The Mishal Husain Show

For more than 30 years, the Indian-born writer Amitav Ghosh has built a global following with novels that draw on deep historical research.  But his latest offering, Ghost-Eye, is more esoteric. The plot moves back and forth between India and the US, using past lives to explore the ties between the personal and the political. The plot centers on a psychiatrist treating a 3-year-old who shocks...

We’re now eight weeks on from the start of the US-Israel war with Iran, a conflict that’s been watched with increasing alarm by Wendy Sherman, architect of the 2015 nuclear deal between the US and Iran and a former deputy secretary of state. Having spent years across the table from Iranian officials, she sees a far more volatile landscape today. In this conversation with Mishal Husain,...

A new and radical take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet is out in US cinemas. The force behind it is actor, writer, producer and musician Riz Ahmed. He says the 400-year-old story has never felt more current. Ahmed, Oscar-nominated for Sound of Metal and star of the Oscar-winning live-action short The Long Goodbye , has a new series on Prime Video called Bait . It’s a black comedy about an acto...

After almost six weeks of war, how did Pakistan manage to get the US and Iran to talk? Amid a still-fragile situation in the Middle East, that question sits at the heart of this conversation with Maleeha Lodhi. She has served as Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington, as well as to the UK and United Nations. For her, the Islamabad talks mark a moment of wider significance, as the middle powers...

Lionel Shriver has often tackled complex or contentious issues in her fiction. From school shootings in We Need to Talk About Kevin to economic collapse in The Mandibles.   Her new novel, A Better Life , is the story of a family home taken over by outsiders. In this conversation with Mishal Husain, Shriver discusses the sociological concerns behind the story, which she says is a metaphor for...

With attention fixed on the potential developments between the US and Iran, could the Israeli government be forced to end the war earlier than it might like? The last few weeks have seen daily air strikes by Israel on Iran, and retaliatory attacks that have killed and injured Israelis. The wider picture is of two and a half years of constant conflict, particularly in Gaza. In this conversation, Mi...

US Representative Ro Khanna of California helped force Donald Trump to release the Epstein files. Now he wants to end the war with Iran. Earlier this month, the Democratic Congressman joined forces with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Republican, on a War Powers resolution seeking to halt the military action, though it ultimately failed in the GOP-controlled House. Speaking to Mishal H...

Despite the intensity of the US-Israel bombing campaign, Iran’s regime, now under a new supreme leader, hasn’t given President Donald Trump the “unconditional surrender” he’s seeking. Mishal Husain speaks with Vali Nasr, a professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies and a preeminent scholar on the Islamic Republic. His life h...

Within 24 hours of the US and Israeli strikes on Iran, a host of other countries were drawn into the latest conflict in the Middle East. Iran retaliated by targeting sites in Israel and across the Gulf, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain, as well as Iraq, Oman and Jordan. Israel, meanwhile, has carried out air strikes on Lebanon and sent in ground troops as it seeks to dism...

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House last year, one of his first acts was to sign an executive order withdrawing the US from the World Health Organization. The administration's rupture with the WHO began in Trump’s first term, when relations deteriorated as the Covid-19 pandemic set in.  In this conversation with Mishal Husain, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom...

“KPop Demon Hunters” is the brainchild of Korean-Canadian animator Maggie Kang. It’s Netflix’s biggest-ever film and follows Rumi, Mira and Zoey, members of the girl band Huntrix, as they battle to save the world from dark forces.  As you’ll hear, Kang grew up loving Korean pop music long before it was globally cool and forged a Hollywood career on films includin...

The Feb. 19 arrest of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the brother of King Charles, puts the British Royal Family into uncharted territory. The former Prince Andrew was detained on suspicion of misconduct in public office after further details emerged of his relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. For this bonus episode, Mishal Husain speaks to Allegra Stratton, a contributing editor...

