Novara FM – Novara Media Podcasts

In Richard Curtis’ Love Actually , a selection of mainly white and middle-class Londoners seem to be living in a parallel universe – one in which the war on terror never happened and the ’90s never ended. What kinds of love are really on offer in this misty-eyed vision of modern Britain? Following Novara FM’s investigation into Die Hard , Eleanor Penny tackles another festive Ala...

Die Hard is a perennial of festive TV, but is it really a Christmas movie? James Butler and Eleanor Penny explore what the 1988 action comedy reveals about corporate power, class antagonism, mid-century terrorism and women in the workplace. Who is Bruce Willis’ shoeless cowboy cop out to rescue? And what is going on with Hans Gruber’s accent? Comments, questions, corrections? fm@novaramedia.com He...

In the 2010s, we found out that we were all being watched. A series of leaks, from Wikileaks and others, revealed that our governments were conducting mass surveillance operations on their own populations. But what were the longer term consequences of those leaks? And why hasn’t something of equivalent size stepped in to replace Wikileaks since? Stefania Maurizi is a journalist who worked with Wik...

In 1891, the French drew the borders of what became Mali. Like many colonial borders, they were arbitrary, absurd to the many nomads who supposedly lived within them. Now climate change is ravaging the Sahel region, and many of those nomads are being forced to settle down. And Russia and China have arrived to replace the long tail of French colonial domination. As has Al-Qaeda. So what does this a...

Imagine a person arrested for keeping a brothel. Who are they? An abusive pimp? Such people exist, no doubt, but the law isn’t set up just to catch abusers: it also targets sex workers working together to stay safe. With Labour in power, big changes could be afoot, but legalising sex work could harm sex workers as well. That’s the view of the English Collective of Prostitutes, one of t...

In October 2024, SpaceX caught a rocket. An astonishing feat of engineering, it took humanity one giant leap closer to the era of everyday space travel – and possibly one small step closer to its own obliteration. Despite a long list of treaties attempting to prevent it, space is now a militarised zone. Nuclear-laden ICBMs and weapons systems on satellites are just the tip of a secretive iceberg o...

In 2016, the alt-right seemed to come from the internet and infest politics. In 2024, the internet and politics have become identical. Are we swimming in the world the alt-right built for us? Perhaps no one knows the world of online politics better than Joshua Citarella, an artist and political theorist whose 2018 book  Politigram and the Post-Left  kickstarted a flurry of investigations into new...

The rise of artificial intelligence will bring about a planetary-scale shift in human life and politics – and, it seems, a lot of weird social media spam. But for all the grand pronouncements from techno-utopians and pessimists alike, the reality is that there’s still much to be decided about the future that AI portends. At the forefront of those investigations is Marek Poliks, a composer, t...

In their new book Loving Corrections , adrienne maree brown poses a crucial conundrum for all progressive thinkers: how do we liberate people from bad ideas? One of America’s most energetic thinkers talks to Rivkah Brown about putting the pol back in idpol, understanding the IDF, navigating the US election, and why we might need to suck it up and ‘bear hug’ our enemies. Comments,...

Around the world, far-right movements are mobilising support by placing the blame for real catastrophes – Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, their own riots and insurrections – on entirely made-up enemies, among them Muslims, immigrants and feminists. This is what Richard Seymour, a writer, theorist and founding editor of Salvage magazine, calls disaster nationalism. He joins Richard Hames to discuss t...

What does Israel hope to achieve this time, nearly 20 years after its last failed ground offensive in Lebanon? And how should we understand its adversary, a political party that also functions as a fighting force, a historical movement, and a regional power? Richard Hames is joined by Elia Ayoub, a Lebanese-Palestinian researcher and writer based in the UK, to sketch the political roots and strate...

The English language is full of pejoratives for large groups of people: mob mentality. Herd behaviour. Crowd contagion. Much of this apprehension stems from one of the most influential works of psychology ever written, Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind . Unfortunately, Le Bon’s big idea – that crowds produce derangement and violence in even the most rational subject – was not...

