The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem is one of the most anticipated films in recent cinema history. But what is it about this story, first told maybe 3000 years ago, that so fascinates us? Who really wrote it and why does it represent, with Homer’s other great work The Iliad , the foundation of western literature? Tanjil Rashid is joined by The Odyssey’s latest translator, clas...

Hot dogs, fireworks, old glory, it’s the 4th July. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the USA’s Declaration of Independence.   What led up to these crucial events in 1776? Was the revolution truly American? And what does this anniversary represent today?   Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sarah Pearsall, historian and author of  Freedom Round the Globe: How the World Made the Americ...

Tayari Jones is one of America's most celebrated novelists, twice chosen by Oprah, shortlisted for prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, and read by presidents. Her newest book was meant to be a tale of gentrification in the American South, she found herself an entirely different story. Kin follows two motherless girls coming of age in 1950s Louisiana, the Jim Crow South. It's a novel about female...

Andrew Marr and the New Statesman's art critic Michael Prodger join Tanjil Rashid to discuss the life and legacy of David Hockney, who passed away last week. A Bradford boy who became one of the most famous artists in the world. A gay man who made desire visible decades before it was safe to do so. A painter who took on the iPhone and the iPad and bent new technology to the oldest of artistic impu...

“The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” Andrea Wulf joins us to discuss her new book The Traveller , about George Forster - the forgotten naturalist who sailed with Captain James Cook at seventeen and came back convinced of something radical: that all human beings are equal. We ask why that idea was so scandalous in the Enlightenment, why Forster has been large...

There is in Britain today a widespread mood of public despair, a deep premonition of imminent national decline. According to Ipsos, just over half of Britons feel worse off since Keir Starmer was elected. Going further back, 60% feel the country has gone backwards since 2022. Are Britain's best days really behind it? Pratinav Anil, Rachel Clarke, Tanjil Rashid, John Kampfner, Gary Stevenson, and P...

What is the relationship between politics and the built environment? between the spaces inhabited by the public and the policies that govern them?  From parliaments to monuments… from open squares to closed off palaces… there clearly is a connection, but how that manifests itself remains deeply contested.  Tanjil Rashid is joined by Jan Werner-Muller, a German philosopher and historian,...

Political instability, democratic decline, the rise of populist movements - politicians and headlines today are quick to diagnose things as modern day Weimar. But what was Weimar actually like, and how did a city associated with culture and intellectual life become bound up with the rise of Nazism? Historian Katja Hoyer joins us to discuss her new book on Weimar, the process of fascism taking hold...

Donald Trump’s political style has often been compared to reality TV - but what if the better comparison is professional wrestling? Satirist Munya Chawawa joins Luke O’Reilly to discuss his new documentary, Wrestling With Trump, which explores the connections between WWE spectacle and modern American politics. Wrestling with Trump is available to stream now on 4. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/pri...

What makes someone a good spy? And does the fiction writer, in many senses a professional liar, share the traits of a double agent? Novelist and screenwriter William Boyd first explored the theme of espionage in his 2002 novel Any Human Heart and went on to pen a James Bond continuation novel called Solo. His latest trilogy (Gabriel's Moon, The Predicament and Cold Sunset) explores what happens wh...

For decades, James Baldwin has stood as one of the most piercing moral voices of the 20th century, But Baldwin himself has remained, in his own words, elusive. A new biography by Nicholas Boggs - Baldwin: A Love Story - sets out to change that. Drawing on newly uncovered archives and decades of research, Boggs reframes Baldwin’s life through an intimate and sometimes unsettling lens: love. Luke O'...

The Resistible rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht's darkly comic allegory of authoritarianism is a play that straddles past and present. Written in 1941, it was conceived as a warning; a grotesque gangster-inflected retelling of the rise of Adolf Hitler. It holds out the warning that such a rise is not, in fact, inevitable – it can be resisted. In a new production, Mark Gatiss steps into the r...

