The author of The City & The City joins Ash Sarkar on Downstream to discuss sadism, sci-fi, blockchain utopias, Lord of the Rings and the politics of Sally Rooney’s fiction.
In his new book George Monbiot warns that we’re approaching a tipping point in the fight to protect the planet. Can changing what we eat bring us back from the brink? Aaron Bastani speaks Britain’s foremost environmental campaigner about what to do when the worst possible people are in charge at the worst possible time.
In 2012 a New York Times journalist met 11 year old Dasani Coates. Over the next 8 years the journalist followed Dasani and her family as they navigated social services, the cascade of generational trauma and the attention of a New York City Mayor. Ash Sarkar meets Andrea Elliott author of Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival & Hope in an American City.
Is he a managerial Machiavelli? A moral crusader? Or just an opportunist with a decent haircut? Aaron Bastani talks to Oliver Eagleton about the Labour leader.
Known for his steadfast support of Jeremy Corbyn whilst heading up the biggest private sector union in the country, Len McCluskey has a uniquely intimate knowledge of both Labour Party politics and the organised labour movement.
Few political thinkers exert such an influence that their work becomes synonymous with a historic era. Francis Fukuyama’s declaration of “the end of history” after the fall of the Soviet Union made him one. Aaron Bastani speaks to Fukuyama on the publication of his new book, Liberalism and its Discontents.
Does love transcend everything? What does it mean to fall in love in an unequal world? Dalia Gebrial looks at how race shapes our experiences of sex and desire, and asks: what would it take to create better conditions for loving one another?
Why are women more afraid of violence from strangers on the street when – statistically speaking – home is the place where they’re most unsafe? Ash Sarkar takes a look at how rational fears are used to justify irrational policy decisions, and what we miss when we talk about ‘rape culture’.
How far would you go to get famous and escape poverty? Ash Sarkar is joined by Symeon Brown to discuss how the democratic promise of the internet has reinvented the pyramid scheme. From cryptocurrencies to botched Brazilian butt lifts, they look at how the new clout economy has created a digital lumpenproletariat.
In debates around the rights of transgender people, a charge often levelled at those fighting for trans inclusion is that their arguments rest on a denial of biological facts. Michael Walker speaks to biologist Julia Serano about what so-called ‘gender critical’ thinkers get wrong about sex and gender, and whether trans activists should embrace the argument that they were “born this way”.
Ellen Clifford speaks to Michael Walker about her book “The War on Disabled People: Capitalism, Welfare and the Making of Human Catastrophe”, including an explanation of the Social Model of Disability, the history of the Disabled People’s Movement, and the disastrous consequences of austerity policies.
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