On the eve of the millennium, JG Ballard noted how “everything is clean and shiny but oddly threatening”. The dawn of the 1990s had heralded a period of economic prosperity, of globalisation, relative peace and hi-tech connectivity – but did we end the decade more divided than ever?

In this deeply researched and wide-ranging essay, first published in March 2021, the New Statesman’s ideas editor, Gavin Jacobson, looks at the culture and politics of a misunderstood decade. After the old certainties of the Cold War, he writes, the West entered a period of drift: “The overwhelming sense was that the new world order bore no resemblance to those dreamlands promised by the… pursuit of freedom.” In place of the old tensions came the rise of reactionary populism, economic instability and the growth of corporate powers. Meanwhile technological and scientific advances – from an unregulated internet to the cloning of Dolly the sheep – brought uncertainty rather than enlightenment.

Drawing on sources from Naomi Klein to Don DeLillo, via Francis Fukuyama and The Matrix, Jacobson charts the decade that saw the birth of a global monoculture – as well as surveillance capitalism and today’s culture wars. Twenty years on, are the 1990s the decade we have failed to escape?

This article was first published on newstatesman.com and in the magazine on 24 March 2021. You can read a text version here.

Written by Gavin Jacobson and read by Adrian Bradley.

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The New Statesman’s Pippa Bailey has long had a professional as well as a personal interest in the OED: she and the team of sub-editors she leads rely on the world’s most comprehensive dictionary to answer questions of meaning and spelling. So it was a labour of love when she visited its Oxford HQ to meet the lexicographers whose decisions – about which words are added, revised, or rendered obsolete – help shape the world’s most-spoken language.

In this richly researched and beautifully observed deep dive, Bailey charts the course of the dictionary from its mid-19th-century origins to its most recent “new words” update (“terf”, “stealthing” and “sportswashing” were among the June 2022 inclusions). She visits the archive and hears from the specialists hard at work on the dictionary’s third edition – a job that began in 1994 (and the OED is still only halfway revised). Should they trace the first written use of “burner phone” to The Wire, or further back to a 1996 rap by Kingpin Skinny Pimp? Should they add the phrase “very traffic”? And why is it so hard to tell the origin story of “bucket list”?

This article first appeared on newstatesman.com on 22 June and in the magazine on 24 June 2022. You can read the text version here.

Written by Pippa Bailey and read by Emma Haslett.

You also might enjoy listening to How the trial of the Colston Four was won by Tom Lamont.

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In the wake of the pandemic, mental health referrals for adults and children have doubled. Has Covid sparked a parallel wave of mental illness? Or is grief and sadness a natural response to those months of isolation, uncertainty and daily death tolls? 

In this richly reported long read, New Statesman associate editor and feature writer Sophie McBain talks to the patients and medical professionals who believe we over-diagnose mental illness, ascribing labels and medication that do not help. A movement within psychiatry – known as critical psychiatry – rejects the idea of mental illness altogether. Such arguments are now at the heart of what has become a bitter culture war in the UK and US, between those who would abandon psychiatry’s “disease” model and those who insist it saves lives. 

The article was first published on newstatesman.com on 9 February 2022 and in the magazine on 11 February 2022. You can read the text version here.

Written and read by Sophie McBain

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Music writer Pete Paphides has turned to songwriters and musicians, from Abba to the Undertones, to make sense of all the big moments in his life. So when he got the call he was dreading, to say that his father was dying, it was music that saw him through shock, denial and loss. 

In this moving audio essay, read by the author, Paphides explores both the unpredictability of grief and the way his playlists gained fresh meaning – particularly the traditional songs his Greek-Cypriot father listened to, which remind him of home and wet weekends above the family fish-and-chip shop in Birmingham. 

“This is the gift that grief gives you,” says Paphides. “When a loved one leaves this world, they take with them the invisible membrane that stood between your senses and the songs they receive.” For months, he had been looking forward to the premiere of the Abba Voyage hologram show; now, it falls on the eve of his father’s funeral. When he attends the show, how will it affect him?

This article was originally published on 11 June 2022. You can read the text version (with playlist) here.

Music quoted in this piece:

“Freetime” by Trashcan Sinatras

“Giorgio by Moroder” by Daft Punk

“Maddox Table” by 10,000 Maniacs

“Ena omorfo amaxi me dio aloga” (One Cart with Two Horses) by Grigoris Bithikotsis

“Six Words” by Elbow

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On June 21 2022, Prince William will turn 40. What kind of king will the second-in-line be: the moderniser who posed for the cover of Attitude magazine, or the relic behind a disastrous recent tour of the Caribbean? Freelance writer Tanya Gold sets out in search of the ‘real’ William, talking to former colleagues and collaborators, joining a royal visit to Wales, and hearing from the actor who plays him in the Netflix comedy The Windsors. (The starting point was “speaking as poshly as I could”, he says, “pretending I’m in Hamlet or Dynasty, and then eating Haribo.”)

