For our end-of-year edition of Downstream, the Novara Media team look back on the biggest stories of the year. Ash Sarkar is joined by Moya Lothian-McLean, Michael Walker and Owen Jones to talk about the Labour Party, the climate crisis, the rise of AI and the war on Gaza. This conversation was recorded live in […]
Asset management companies like Blackrock, Vanguard and Macquarie have avoided real scrutiny for decades, but their secretive activities are starting to attract attention from political researchers and academics. What do these companies do, and what risk do they pose to society? Author and academic Brett Christophers sets out to answer this question in his new […]
From advising former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak to heading up the U.S. / Middle East Peace Project, Daniel Levy has had a front row seat at some of the most consequential peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine in the last two decades. He sat down with Ash to talk about genocide, the central role […]
Blindboy Boatclub is the Irish broadcaster, author and musician behind The Blindboy Podcast, a massively popular show mixing short fiction, comedy and interviews. His new short story collection, Topographia Hibernica, is inspired by the human, animal and emotional geography of Ireland. Blindboy sat down with Ash for a freewheeling discussion about everything from Eminem’s ’90s […]
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of several books focussing on the Middle East including The Hundred Years’ War On Palestine. He explains some of the basic facts of the struggle for Palestinian independence and the history of the creation of the Zionist project […]
Zarah Sultana is one of the youngest MPs in Parliament and has faced intense hostility from the right of her party since Keir Starmer’s ascent to leader. The MP for Coventry South sat down with Ash Sarkar to talk about the grim reality of being a Muslim woman in the Labour Party.
Many people around the world are already living in a cashless society. With the dominion of Visa and Mastercard showing no sign of shrinking, it’s vital to scrutinise exactly what this shift means. Brett Scott is an author and former banker, who is deeply committed to evaluating the grave dangers surrounding the removal of cash […]
Slavoj Žižek is perhaps the most famous living Marxist philosopher. In 2023, he has written 3 books with topics ranging from the nature of freedom to his intensely pessimistic view of the future. He sat down with Aaron to talk about Israel and Palestine, Deep Fakes and the legacy of Stalin.
The 2010s saw a new era of mass protest, from Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt and Syria, to Occupy Wall Street, EuroMaidan and Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement. Many of these movements shared a “horizontalist” or leaderless approach and most of them ended in failure. Vincent Bevins experienced some of these movements up close. In […]
John Gray’s writing on political philosophy is not easily pigeonholed. Over the last 50 or so years, he has favoured ideas that span the political spectrum and pissed almost everybody off – his central thesis being that growth and progress are not inevitable. In his latest book The New Leviathans, his attention turns to the […]
From his early career following Nelson Mandela on the campaign trail to his stint as US Correspondent for The Guardian, Gary Younge has been one of the most thoughtful and compassionate voices on the UK left. Gary sits down with Ash to talk about his time in Soviet Russia, his problem with skiing and the […]
In his new book, ‘Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism’, Yanis Varoufakis explores how giant tech firms, both in the US and China are expanding their control over the planet. His analysis is that, whilst material resources certainly matter, the real battle ground is over digital real estate. Aaron sat down with Yanis to talk about how […]
In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein takes a journey into the uncanny world of anti-vaxxer conspiracy theory and far right propaganda. As she goes through the looking glass, she discovers dark forces bent on warping our politics in their image. What starts as a story of mistaken identity with her namesake Naomi Wolf, soon becomes a parable […]
Nick Dearden has been an economic justice campaigner for over 20 years. His attention was focused on the pharmaceutical industry just as the Covid-19 pandemic swept the globe. But as the world started to sing the praises of ‘Big Pharma’, Nick saw an unprecedented PR coup. Giant corporations capitalised on the crisis, tightening their stranglehold […]
Most people know that the game is rigged. Those who set the rules – win the game. Grace Blakeley has made a career of studying the rules, exposing the exploitative ways in which powerful institutions govern our lives and figuring out ways in which we can beat the banker and resist the game itself. Grace […]
Who exactly are the ruling class? The conspicuous top hat and tailed Bullingdon Club still exert dominance, but their era is waning and new folks are in town. They can’t beat the obscene wealth of petrostate oligarchs, so they’ve joined them – ransacking the country. Ash is joined by Sam Bright, author of: ‘Bullingdon Club […]
The media and the public seem to be fixated on sex scandals this year, from household names in the headlines to salacious rumours spread on social media. But haven’t we always been intrigued by the private lives of those in power? Ash Sarkar is joined by Novara Live researcher Steven Methven to delve into the […]
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