Origin Story

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust. In this two-part episode Dorian and...

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust. In this two-part episode Dorian and...

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a j...

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a j...

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In part two of George Orwell, Dorian picks up the story in 1941, with Orwell taking a job at the BBC. The war grinds on, and so does George, until his anti-Stalinist fairy tale Animal Farm changes everything. We’re on the road to Nineteen Eight...

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this opening two-parter Dorian bows to the inevitable and tells the story of the subject of his book, The Ministry of Truth. When George Orwell died on 21 January 1950, at the age of 46, the phenomenal success of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Fo...

We’ve covered ideas, phrases, people and historical events. Now Origin Story profiles its first building: Number 10 Downing Street.  Following Dorian’s bonus episode about the birth of end of the world fiction, based on his new book Everything Must Go, Ian goes deep on a topic from his bestselling book How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t. He explains how a house built on marshland by a 17th c...

• Join Ian and Dorian for Origin Story Live in London on Tue 7 May. They’ll be looking at how the Conservative Party got addicted to conspiracy theory, and more. This time: The Illuminati were a group of Enlightenment idealists who existed for just a few years in 1780s Bavaria. Or were they? The Illuminati have since been blamed for everything from the French Revolution to communism to 9/11. How d...

For 1800 years, Western conceptions of the end of the world were dominated by the Book of Revelation: Armageddon, the Millennium, Judgement Day. But in 1816, political upheaval, Enlightenment science and the Romantic imagination converged to give birth to a radical idea: the end of the world without God. When Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley came together beside Lake Geneva that summer,...

In the last episode of season four, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey discuss effective altruism. Last month the US entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the dramatic collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was also a prominent advocate of effective altruism, a philanthropic movement based on utilitarian philosophy, and the...

In part two of the history of eugenics, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey explain how the pseudo-science of “racial hygiene” seduced everyone from feminist birth-control pioneers and social democrats to the ardent white supremacists whose screeds shaped US immigration laws and influenced Hitler. Then they turn to the rise of eugenics in Germany and how it enabled the Nazis to introduce massive programs...

This week, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey get started on the history of eugenics, the idea of finding biological solutions to social problems. Say the word now and it calls to mind skull-measuring cranks or Nazi death camps but for decades it was a mainstream project in many parts of the world, attracting not just white supremacists and elitist snobs but liberals, socialists and feminists. Winston Ch...

Born in Haitian folklore and inadvertently reinvented by director George A. Romero, the zombie is the most flexible metaphor in horror fiction, if not all of popular culture. It can represent a war, a virus, a natural disaster, terrorism, capitalism, climate change and much more. In fact, it’s hard to tell a zombie story that isn’t political in one way or another. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey follo...

In Part Two of John Maynard Keynes, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt reconnect with Keynes in the 1930s, as he slowly pulls together his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This book changed everything for Keynes, and the rest of us, by establishing Keynesianism as a new way to understand both the economy and society. Ian and Dorian discuss the last decade of Keynes’ life...

Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey discuss perhaps the most extraordinary individual they have encountered so far: John Maynard Keynes. The most significant economist since Adam Smith rewrote our understanding of the relationship between the state and the market. But Keynes was also a philosopher, a statesman, an aesthete and a hell of a writer: a one-man advertisement for the virtues of refusing to stay...

This week, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt look at the most powerful and divisive generational cohort of them all: boomers. The people born between 1946 and 1964 have been credited, and blamed, for creating the world we live in. They’re the 60s generation, the Me generation, the Reagan generation and the Third Way generation. Where they lead, the world follows. Now that most of them have passed the ag...

This week, it’s part two of the riddle of Jordan B Peterson, the bestselling author and culture warrior. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey dig into his two megasellers, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, and try to understand why these very strange cocktails of self-help advice, comparative mythology and biological essentialism resonated with millions of readers, especially men and boys.  Do his ideas...

Origin Story is back. The critically-acclaimed podcast uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew.  To kick off Series 4 Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey turn their sights on Jordan B Peterson, the bestselling author, diehard culture warrior and, allegedly, the most influential intellectual in the western world. In part one they discuss Peterson’s life up to the...

Christopher Nolan has been generous enough to put together a full-on Origin Story film, combining key elements from the Nuclear War and McCarthyism episodes. So Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt put on their Oppenheimer cosplay outfits including suit trousers waisted up to the chest, and set off to the cinema to watch it.  Here's what they had to say… Support Origin Story on Patreon for more bonus episo...

Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey host an evening of storytelling, debate, gallows humour and intense irritation recorded with an audience on a balmy evening in Soho, London. They look at the idea of The Elite. What the hell does it mean? Where did it come from? How has it changed over the years? And why does it always seem to refer to whoever you happen to disagree with?  For their sins Dorian and Ian...

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew.  In a first for Origin Story, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt focus on a living figure: the ubiquitous and divisive richest man in the world, Elon Musk. In the past two years the public perception of Musk has changed dramatically, from Time's Man of the Year and “real-life Iron Man" to radicalised right-wing troll and...

Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long, THORNY history of Zionism. In part two, the horror of the Holocaust persuades the international community to mandate a Jewish state in Palestine, with the surprising endorsement of Stalin, but Zionism remains divided.  In the year of Israel’s 75th anniversary, Ian...

Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics. In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long thorny history of Zionism.  In part one, covering the 1890s to the 1930s, they explain how Theodor Herzl single handedly created a movement for a Jewish nation, Chaim Weizmann won over Churchill and Balfour, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky sowed the seeds of Likud. Utopian dr...

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew. In part two of the story of climate change denial Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey take a closer look at the techniques of the “merchants of doubt" who took the denial of man made global warming into the mainstream. Ian tells the real story behind 2009’s phoney scandal “Climategate”, while Dorian reads Michael Crichton...

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew.  This time: Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey try to cool their tempers as they take on climate change denial. They trace denial’s journey from fossil-fuel lobbyists and neoliberal think tanks into the heart of the mainstream media and lay out the dire consequences. In this first part Ian and Dorian discuss how global w...