Or has the term lost its meaning? It’s a label that’s everywhere now: used by political commentators, thrown around on social media, and increasingly a part of everyday conversation. In recent months it's been used to describe matters including Indian cricket, Sainsbury's use of facial recognition, the 'Dubai Dream'. But what did George Orwell actually warn us about, and how closely does our moder...

Last night, the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a 10-day mission to space and a lunar flyby. The voyage, which included the first woman and a non-US citizen to take part in a lunar mission, is part of a program to place humans once again on the Moon by 2028, a return after 56 years apart. But why do we bother? Where does this fascination come from? Can the moon teach us so...

It's almost impossible to separate how we think about modern life from the phenomenon that is capitalism, and to think, what would life look like without it? Tanjil Rashid is joined by Sven Beckert, Professor of History at Harvard University and author of Capitalism: A Global History, to trace the long emergence of capitalism, and to ask what the world looked like before it took hold. Hosted on Ac...

Michael Pollan, a writer best known for his work on the effect of psychedelics, has taken a journey into the inner mind. For much of modern history, we’ve understood the mind in comparison to our most advanced machines. Once it was clockwork, then looms, now computers. Each metaphor promises clarity - the ability to be mapped and modelled - but each, in its own way, falls short. Drawing on philoso...

In 2025, Elon Musk took on an extraordinary role inside Washington, leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency - or Doge. What followed was a radical experiment: an attempt to remake the machinery of the state using the logic of Silicon Valley and the language of memes. To understand that moment, it helps to understand Musk himself. This is a figure shaped by his upbring...

Despite KPop Demon Hunters becoming Netflix’s most-watched film in history and dominating music charts for months, it’s also the kind of cultural phenomenon many people might never have encountered. The animated musical feature has been cleaning up at awards season and this weekend it could pick up two Oscars. In this episode of the New Society, we discuss how the film became a global hit and the...

If you’ve ever taken a random walk around the block to push your step count to 10,000… rushed through a lesson on Duolingo to keep your streak alive… or checked a post one more time to see if the likes have ticked up - you’ll know the quiet power of the score. Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen thinks modern life is increasingly organised around scores, rankings, targets, dashboards, and that these numbers...

In 2014, Helen Macdonald published H is for Hawk - a book that arrived, at least on the surface, as a memoir about grief: the death of their father, and Macdonald's decision to train and live with a goshawk in the aftermath. It was nature writing, literary biography, cultural history, and a deeply personal account of what happens when someone steps sideways out of ordinary life and into something...

For one of the most famous historians in Britain, conquering the past is not enough. This month, alongside co-host Tabitha Syrett, Dominic Sandbrook is launching a new podcast - this time shifting his focus from history to literature. Tanjil Rashid sat down with Sandbrook to talk about this new venture, what he’s reading (he insists it’s a balanced diet) and why reading still matters, not just to...

Wuthering Heights is a story that has been told and retold, adapted and reinterpreted so many times since publication in 1847. Every generation seems to rediscover Emily Brontë’s ever-enduring novel, and every generation seems convinced it finally understands it. Now, it’s British filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s turn. And once again, we’re left asking: is this a love story, a ghost story, a story of o...

A new documentary, Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision , offers a rare glimpse into the deeper ideas shaping King Charles’s view of the world. Known for decades as an environmental campaigner, the King has often spoken about the need for “harmony” between humanity, nature and the environment - but what does he really mean by that? Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Mark Sedgwick. Hosted on Acast. S...

Thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest - a novel so sprawling, so formally strange, and so unnervingly prescient that it has never quite stopped happening. Set in a near-future North America obsessed with pleasure, entertainment, and escape, the book asked a question that feels even sharper today than it did in 1996: what happens when a culture confuses happiness with anaes...

Over 100 million people around the world have downloaded AI companion apps. Friends, therapists, lovers ... mediums - for some, their closest connection in this life is a chatbot. How did we get here? Catharine Hughes is joined by James Muldoon, sociologist and author of Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more in...