The Palestine solidarity movement is the largest movement in British politics for a century. Yet has been vilified and policed as if it were a tiny group of extremists. In this investigative episode of Novara FM, series producer Richard Hames is joined by Simon Childs, commissioning editor at Novara Media, to expose the authoritarian turn inside the British state that is driving the crackdown on P...

How can we resist exploitation when the boss has been replaced by a computer? That’s the premise of Cyberboss, a new book by Craig Gent, North of England editor for Novara Media, which explains how “algorithmic management” is being rolled out in the workplace, starting with Amazon packers, Deliveroo drivers and online supermarket shoppers. He talks to NM’s head of audio Cha...

“Don’t mourn, organise” were the final words of American labour activist Joe Hill before his execution in 1915. But sometimes our feelings of grief don’t lend themselves to good organising – sometimes we might just want revenge. In her forthcoming book, critic and journalist Sarah Jaffe looks at the many kinds of grief that shape our social and political lives, from family bereav...

Motherhood was once at the centre of the feminist movement’s demands, from campaigns for reproductive rights to the mobilisation of anti-nuclear mums at Greenham Common. But in the 21st century, the politicisation of mothering seems to have shrunk in its ambition. In her new book Mother State: A Political History of Motherhood , literary scholar and historian Helen Charman tells the story of...

In 2019, mines expelled 100 billion tonnes of solid waste. Vast and destructive almost beyond imagination, mining is nevertheless essential to the green transition: without the minerals that we pull from the Earth, we cannot wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Thea Riofrancos is associate professor of political science at Providence College and an expert on the politics of resource extraction, green...

People walk around San Francisco in Make America Great Again hats. Major CEOs endorse Trump. JD Vance is a hit among the crypto whales. So what? It’s part, perhaps, of a cultural change in Silicon Valley: a swing decisively to the right in a state famed for its contributions to radical politics, from the Black Panthers to the counterculture. There’s no one better to understand this cha...

The French left have played a blinder. Or, at least, the centre-right chaos agent and French President Emmanuel Macron has played it for them. Macron called snap elections, hoping to crush both the left and right. He failed. Instead, the far right briefly surged, coming top in the first round before a newly cohesive French left took the largest share in the second, decisive round. Is this the end...

Asked in a recent poll to summarise Britain in a word, ‘broken’ was the people’s top choice. This brokenness is concrete stuff: crumbling bridges, sewage-filled rivers, failing computer systems, cancelled rail projects. But it’s also bundled with the collective stories we tell about what it means to be a nation, and who belongs in it. To find out why it feels like nothing w...

This time next week, Keir Starmer will likely be settling into No 10 with a thumping majority. Yet Labour has largely avoided the question of what they’re going to do with all that power once they get it, and the political media has barely posed the question. Meanwhile the Conservative party as we know it has shattered into pieces, and the far-right is filling the vacuum. To paint a picture...

It’s easy to think that the Labour left is gone for good. But it’s not so certain. From the 80s to the 10s, the Labour left endured almost three decades of isolation and exile. The difference this time is that their ideas are still popular. Will they be back once more, or have they now truly been left for dead? To find out, Eleanor spoke to Andy Beckett, author of The Searchers: Five R...

Was the Iraq War the exception or the rule? Throughout the twentieth century, Labour governments have been involved in some of Britain’s most disastrous colonial acts: the partition of India, the counter-insurgency in Malaya, and the Nakba. So, what can we expect this time? Eleanor Penny asks David Wearing, author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain. Support independent journa...

What’s it like to be left-wing in an aspiring ethnostate? Israel has swung hard to the right in the last few decades, with self-described fascists now in government. But a left remains, calling not just for a ceasefire in the war on Gaza, but for the end to the apartheid regime as a whole. What power do they have? Comedian and activist Noam Shuster-Eliassi and +972 Magazine journalist Haggai...

After investigating the politics of cool on the last Trip episode, the crew turn their attention to another distinctly modern sensibility: camp. Digging into Susan Sontag’s formative 1964 essay on the camp aesthetic, Nadia, Keir and Jem think about how elements of the artificial, the theatrical and the sentimental come together in camp objects, from porn movies to Tiffany lamps to risqué rad...