Funny, richly detailed and sometimes jaw-dropping, Gold’s deep dive charts the extraordinary childhood, very public romance and early middle age of the man who will be king. His father, she writes, is ‘a placeholder king. It will be King William who must navigate the path between stability and progression.’ 

This article was originally published on newstatesman.com on 1 June and in the New Statesman magazine on 3 June 2022. You can read the text version here.

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Since Alexander Lukashenko, the president of Belarus, stole an election two years ago his regime, already one of the most repressive in Europe, has been cracking down on opponents real and imagined. These include the fanatical supporters – “ultras” – of Belarusian football clubs, inspired by tales of Ukrainian football hooligans joining protests in Kyiv which led to the removal of a pro-Russian president in 2014.

Like the Ukrainians, the Belarusian ultras opposed Moscow’s influence over their country on nationalist grounds. They joined protests after the August 2020 election, but hundreds were detained, dozens fled to Poland, and one was found dead in suspicious circumstances.

Maria Wilczek tells the story of how the hard men of Belarusian football became dissidents, political prisoners and exiles. The story’s roots are entwined with the conflict in neighbouring Ukraine: Russia has used Belarus as a client state and a launchpad for its regional ambitions.

This story was edited by Neil Arun. It was produced for the Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence, supported by the ERSTE Foundation, in co-operation with the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.

This article was originally published on Newstatesman.com on 14 May. You can read the text version here.

Read by Alix Kroeger.

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On 17 June 1972, a nightwatchman stumbled across a burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC – triggering what became known as Watergate, the investigation that ultimately led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation.

Fifty years on, the historian Colin Kidd reflects on Watergate’s renewed relevance in a populist, post-Trump era. Did the scandal help fuel today’s political conspiracy theories? And did Donald Trump’s war on “fake news” begin with the “journalistic aggrandisement” of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein?

Kidd examines the parallels between Nixon and Trump – “the vindictiveness, the casual indifference to norms, the authoritarian instincts” – and the long-term lessons of Watergate: that lobbyists, millionaires and law-breaking still loom large in a corrupt system.

This article was originally published on Newstatesman.com on 6 April and in the New Statesman magazine on 8 April 2022. You can read the text version here.

Read by Emily Tamkin.

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When George Orwell travelled to Spain in the winter of 1936 to fight General Franco and the fascists, he stopped en route in Paris, where Henry Miller gave him his coat. The two men could not have been more different: the passionately political Englishman, and the American who disdained of all forms of activism. As Ian McEwan writes: “In a letter to Lawrence Durrell he wrote that he knew he could head off the rise of Nazism... if he could just get five minutes alone with Adolf Hitler and make him laugh.” 

The encounter inspired Orwell’s 1939 essay “Inside the Whale”, in which he defended Miller’s freedom to refuse political engagement. Should a novelist insulate themselves from bigger, harder realities (ie, write from “inside the whale”) or confront a bleak political landscape face-on (write “outside the whale”)? Orwell, McEwan argues, managed the unusual trick of doing both – a tension that informs books such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

Adapted from his compelling 2021 Orwell Memorial Lecture, McEwan’s essay looks at the choices he and other novelists have made about writing – and about living – in a time of crisis. How removed from politics can a 21st-century writer be now that “even inside the whale there is ultra-fast broadband”? 

Endnote: This article was first published in the New Statesman on 9 December. It was adapted from the 2021 Orwell Memorial Lecture, delivered on 26 November 2021 and organised by the Orwell Foundation.

You can read the text version here.

Read by Adrian Bradley.

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It started with an innocent question posted on Yahoo! Answers in 2009, and snowballed into a thriving subreddit community: did anyone remember an American movie from the early Nineties called Shazaam, starring the comedian Sinbad as an incompetent genie who grants wishes to two children? Thousands of people did, vividly – and yet there was no trace of it.

In this compelling long read, culture writer Amelia Tait talks to the Shazaam true believers, sorts fact from fiction and looks at the notion known as “the Mandela effect”: the theory that a large group of people who share the same false memory used to live in a parallel universe. 

This article was first published on the New Statesman website on 21 December 2016. You can read the text version, which has been updated for the podcast, here.

Written by Amelia Tait and read by Emma Haslett.

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It launched with a promise to shake up the staid world of television news – to challenge broadcasting’s perceived liberal, left-wing bias. One year on, and faced with a new rival in TalkTV, how is GB News’s revolution going?

Freelance writer Stuart McGurk spent several months reporting the inside story, as told by staffers past and present: those who were there for a chaotic June 2021 launch, those who quit, and those who stayed.

In this deeply researched and often very funny long read, McGurk charts the highs and lows of Britain’s first new rolling news channel in 30 years. Whose idea was it to interview a Winston Churchill impersonator? Why did producers start booking their own parents as guests? And who thought driving a former Soviet police car into Ukraine’s front line was a good idea? All this, and much more, is revealed. 

This article was first published on newstatesman.com on 29 April, and in the magazine on 5 May. You can read the text version here.

Read by Chris Stone.

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