scandals, Covid-19 and a parliamentary no-confidence vote, Westminster’s “greased piglet” was finally undone by the alleged sexual improprieties of his chief whip, Christopher Pincher, and the mass resignation of his cabinet. For many, the mystery was that such a policy-light, contradiction-heavy leadership had lasted so long. But in this dazzling satirical essay, the novelist Ed Docx shows us exactly how Johnson got away with it for so long – by playing the clown, a sustained performance he charts through four acts of increasing complexity. First, his breakthrough show, “Mayor”; his widely celebrated follow-up, “Brexit: the Referendum”; the underrated international piece, “Foreign Secretary”; and his most ambitious artistic work, “Prime Minister”, featuring “the largest cast of supporting clowns he had ever used. Those he called ‘ ethics advisers ’ were custard-pied one after another as they came by on a merry-go-round featuring characters from Peppa Pig . Those he called ‘donors’ showered the stage with money.” Both wildly funny and deeply revealing, Docx captures the antics and emptiness of the Johnson premiership – as well as the public’s and politicians’ willingness to applaud, or at least accommodate, this “perfect ambassador of meaninglessness”. When did the booing start? Shamefully late, it turns out. This article originally appeared on the newstatesman.com on 13 July, and in the 15-21 June edition of the magazine. You can read the text version here . Written and read by Edward Docx. You might also enjoy listening to Stalin and Putin: a tale of two dictators by Simon Sebag Montefiore. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, July 16, 2022
How to grow old in America
Soon after finishing his most recent book, The Last Days of Roger Federer , the author Geoff Dyer decided to follow in his hero’s footsteps and have surgery. “Strictly speaking, I was following in the footsteps of Novak Djokovic and Stefanos Tsitsipas,” he writes, “in that I would be having surgery on my elbow (left) rather than a knee, but that’s just an anatomical detail.” Worsening tennis elbow was the latest sign that, at 63, Dyer might be getting old; “business-class” medical care near his home in Santa Monica, California, promised to undo the damage. In this funny, sad and beautifully written reflection on mortality and late middle age, Dyer examines his own frailties and the differences between American healthcare and that received by his father in England. Meanwhile, the pain of a slow physical recovery is eased by a trip to a seniors’ holiday resort called the Fountain of Youth. If the American way is one of constant self-improvement, from yoga to decluttering, and from a bigger house to a better game of golf, what happens when you opt out? Can anyone escape? As Dyer writes: “Gore Vidal mocked F Scott Fitzgerald for whining on in his notebooks about how ‘he was young and now he’s middle-aged’. That now seems to me an entirely worthy theme, perhaps the biggest one there is.” This article appeared on the newstatesman.com on 15 June and in the magazine on 17 June. You can read the text version here . Written by Geoff Dyer and read by Chris Stone. You might also enjoy listening to Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth by Jenny Kleeman. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, July 09, 2022
The lonely decade: how the 1990s shaped us
On the eve of the millennium, JG Ballard noted how “everything is clean and shiny but oddly threatening”. The dawn of the 1990s had heralded a period of economic prosperity, of globalisation, relative peace and hi-tech connectivity – but did we end the decade more divided than ever? In this deeply researched and wide-ranging essay, first published in March 2021, the New Statesman ’s ideas editor, Gavin Jacobson, looks at the culture and politics of a misunderstood decade. After the old certainties of the Cold War, he writes, the West entered a period of drift: “The overwhelming sense was that the new world order bore no resemblance to those dreamlands promised by the… pursuit of freedom.” In place of the old tensions came the rise of reactionary populism, economic instability and the growth of corporate powers. Meanwhile technological and scientific advances – from an unregulated internet to the cloning of Dolly the sheep – brought uncertainty rather than enlightenment. Drawing on sources from Naomi Klein to Don DeLillo, via Francis Fukuyama and The Matrix , Jacobson charts the decade that saw the birth of a global monoculture – as well as surveillance capitalism and today’s culture wars. Twenty years on, are the 1990s the decade we have failed to escape? This article was first published on newstatesman.com and in the magazine on 24 March 2021. You can read a text version here . Written by Gavin Jacobson and read by Adrian Bradley. Podcast listeners can get a subscription to the New Statesman for just £1 per week, for 12 weeks. Visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, July 02, 2022
How to build a language: inside the Oxford English Dictionary
The New Statesman ’s Pippa Bailey has long had a professional as well as a personal interest in the OED: she and the team of sub-editors she leads rely on the world’s most comprehensive dictionary to answer questions of meaning and spelling. So it was a labour of love when she visited its Oxford HQ to meet the lexicographers whose decisions – about which words are added, revised, or rendered obsolete – help shape the world’s most-spoken language. In this richly researched and beautifully observed deep dive, Bailey charts the course of the dictionary from its mid-19th-century origins to its most recent “new words” update (“terf”, “stealthing” and “sportswashing” were among the June 2022 inclusions). She visits the archive and hears from the specialists hard at work on the dictionary’s third edition – a job that began in 1994 (and the OED is still only halfway revised). Should they trace the first written use of “burner phone” to The Wire , or further back to a 1996 rap by Kingpin Skinny Pimp? Should they add the phrase “very traffic”? And why is it so hard to tell the origin story of “bucket list”? This article first appeared on newstatesman.com on 22 June and in the magazine on 24 June 2022. You can read the text version here . Written by Pippa Bailey and read by Emma Haslett. You also might enjoy listening to How the trial of the Colston Four was won by Tom Lamont. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 25, 2022
