The Conversation Weekly

It was 1967, and country musician Porter Wagoner was introducing a guest on his weekly TV show.

The camera cuts to a woman with big, blonde beehive, wearing a magenta mini dress with the same shade of lipstick to match. It was in that moment a star was born.

Her name was Dolly Parton. In the following decades after that performance, Parton went on to become the “Queen of Country”.

In this week's bonus episode of The...

In recent weeks, Ukrainian drones have targeted large warehouses across Russia, destroying millions of dollars of merchandise stored inside them.

These warehouses and logistics hubs belong to Wildberries, the Russian equivalent to Amazon. They're also taking aim at Ozon, Russia's second largest online retailer too.

Ukraine says it’s targeting these companies because they’ve been providing supplies to soldiers on the front...

🔁 Rerun: originally published 12/12/25. We're revisiting this episode as we take a quick break but we'll be back next week with a new instalment of The Conversation Weekly.

Oecusse, a rugged, remote district of Timor-Leste in south-east Asia, is usually a pretty sleepy place. But in August, Oecusse was rocked by a large police raid on a suspected scam centre, later linked by a UN report to organised crime networks running scamming...

It's pretty grim when your main political opponent is a man with a bin for a head.

That's the situation that's faced Nigel Farage in the Clacton byelection in the UK.

Count Binface has pledged to nationalise the singer Adele, cap the price of ice creams and build at least one affordable house.

It might sound surreal, but the count isn’t the first satirical candidate in election history.

Historian Richard Toye argues we should t...

Balázs Bödö's first interaction with a shadow library was when, as a young professor at university in Budapest, he was faced with a dilemma: what should he teach his students?

"Do I condemn my students to a second rate education and a second rate degree in the European Union? Or do I pirate the books and give them the education that they deserve?"

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound mixing is...

Timothy Piatkowki was scrolling when a targeted ad landed in his feed. Cheap peptides! Straight from the factory! Naturally, he started a chat with the dealer and found himself deep in the world of a thriving grey market.

The more he found out, the less he realised we know about what’s really in these tiny drug vials being shipped around the world.

You can see screen grabs of Tim’s exchanges with the peptide seller in a f...

With growing evidence about concussion, repetitive head impacts and long-term brain disease, have we underestimated the risks of sport all along? How did we get here, what do we really know about head injuries and given the risks, is it time to rethink children’s participation in sport?

In this episode, we chat to Alan Pearce, a neuroscientist and Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne who has bee...

Three months ago, Andy Burnham’s desk was filled with the business of running Greater Manchester. Buses. Housing. Policing. This mayoral region in the north of England is home to 3 million people and Burnham, a former minister in the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been its mayor for nearly a decade.

But after a whirlwind ten weeks, Burnham travelled to Buckingham Palace on July 20 to meet King Charles, ...

When Taylor Swift launched her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, in October 2025, she recorded two short clips to promote it. One for Amazon Music began with “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift”. Another, for Spotify with “Hey, it’s Taylor”.

These two phrases may sound a little mundane, but they’re now at the frontline of a legal fightback by celebrities like Swift against AI deepfakes. In April, Sw...

El Niño has begun and forecasters predict a more than 60% chance that the naturally occurring phenomenon could become a very strong, or super El Niño later in 2026.

El Niño begins with warmer water in the Pacific Ocean near the equator and can have a cascade of dramatic effects on the world’s weather.

But what chain of events has to happen for high temperatures in the Pacific to translate into severe floods, droughts and storms...

A new youth protest movement in India that started as online satire is now staging an ongoing sit-in in New Delhi calling for the resignation of India’s education minister.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was launched in late May by Abhijeet Dipke, a graduate of Boston University, in response to alleged comments by India's chief justice, Surya Kant, comparing unemployed young Indians to cockroaches. Dipke launched a parody pol...

When Australia banned under 16-year-olds from using social media in December 2025, it became a test case for a policy now being pursued by governments around the world. This week, the UK announced a similar social media ban from 2027.

So how’s it going in Australia? Have the teenagers emerged from a phone-lit glow to reengage in the real world? And what kind of difference is it having on their mental health?

In this episode, we...

When Roberto Baggio missed a penalty in the 1994 Fifa World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, more than 94,000 people were there to watch Italian heartbreak and Brazilian ecstasy.

To this day, no other World Cup has been as well attended as the 1994 tournament. Tickets were cheap and abundant, and despite the relatively low profile of the game in the US compared to sports like baseball or basketball, people went al...

As health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continue to battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak, scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against the strain of the virus that’s causing it.

Two approved vaccines exist for Ebola, but they target the Zaire strain of the virus, not the Bundibugyo strain causing the 2026 outbreak, which has so far killed 61 people with 359 confirmed cases i...

Buried underground in caverns dug out of salt on the Gulf coast of the US are millions of barrels worth of crude oil. This is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, built up in the late 1970s.

Globally, at the end of 2025, global strategic oil stockpiles were estimated at 2.5 billion barrels, with China holding the most.

With the Strait of Hormuz now closed for more than two months, global oil supplies are being squeezed. In March, ...

The month Javier Milei took over as president of Argentina in December 2023, monthly inflation was 25.5%. The annual rate for that year was 211%. Now, it’s plummeted to 32% – still very high, but more stable.

Milei, a right-wing populist famous for wielding a chainsaw on stage to make a point about fiscal conservatism, made cutting inflation a central part of his campaign.

And yet economists like Can Cinar from City St Ge...

As the revelations from the Epstein files continue to reverberate around the globe, those conspiracy theorists who were among the first to call for the release of information about Jeffrey Epstein's legal cases are feeling vindicated.

Before his death, Epstein already featured in many fringe online forums, including those centred on the Qanon conspiracy narrative that the world is run by an elite cabal of child sex traffickers. Now,...

As Xi Jinping prepares to host Donald Trump for a delayed summit in Beijing on May 14-15, a lot has changed since the US president's last visit to China in November 2017. Trump's first trade war with China began in earnest the following year, ushering in a new era of trade tensions between the world's two largest economies.

While Trump's second trade war raged in 2025, China reported a record trade surplus of US$1.2 trillion. Yes, d...

After Donald Trump took to social media to lambast Pope Leo's criticism of the Iran war, the pontiff told journalists "I'm not afraid of the Trump administration". Part of the war of words between Trump and Leo is a question over whether the Iran war is a just one.

Just war theory, first articulated by St Augustine in the fifth century, outlines the church’s moral guidelines for political and military leaders to consider befor...