This winter has been exceptionally brutal in Ukraine. Already the coldest in more than a decade, it’s been made worse by Russian attacks on energy infrastructure that have left millions with no heating and intermittent power. As Russia’s war approaches its fourth anniversary, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy is under intense pressure from Donald Trump to hold elections and accep...

In 2007 when he was UK Foreign Secretary, David Miliband delivered an address to the Labour Party conference. He described a world with “fewer countries at war” and “more democracies than ever before.” Two decades later, with that vision further from view, Miliband is head of the New York-based International Rescue Committee, one of the world’s largest aid agencies. I...

The killing of two US citizens by federal agents in Minneapolis has made January a dark month for many across America. Both Alex Pretti and Renee Good were quickly labeled “domestic terrorists" by the Trump administration, which accused them of endangering the lives of law enforcement. Video evidence soon appeared to contradict government claims, but it’s still a label that filmmaker L...

Rutger Bregman knows what appearing at Davos can do for your profile. His reputation was made when he went there in 2019 and attacked the rich. The clip went viral.  A historian and author originally from the Netherlands, Bregman has been focused on elites ever since, most recently in his book Moral Ambition , and in a series of lectures on the BBC, after which he accused the organization of...

What is Donald Trump’s plan for Venezuela? Does he have one? Will he go beyond threats in supporting the uprising in Iran or invading Greenland? Jeanne Shaheen has been in the US Senate since 2009 and is now the most senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. Her position has given her access to information most lawmakers don’t have. She’s also known as someone prepared...

US President Donald Trump’s tough talk about China and tariffs can be traced back in large part to economist Peter Navarro. A well-known China hawk, he has written books arguing Beijing poses a threat to the US economy and its national security. Navarro is a loyalist who has served as a key trade adviser in both Trump administrations. In between, he spent four months behind bars for refusing...

Kara Swisher has followed the story of Silicon Valley for three decades, having started work as a tech journalist at a time when few people were interested in the beat. But through relationships she built with the likes of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and many others, she became a formidable voice, and eventually more of a commentator and critic. Swisher now hosts the podcasts Pivot and...

As the year draws to a close, we are bringing you one of Mishal Husain’s biggest conversations of the year, in full. In May 2025, Elon Musk joined Bloomberg's Qatar Economic Forum, in a rare media appearance. He remains as consequential a global figure today, as he was then, even if he is no longer working with Donald Trump. Within 10 days of this conversation, he had left DOGE, the Departme...

Lynsey Addario’s life work means  taking great risks to tell other people’s stories. She is a Pulitzer Prize winning war photographer who has been abducted twice while documenting conflicts from Afghanistan to Ukraine and Sudan. There aren’t many women in her field. In a new National Geographic documentary called “Love+War,” currently streaming on Disney+, she le...

Mustafa Suleyman co-founded AI lab DeepMind when he was just 26 years old. Four years later, it was acquired by Google for a reported $400 million.  He is now head of Microsoft’s AI unit, where he just unveiled a new superintelligence team tasked with creating an AI that can outperform humans at all tasks. In this conversation with Mishal Husain, Suleyman talks about the decisions socie...

Salman Rushdie was nearly killed when he was stabbed 15 times on stage in upstate New York in 2022. His injuries were so severe that he lost an eye. It was an attack that came decades after he was first subjected to death threats over his novel, The Satanic Verses . Once he had recovered, he found he was unable to write fiction. However, after publishing an account of what happened to him, the sto...

Ken Burns has been telling stories about America for almost 50 years. The lauded documentary filmmaker has a new series on PBS, The American Revolution, which charts the period before and after 1776. It will air internationally ahead of the 250th anniversary of the US Declaration of Independence.  Mishal Husain asked Burns to join the show to mark Thanksgiving, looking at today’s Americ...

Stanford University Professor Fei-Fei Li has been at the forefront of artificial intelligence research for 25 years, which is why she’s been called the “godmother of AI.” In this conversation she tells Mishal Husain how she arrived in the US as a teenager after her parents decided to emigrate from China. She also talks about the high school teacher who inspired her and a deep lov...