The psychiatrists who don’t believe in mental illness
In the wake of the pandemic, mental health referrals for adults and children have doubled. Has Covid sparked a parallel wave of mental illness? Or is grief and sadness a natural response to those months of isolation, uncertainty and daily death tolls? In this richly reported long read, New Statesman associate editor and feature writer Sophie McBain talks to the patients and medical professionals who believe we over-diagnose mental illness, ascribing labels and medication that do not help. A movement within psychiatry – known as critical psychiatry – rejects the idea of mental illness altogether. Such arguments are now at the heart of what has become a bitter culture war in the UK and US, between those who would abandon psychiatry’s “disease” model and those who insist it saves lives. The article was first published on newstatesman.com on 9 February 2022 and in the magazine on 11 February 2022. You can read the text version here . Written and read by Sophie McBain Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 18, 2022
How does a music writer grieve? With playlists of course
Music writer Pete Paphides has turned to songwriters and musicians, from Abba to the Undertones, to make sense of all the big moments in his life. So when he got the call he was dreading, to say that his father was dying, it was music that saw him through shock, denial and loss. In this moving audio essay, read by the author, Paphides explores both the unpredictability of grief and the way his playlists gained fresh meaning – particularly the traditional songs his Greek-Cypriot father listened to, which remind him of home and wet weekends above the family fish-and-chip shop in Birmingham. “This is the gift that grief gives you,” says Paphides. “When a loved one leaves this world, they take with them the invisible membrane that stood between your senses and the songs they receive.” For months, he had been looking forward to the premiere of the Abba Voyage hologram show; now, it falls on the eve of his father’s funeral. When he attends the show, how will it affect him? This article was originally published on 11 June 2022. You can read the text version (with playlist) here . Music quoted in this piece: “ Freetime ” by Trashcan Sinatras “ Giorgio by Moroder ” by Daft Punk “ Maddox Table ” by 10,000 Maniacs “ Ena omorfo amaxi me dio aloga ” ( One Cart with Two Horses) by Grigoris Bithikotsis “ Six Words ” by Elbow Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 11, 2022
The making of Prince William
On June 21 2022, Prince William will turn 40. What kind of king will the second-in-line be: the moderniser who posed for the cover of Attitude magazine, or the relic behind a disastrous recent tour of the Caribbean? Freelance writer Tanya Gold sets out in search of the ‘real’ William, talking to former colleagues and collaborators, joining a royal visit to Wales, and hearing from the actor who plays him in the Netflix comedy The Windsors. (The starting point was “speaking as poshly as I could”, he says, “pretending I’m in Hamlet or Dynasty, and then eating Haribo.”) Funny, richly detailed and sometimes jaw-dropping, Gold’s deep dive charts the extraordinary childhood, very public romance and early middle age of the man who will be king. His father, she writes, is ‘a placeholder king. It will be King William who must navigate the path between stability and progression.’ This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 1 June and in the New Statesman magazine on 3 June 2022. You can read the text version here . Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, June 04, 2022
The Belarusian football ultras who took on Alexander Lukashenko
Since Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, stole an election two years ago his regime, already one of the most repressive in Europe, has been cracking down on opponents real and imagined. These include the fanatical supporters – “ultras” – of Belarusian football clubs, inspired by tales of Ukrainian football hooligans joining protests in Kyiv which led to the removal of a pro-Russian president in 2014. Like the Ukrainians, the Belarusian ultras opposed Moscow’s influence over their country on nationalist grounds. They joined protests after the August 2020 election, but hundreds were detained, dozens fled to Poland, and one was found dead in suspicious circumstances. Maria Wilczek tells the story of how the hard men of Belarusian football became dissidents, political prisoners and exiles. The story’s roots are entwined with the conflict in neighbouring Ukraine: Russia has used Belarus as a client state and a launchpad for its regional ambitions. This story was edited by Neil Arun. It was produced for the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence , supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in co-operation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network. This article was originally published on Newstatesman.com on 14 May. You can read the text version here . Read by Alix Kroeger. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 28, 2022
Nixon, Trump and the lessons of Watergate
