Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman

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.

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...

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...

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 stat...

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 aro...

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 o...

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 t...

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 betw...

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,...

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 clima...

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,...

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 isol...

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...

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, conf...

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 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...

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. Saud...

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, F...

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...

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 announ...

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....

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 conse...

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...

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 (w...

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...