The Verso Podcast

Co-organised by the IPR, PoLIS, Verso and Surviving Society Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter speak to co-hosts of the Surviving Society podcast, Chantelle Lewis and Tissot Regis; chaired by Dr Fran Amery.

Sinews of War and Trade: Laleh Khalili speaks to Rafeef Ziadah by Verso Books

In the current race to be Democratic presidential candidate, a socialist is in second place. Meanwhile, in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn’s left-led Labour Party has revived a political idea many had thought dead. But what, exactly, is socialism? And what would a socialist system look like today? Bhaskar Sunkara is joined by journalist and author Dawn Foster to examine the key ideas behind his new book, Th...

Juno Mac and Molly Smith in conversation with Frankie Mullin about how the law harms sex workers—and what they want instead Do you have to think that prostitution is good to support sex worker rights? How do sex worker rights fit with feminist and anti-capitalist politics? Is criminalising clients progressive—and can the police deliver justice? In Revolting Prostitutes, sex workers Juno Mac and Mo...

What is technology trying to tell us in an emergency? James Bridle, in conversation with Serpentine Galleries CTO Ben Vickers, discusses 'New Dark Age' and the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime. As the world around us increases in technological complexity, our understanding of it diminishes. What is needed is not new technology, but new metaphors: a metalanguage for de...

1968 was one of the most seismic years in recent history -- Vietnam, the Prague spring, Black Power at the Olympics and protests on the streets of Paris and London. This interview is part commemoration, part reassessment. What remains of that turbulent time and where can we discern its features in our political landscape today?

Discussion with author Anna Feigenbaum about Tear Gas, which tells the story of how a chemical weapon went from the battlefield to the streets.

A conversation with writer and professor Ashley Dawson on his latest book, Extreme Cities. Here, he presents a disturbing survey of the necessarily ecological history of global urbanization and industrialization, as well as the unstable futures they are producing. As much a harrowing study as a call to arms Extreme Cities is a necessary read for anyone concerned with the threat of global warming,...

Among activists, journalists, and politicians, the conversation about how to respond to and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Policing is an institution whose primary function is the creation and reproduction of massive inequalities. In "The End of Policing," Alex Vitale reveals the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social c...

Timothy Morton discusses the political idea of the collective, subscendence, solidarity, fighting Nazis, and lots more. Humankind: Solidarity with Non-Human People, by Timothy Morton, is out now.

In this episode of the Verso podcast, journalist Antony Loewenstein discusses his book, Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe. Loewenstein trav­els across Afghanistan, Pakistan, Haiti, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Britain, Greece, and Australia to witness the reality of disaster capitalism. He discovers how companies cash in on or­ganized misery in a hidden world of priv...

Franco “Bifo” Berardi discusses his new book, Futurability, with editor Federico Campagna. Renowned Italian Marxist theorist and activist “Bifo” Berardi talks about political impotence, the tool of humiliation and the victory of Donald Trump, his experience coming of age in '68, and why we are drawn to the concept of populism in the current political moment. Stuck between global war and global fin...

The NYU Department of Sociology Presents: "Internationalism and Democracy after the Eurozone Crisis" Monday, January 30thSince 2008, Europe has been mired in an institutional and political crisis that shows no signs of abating. If the 2008 financial meltdown shook the Eurozone to its foundations, the combination of austerity and the uneven recovery of member-states in its wake has once again broug...

In July 2012, aged thirty, Juliet Jacques underwent sex reassignment surgery—a process she chronicled with unflinching honesty in a Guardian column. Trans, her critically acclaimed memoir, tells us of her life to the present moment: a story of transition and becoming herself through the cruxes of writing, art and identity. Join Juliet Jacques and Nina Power, philosopher, critic and feminist, in co...

John Berger has revolutionised our understanding of art, language, media, society, politics and everyday experience itself since his landmark book and TV series Ways of Seeing over forty years ago. As the internationally influential critic, novelist, film-maker, dramatist and, above all, storyteller enters his ninetieth year, the latest Verso podcast in collaboration with the London Review Booksho...

The Levellers, revolutionaries that grew out of the explosive tumult of the 1640s and the battlefields of the Civil War, are central figures in the history of democracy. In this thrilling narrative, John Rees brings to life the men—including John Lilburne, Richard Overton, Thomas Rainsborough—and women who ensured victory at war, and brought England to the edge of radical republicanism. From the r...

From the tyranny of exercise to the crisis of policing, via the sexualization of childhood (and everything else), Mark Greif’s Against Everything is an essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism and a vital scrutiny of the contradictions arising between our desires and the excuses we make. In a wide-ranging conversation for the latest Verso podcast i...

The Storyteller (Verso, 2016) gathers the fiction of the legendary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, best known for his groundbreaking studies of culture and literature, including Illuminations, One-Way Street and The Arcades Project. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and de...

Writers and artists are grappling with social and political effects of our warming planet by telling stories of fear and dread, of warning and disaster, of encouragement and hope. Written by Bulgarian-German novelist and renowned travel writer Ilija Trojanow, The Lamentations of Zeno is a “topical polemic about global warming and climate change,” an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majes...

The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness gathers for the first time the fiction of Walter Benjamin, edited and translated by Sam Dolbear, Esther Leslie and Sebastian Truskolaski. His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold of dreamworlds, celebrate the ludic, and delve into fortune-telling. Taken together, the novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and ridd...

Originally published in 1967, Valerie Solanas' incendiary SCUM Manifesto called for a Society for Cutting Up Men and declared war on capitalism and patriarchy. Today, the controversial tract has a complex relationship with contemporary landscapes of feminism and gender politics. Juliet Jacques and Ray Filar join Sophie Mayer to discuss the treatise from critical and contemporary perspectives. Taki...

In 2011, an elite group of US Navy Seals stormed an enclosure in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad and killed Osama bin Laden. The news did much to boost President Obama's first term and played a major part in his re-election victory the following year. Four years on, Seymour Hersh published a controversial series of essays in the London Review of Books, arguing that the story of that night, was in...

Dan Hancox talks to Amina Gichinga and Linda Bellos about what it means to live in London and how, given the various challenges the city faces, it can be changed for the better. Dan is the author of The Village Against The World, and ebooks including Kettled Youth and Fight Back! Dan tweets at @danhancox. Linda Bellos is an activist and former leader of Lambeth Borough Council 1986-88 and chair of...

This focus panel on race and racism was recorded at Foyles, Charing Cross Rd, 23rd March 2016 at the second in the Our London event series in collaboration with Compass and co-hosted by Novara Media. One of the greatest aspects of living in London is its diversity, but at the same time the city is striated by racial politics. In London, as throughout the UK, people from BAME groups have been histo...

Kate Evans joins writer and editor Sophie Mayer to examine the radical origins of International Women's Day, Rosa Luxemburg's revolutionary life and work in the international socialist movement, and her enduring legacy. This March, the London Review Bookshop is celebrating women graphic novelists in honour of Women's History Month. As part of their spotlight on Kate Evans, the creator of the cult...