On 17 June 1972, a nightwatchman stumbled across a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC – triggering what became known as Watergate, the investigation that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation. Fifty years on, the historian Colin Kidd reflects on Watergate’s renewed relevance in a populist, post-Trump era. Did the scandal help fuel today’s political conspiracy theories? And did Donald Trump’s war on “fake news” begin with the “journalistic aggrandisement” of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein? Kidd examines the parallels between Nixon and Trump – “the vindictiveness, the casual indifference to norms, the authoritarian instincts” – and the long-term lessons of Watergate: that lobbyists, millionaires and law-breaking still loom large in a corrupt system. This article was originally published on Newstatesman.com on 6 April and in the New Statesman magazine on 8 April 2022. You can read the text version here . Read by Emily Tamkin. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 21, 2022
Wrestling with Orwell: Ian McEwan on the art of the political novel
When George Orwell travelled to Spain in the winter of 1936 to fight General Franco and the fascists, he stopped en route in Paris, where Henry Miller gave him his coat. The two men could not have been more different: the passionately political Englishman, and the American who disdained of all forms of activism. As Ian McEwan writes: “In a letter to Lawrence Durrell he wrote that he knew he could head off the rise of Nazism... if he could just get five minutes alone with Adolf Hitler and make him laugh.” The encounter inspired Orwell’s 1939 essay “Inside the Whale”, in which he defended Miller’s freedom to refuse political engagement. Should a novelist insulate themselves from bigger, harder realities (ie, write from “inside the whale”) or confront a bleak political landscape face-on (write “outside the whale”)? Orwell, McEwan argues, managed the unusual trick of doing both – a tension that informs books such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm . Adapted from his compelling 2021 Orwell Memorial Lecture, McEwan’s essay looks at the choices he and other novelists have made about writing – and about living – in a time of crisis. How removed from politics can a 21st-century writer be now that “even inside the whale there is ultra-fast broadband”? Endnote: This article was first published in the New Statesman on 9 December. It was adapted from the 2021 Orwell Memorial Lecture, delivered on 26 November 2021 and organised by the Orwell Foundation . You can read the text version here . Read by Adrian Bradley. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 14, 2022
The movie that doesn’t exist (and the fans who think it does)
It started with an innocent question posted on Yahoo! Answers in 2009, and snowballed into a thriving subreddit community: did anyone remember an American movie from the early Nineties called Shazaam , starring the comedian Sinbad as an incompetent genie who grants wishes to two children? Thousands of people did, vividly – and yet there was no trace of it. In this compelling long read, culture writer Amelia Tait talks to the Shazaam true believers, sorts fact from fiction and looks at the notion known as “the Mandela effect”: the theory that a large group of people who share the same false memory used to live in a parallel universe. This article was first published on the New Statesman website on 21 December 2016. You can read the text version, which has been updated for the podcast, here . Written by Amelia Tait and read by Emma Haslett. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, May 07, 2022
A year inside GB News: "what the hell have we done?"
It launched with a promise to shake up the staid world of television news – to challenge broadcasting’s perceived liberal, left-wing bias. One year on, and faced with a new rival in TalkTV, how is GB News’s revolution going? Freelance writer Stuart McGurk spent several months reporting the inside story, as told by staffers past and present: those who were there for a chaotic June 2021 launch, those who quit, and those who stayed. In this deeply researched and often very funny long read, McGurk charts the highs and lows of Britain’s first new rolling news channel in 30 years. Whose idea was it to interview a Winston Churchill impersonator? Why did producers start booking their own parents as guests? And who thought driving a former Soviet police car into Ukraine’s front line was a good idea? All this, and much more, is revealed. This article was first published on newstatesman.com on 29 April, and in the magazine on 5 May. You can read the text version here . Read by Chris Stone. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 30, 2022
Stalin and Putin: a tale of two dictators
What does Vladimir Putin owe Stalin? In this week’s audio long read, the historian Simon Sebag Montefiore reflects on the parallels between the two Russian leaders, from their formative years to their ultimate reckoning in the history books. Putin keeps half of Stalin’s library in his office, annotated by the former dictator, and has embraced the Soviet cult of ruling through fear and control. By invading Ukraine, he has made a colossal gamble on securing his own legacy. Written by Simon Sebag Montefiore and read by Adrian Bradley. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Statesman website on 9 March 2022, and in the magazine on 11 March 2022. Podcast listeners can subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special offer. Just visit newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 23, 2022
What does a doctor do?
