Novara Media

It’s the question that will come to define our lives: is our society going to collapse? But the field of collapse research is fragmented, chaotic, and often plain deranged. Who can you trust? Luke Kemp is the author of Goliath’s Curse and a research affiliate at the Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s also a political radical. He told Richard Hames about how close w...

As the American empire teeters, China gains dominance, and war spreads across Eastern Europe and West Asia, questions arise as to Europe’s place in this rapidly changing world order. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar speaks to Roderick Beaton, former Koraes Professor of History at King’s College London, about his latest book Europe: A New History. How did the boundaries between Europe and...

To accompany our podcast series, Death in Westminster, hosts Kojo Koram and Dalia Gebrial met with investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan and former private wealth lawyer Stephanie Brobbey at EartH in Hackney last month. Digging into the dark money that flows through Westminster, Kojo and Dalia find out what made Stephanie quit her job hiding rich people’s assets, why Peter couldn’t...

Take part in our audience survey: novara.media/survey In China in the 1990s, the arrival of the internet was swiftly met with the ‘great firewall’: a complex matrix of censorship, surveillance and state control. Since then there have been two internets: the World Wide Web, and the Chinese internet. ​ Aaron Bastani talks to China analyst Yi-Ling Liu about the cultures and innovations that have evol...

After mulling over the problem of boredom in the last Trip episode, the ACFM gang return with a solution: hobbies. In this episode Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder why hobbies tend to mutate into jobs, which hobbies are appropriate for commoners, whether men and women approach their hobbies differently, and why having a hobby is often framed as uncool. It’s a weird-left spin on private pastimes wi...

Fill in our audience survey: https://novara.media/survey For fifty years, Alfred McCoy has exposed covert operations. In 1972 he uncovered the CIA and French intelligence’s complicity with the heroin trade during the Vietnam War – research that the CIA tried to suppress. He’s the author of many books, most recently Cold War on Five Continents, which gives a comprehensive account of late 20th centu...

Liberalism, in one form or another, has been the pervading political ideology of the past 200 years. It has become so pervasive, as an ideology, that it lays claim to the middle ground and common sense itself. But liberalism is a set of dogmas and doctrines like any other political ideology, and unfathomable horrors as well as huge advances have been made in its name. Today on Downstream, the idea...

To mark the launch of our new podcast series, Death in Westminster, host Dalia Gebrial sat down with Hannah Spencer, the new MP for Gorton and Denton, and Faiza Shaheen, the director of Tax Justice UK, at EartH in Hackney. They talked about Hannah’s landslide victory, her first few weeks in Parliament, and what a wealth tax would actually look like. What approach did Faiza and Hannah take wi...

When was the last time you were bored? Nadia, Jem and Keir wonder if ennui is a feeling that belongs in the past – and what a boredom-free life might be missing. Is compulsive scrolling a modern symptom of boredom? Why are spiritual practices often based around tedious repetition? Do bored workers make better organisers? What about the “stuckness” experienced by migrants, or the drudge...

In the last decade and a half, society has got vastly more politicised: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the Me Too Movement and many other movements besides mobilised hundreds of millions of people around the world. So where are the massive organisations that big mobilisations brought in the 20th century? They don’t exist. For all the increased political activity, society hasn’t become much more organ...

Aaron Bastani sat down with Novara Media’s own Ash Sarkar, to celebrate the paperback release of her bestselling book, Minority Rule. ‘Minority rule’ is the term Ash used to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. She revealed how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics,...

The most powerful CEO in history is barely a person anymore. But it’s not just his X-addled brain that has transformed him. He has deeply integrated himself in the ‘cyborg collective’ – a world of electrons, brain implants, fantastical promises, financial systems, bots, and memes – he has made for himself. Henry Ford gave his name to Fordism. According to Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff, we’re ent...

Rising unemployment, increased military spending, and a decline in living standards for most people, including the middle class: the description fits both the 1930s and the 2020s. In the 1930s, it was a situation that morphed into the destruction and horror of the Second World War. On Downstream with Aaron Bastani this week is Clara Mattei, professor of economics at the University of Tulsa, and au...

Trillions of dollars of AI build-out. An economy poised on the edge of a giant crisis. Some say it’s a bubble. But what if it’s an entirely new kind of economics? One that has no need of humans at all? Marek Poliks is the co-author with Roberto Alonso Trillo of Exocapitalism: Economies with Absolutely No Limits. Together, they are the co-hosts of the Disintegrator podcast. He speaks to Richard Ham...

The final episode. Back in Westminster, Kojo confronts the human cost of hidden wealth – and asks if change is still possible. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are available from Dice . Full credits and more...

In episode three, the dark web of offshore finance connects Britain’s imperial past with its political present. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are available from Dice . Full credits and more information: h...

In episode two, the trail leads offshore. From Westminster to the Cayman Islands, Kojo uncovers how tax havens are fuelling London’s housing crisis. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Geoghegan, Faiza Shaheen and Stephanie Brobbey. Tickets are available from Dice ....

New four-part podcast. A homeless man dies in Westminster surrounded by vast wealth and empty homes. His death sparks a disturbing investigation into how secrecy and evasion have become normalised in the heart of British power. Join Kojo Koram on 19th March at EartH in Hackney for a live event – Dark Money: How Billionaires Ruined Britain And How To Make Them Pay. Featuring Dalia Gebrial, Peter Ge...

Nearly all of us on Earth live within a ‘nation-state’. Nation-states are an invisible and seemingly inevitable and eternal part of the infrastructure that forms our society: the water we swim in. Rarely do we pause to consider how this global system of nation-states came into being, and what might replace it after its gone. But as the United States wages a war of aggression on Iran, i...

[Audio error updated! Please refresh or re-download if correct episode isn’t playing.] Have the Greens got what it takes to become the main political vehicle of the radical left? Following their Trip episode on Ecology , the ACFM crew take a closer look at Zack Polanski’s party as it nudges past Labour in the polls. From the ’60s dream of ‘steady state economics’ to t...

The US military is changing shape: it’s increasingly high-tech, intelligence led, and focused on assassinations. In short, the Israeli model. And the changing shape of war means changing flows of money and power. The primes, which have dominated the military industrial for decades, now face competition from Silicon Valley companies like Palantir and Anduril. But does their tech actually work? Or d...

The notion that the Global South is affected ‘first and worst’ by global shocks they didn’t cause, namely climate change, is one of the cornerstones of leftist thought. But what if it’s not entirely true? What if, contrary to this tenet, it’s wealthy Western nations who have over-developed and lost their resilience in the process? This is the argument made by John Rapley in his latest book ‘Icarus...

Cheap food holds capitalism together. But to get it, we’ve had to cheapen almost everything on the planet: the work of women, nature and colonies. We’ve made strange new ecologies all over the world, and now we’re living in the metabolic sh*tshow. How will the ruling class keep control? On this week’s  Do Your Own Research , Jason Moore tells Richard Hames why the end of cheap nature means the ris...

In 2001, Eric Schlosser published Fast Food Nation: an investigation into the toxic depths of America’s food industry.  Twenty five years later, the book remains an urgent intervention, as much for what it says about workers’ rights as for our agricultural systems and dietary health. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar talks to Eric Schlosser about what’s changed since 2001, and what remains unref...

Are humans distinct from nature? Are there natural limits to inequality? Can you have action without effort? Do bacteria have agency? Jem, Nadia and Keir find themselves dwarfed by the concept of ecology in this planetary-scale episode, which touches on cybernetics, systems thinking, ecofeminism and actor-network theory. Their ACFM guide to ecological thinking includes ideas from Rachel Carson, Pe...