Novara Media

We need critical minerals for the green transition, the military and the AI boom. In barely a year, lithium and the rare earths have become some of the most fought-over objects on earth. But the scarcity is manufactured — by refineries, choke points and the states that control them. <...

Mariana Mazzucato is a towering figure in contemporary economics, best known for her work on the entrepreneurial state and mission-oriented economics. Her congregation is broad, ranging from an ascendant Andy Burnham, to the Pope, to Marco Rubio. Ash Sarkar sat down with her in front of a live audience at EartH Theatre in Hackney to test the ideas in her new book, The Common Good Economy.

A weird-left look at the magical properties of resilience, from the colonial legacy of the stiff upper lip to contemporary narratives of trauma and victimhood.

Nadia, Keir and Jem wonder whether humans and animals can flourish in the ruins of capitalism, and what a left politics of resilience could look like in an era of constant economic and climate shocks.

No tunes in this show, but plenty of ideas from Catherine Liu, Sheryl Sand...

Daniel Levy is a British-Israeli analyst, commentator, and former Israeli government negotiator whose biography reads like a map of the peace process’s rise and fall.

Ash Sarkar sat down with him as a new Iran deal is announced, with shipping through the Strait of Hormuz set to reopen and the US-Iran ceasefire extended for 60 days.

In this conversation, Daniel picks apart what these peace negotiations are really about. What d...

Secret backrooms where deals are done in private: the realm of conspiracy theories? Or an increasingly large part of capitalism?

Since the financial crisis, some of the big winners have been private equity firms. They’ve snapped up bargains on everything from high street brands, to care homes and nurseries – and maybe even the house you own.

Hettie O’Brien is a journalist for The Guardian and the author of Th...

The war on terror ended in 2021 with a catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the consequences of that conflict continue to play out both overseas and at home.

Aaron Bastani sat down with investigative journalist Matt Kennard, founder of Declassified UK, to talk about the status of the American empire, Trump’s war-hungry administration, and how the US government has been captured by Netanyahu.

Matt’s new book is...

The so-called ceasefire in Gaza has not ended the genocide.

The bombing runs may be quieter, but the bulldozers roar on. Israel is tearing up homes, orchards, schools and hospitals, then flattening the rubble to erase the memory that Palestinian life was ever there.

To understand this architecture of death, Richard Hames spoke to Eyal Weizman, author of Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide and founder of Forensic Arc...

It has been a year since Aaron Bastani first met with AI investigative journalist Karen Hao, to discuss her book Empire of AI.  A year is a long time, in the fastest growing sector on the planet. To bring us up to date, Aaron and Karen sat down again to discuss the major shifts in the empire – and their impacts on us all. 

Billions of people now ...

We are all subject to manipulation campaigns all the time: advertising, political campaigning, social media. You don’t know what’s true and you can’t stop watching slop.

And the technology is getting better all the time – there are now systems that predict what your brain state will be when you see a particular video on the internet.

We’re living in a jungle of manipulative...

The far right holds power in the US, inflaming tension along racial lines. ICE agents terrorise the streets, while Black history is erased from school curricula. In the UK too, Nigel Farage’s far right party Reform is on the ascendancy, riding a tide of anti-immigrant sentiment that he himself helped to stoke.

Our guest on Downstream this week is Professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, civil rights advocate and legal scholar. Crenshaw i...

AI progress isn’t slowing down. The bubble doesn’t seem to be popping. And who in power actually cares about the environmental impacts anyway?

All that is to say: AI is here to stay. And what will be its fruits? Greater control of workers or even their brutal repression, some say.

So, is there a positive future for AI at all?

Garrison Lovely is the author of Obsolete: The AI Industry’s Trillion-Dollar Race to Repl...

A wealth tax on the very richest people in our society has never been more popular. Recent polling puts the plan at 90% approval, a figure almost unheard of for any policy proposal.

This week’s guest, Gabriel Zucman, is a French economist who has done the most comprehensive work on what such a tax could accomplish.

And he’s also a key inspiration for the UK’s leading wealth tax advocate – and friend of the s...

It’s a dizzying set of allegations.

A trove of leaked voice notes and call recordings — published by the anonymous outlet Hondurasgate.ch and Spain’s Canal RED — allege that Israeli money helped secure US President Donald Trump’s pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was serving 45 years in a US p...

Jem, Nadia and Keir apply their weird-left lens to the power and potential of shock. Starting with an investigation into economic shock therapy and the way that Trumpism models the concept of shock doctrine, they move onto modern art’s relationship with the shock of the new, from Dada and Eisenstein to gangsta rap and radio shock jocks.

Can you acclimatise yourself to shock either through repetition or training? Can shock be...

It has been a seismic week in British politics. The two-party system has collapsed. Keir Starmer is digging in at Downing Street, while Labour leadership contenders line up outside, and Reform clouds gather overhead. Now: the most important by-election in more than a century looms. How did we get here? And what happens next?

On this week’s Downstream, Aaron Bastani is joined by James Butler, contributing editor at the London ...

Are you a person? Sounds like a simple question, but it isn’t. Until pretty recently, the idea that everyone was a human in the same way was almost unthinkable.

But the world order that established universal human rights is crumbling. The question of who or what counts as a person is getting harder to answer. Companies have rights to religious freedom – but Muslims detained in Guantanamo Bay don’t. Rivers hav...

British politics is in turmoil. The two party system has collapsed, the far right has won huge gains across the country. Crises of this scale can create huge opportunities for socialists too, but only when the left is organised and ready.

Peter Mertens is the general secretary of the Workers’ Party of Belgium. If recent years in British politics have had a...

Are we living through a new era of British weirdness? Keir and Jem mark the start of spring by taking in the weird-left politics of leylines, weird walks and standing stones.

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