Stretched to breaking point by the pandemic, health services around the world are in crisis – with staff exhausted and demoralised, many of them quitting as a result. England alone is at least 6,000 GPs short of the government’s stated 2024 target – a recruitment pledge of the last election which it has already abandoned. The New Statesman ’s medical editor, Phil Whitaker, a practising doctor, reflects on the ordinary pressures he and his colleagues face – in this case, through the gradually unfolding story of one family’s complex needs. Is a young girl’s abdominal pain appendicitis or a reaction to stress at home? Are her mother’s heart palpitations a sign of everyday strain or an underlying cardiovascular problem? Whitaker argues that knowing his patients well can be life-saving – but that many family GPs like him fear their days are numbered. In this moving insider’s account of life in the consulting room, Whitaker makes the case for continuity of care and a patient-centred, less transactional kind of medicine. Written by Phil Whitaker and read by Chris Stone. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Statesman website on 8 December 2021, and in the magazine on 10 December 2021. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 16, 2022
How the trial of the Colston Four was won
On 7 June 2020, the statue of the former slave trader Edward Colston was toppled in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest – an act that, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder by police in Minnesota, US, reverberated around the country. Eighteen months later, Tom Lamont spent a month at the trial of the four protesters charged with its fall. As he writes, the UK government and others “viewed the toppling as guerrilla work, not just illegal but selfish and dangerous”. Others saw it as an overdue correction to a historical wrong. In this definitive inside account, Lamont explores the human drama of a landmark trial, and the knotty questions the case raised about racism, justice, protest and history. Written by Tom Lamont and read by Chris Stone. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Statesman website on 2 April 2022, and in the magazine on 8 April 2022. To receive all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 09, 2022
Travelling through Macron’s France, from the Channel to the Mediterranean
On the eve of the 2022 French presidential election, the New Statesman ’s writer-at-large Jeremy Cliffe caught a train from Courseulles-sur-Mer on the north coast of France to Marseille on the Mediterranean. Stopping in Caen, Paris and Vierzon along the way, he heard how contemporary France is reshaping itself in the long shadow of Charles de Gaulle – and against the backdrop of Europe’s biggest war since 1945. What does the future hold for the Fifth Republic? Written by Jeremy Cliffe and read by Adrian Bradley. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Statesman website on 12 March 2022, and in the magazine on 18 March 2022. To receive all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 09, 2022
Operation Warm Welcome: the hotel that became home to 100 refugees
When the Taliban took control of Kabul in August 2021, the Koofi family were among 8,000 Afghans airlifted to safety in the UK, as part of the government’s Operation Warm Welcome. The New Statesman ’s Sophie McBain met them in a hotel in the north of England soon afterwards, where they were waiting to be resettled. As the months passed, she followed their new life, as well as that of the hotel staff and its other residents: an uncertain limbo of bureaucracy and confinement. Written and read by Sophie McBain. Read the text version here . It was published on the New Statesman website and in the magazine on 10 December 2021. To receive all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 09, 2022
Big Tech and the quest for eternal youth
The anti-ageing industry is bankrolled by some of the wealthiest people on Earth, including Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel. Are the scientists it employs close to a cure? And if they are, who wants to live forever anyway? Jenny Kleeman meets the entrepreneurs who say that a 120th birthday is within reach, and critics who argue that life extension is the pinnacle of elite narcissism. Written by Jenny Kleeman and read by Emma Haslett. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Statesman website on 13 October 2021, and in the magazine on 15 October 2021. To receive all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Sat, April 09, 2022
I was Joni Mitchell’s “Carey”: an interview with Cary Raditz
For 50 years, the “mean old daddy” immortalised in one of Mitchell’s best-loved songs was an enigma. For the first time, he tells his side of the story to the New Statesman ’s lead interviewer, Kate Mossman. Kate and Cary Raditz met in Paris in late 2021 to talk about a love affair that began on the island of Crete in the spring of 1970, continued in California and England, and which became a part of Mitchell’s iconic album, Blue . Written and read by Kate Mossman. Read the text version here . It was first published on the New Statesman website on 17 December 2021, and in the magazine on 7 January 2022. To receive all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Trailer · Fri, April 01, 2022
Trailer: Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman
Audio Long Reads is a new podcast from the New Statesman , showcasing the best of our reported features and essays, read aloud. Ease into the weekend with stories and analysis from our authors – including Kate Mossman, Jeremy Cliffe and Sophie McBain – published every Saturday morning. Just search for Audio Long Reads from the New Statesman wherever you get your podcasts. For all our long reads, subscribe to the New Statesman for just £1 a week for 12 weeks using our special podcast offer. Just visit www.newstatesman.com/podcastoffer . Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

The UK’s leading romance fraud specialist

The great private school con

How Rishi Sunak became the first Silicon Valley prime minister

Israel, Hamas and the unravelling of the West

Has your AI therapist got your back?

How Britain became a dangerous place to have a baby

A year inside GB News: "We’re going to disrupt"

The philosopher and the crypto king: Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion

How Chile (almost) democratised Big Tech

The prime minister and the AI that solved the climate crisis

Summer of Light: a new short story by Jonathan Coe

Escaping Eden: life after the Plymouth Brethren

In defence of counterfactual history

What Simone De Beauvoir knew about loss, by Ali Smith

George Monbiot: how I escape climate despair

The 1922 committee: inside the Conservatives’ assassination bureau | Audio Long Read

How Saudi Arabia is buying the world

The Spanish election reveals the future of Europe

Is male fertility in freefall?

What we learned from the Wagner mutiny

A warning from the godfathers of AI

The risky rise of medical self-diagnosis

How did parenthood become an unaffordable luxury?

How the rich got richer: welcome to the age of ‘greedflation’

Inside the Conservative party’s radical right

‘It’s a state of terror’: inside Haiti’s descent into chaos

Why Liverpool bet big on Eurovision

Inside the mind of King Charles III

The slow, sad death of the print newspaper

Xi, Putin and the new world order

Confessions of a philosopher: Bryan Magee’s final interview

Inside the migrant revival of British Christianity

Why Taiwan is already under attack

Are we headed for another banking crisis?

The long shadow of the Iraq War: how one town honoured Britain’s fallen soldiers

The long and stupid decline of the British university

The strange death of moderate conservatism

The rise and fall of Nicola Sturgeon

Can literature teach us how to grieve?

The great housing con: why the coming crash will rewrite the UK economy

“Nothing prepares you”: a journey through Ukraine at war

Lea Ypi on mothers, the motherland and the cruelties of UK immigration

A doctor’s prescription for saving the NHS

The good social network: what Twitter could learn from the coffeehouse

From the archive: Trotsky in Mexico; Angela Carter on the maternity ward

From the archive: when HG Wells met Josef Stalin

Then Later, His Ghost: a Christmas story by Sarah Hall

Karl Ove Knausgaard: a personal manifesto on the art of fiction

A brief history of “woke”: how one word fuelled the culture wars

World Prince: what drives Emmanuel Macron’s global ambitions?

Are 'Substackademics' the new public intellectuals?

Era of the rogue superpower: what Trump’s bid means for the US, Russia and China

Margaret Atwood: why I don’t write utopias

The ADHD decade: what’s behind the surge in adult diagnoses?

Britain after a nuclear attack: the BBC film that shocked a generation

Rebecca Solnit on hope, despair and climate action

Grayson Perry on the rise and fall of Default Man

Grow-your-own steak: seeking a cure for the planet’s meat addiction

What drives Liz Truss? The people and ideas behind the PM’s economics

The making and meaning of Giorgia Meloni

Would there have been climate change under socialism?

Queen Elizabeth II and the end of empire

What is left of Princess Diana?

Archive: I was Joni Mitchell’s “Carey”

The battle for the soul of English cricket

How the British university degree lost its value

Thomas Mann, German identity and the romantic allure of Russia

Euro 22: how women’s football became the more beautiful game

Boris Johnson: the death of the clown

How to grow old in America

The lonely decade: how the 1990s shaped us

How to build a language: inside the Oxford English Dictionary

The psychiatrists who don’t believe in mental illness

How does a music writer grieve? With playlists of course

The making of Prince William

The Belarusian football ultras who took on Alexander Lukashenko

Nixon, Trump and the lessons of Watergate

Wrestling with Orwell: Ian McEwan on the art of the political novel

The movie that doesn’t exist (and the fans who think it does)