Only 3000 people are invited to Davos, home of the World Economic Forum - and you’re one of them! Well, not really. But welcome anyway to this chocolate-box Swiss mountain town, transformed via "the Champions League of logistics" into a de facto military base for the world's economic, political and corporate superpowers.

Guiding us through this deeply cursed world is very special guest Caitlín Doherty, smuggling us in to encounter some profoundly cursed Davos freebies. Saudi Arabia-sponsored hand warmers? Meta-branded hot chocolate? Pinterest ramen? Ice cream with crickets in? These seemingly disparate objects are a window into the centres of elite power, ‘Great Reset’ conspiracies, the Epstein files, crypto and AI bubbles, and the mysterious technocrat that is Davos Man. How has Davos - the town, and the economic forum - changed, in a world where globalisation is allegedly in retreat? What has changed under the second Trump administration? When was peak Davos, and has it passed? Are Chinese capitalists inside or outside the tent? And what happens when the capitalist class run out of ideas about where to put their money?

Read some of Cait's amazing pieces:

The Davos essay for Harpers

On David Lynch, for the New Statesman

In Dubai, for New Left Review

And keep an eye out for her forthcoming book on Davos!

And follow her on Twitter @caitdoherty

New year, new you, new Cursed Objects - let’s dive in! This week, Kasia breaks the ice and takes us on a plunge into the cursed and blessed world of wild, outdoor and cold water swimming – while Dan nervously dips a toe in to see if he can hack the chills and spills.

Wild swimming – or “swimming”, as it was sometimes known historically – has taken on an outsized and fascinating role in British culture in the last decade or so. How did we go from over 300 lidos dotted around the country to a situation where people are submerging themselves in urban rivers RIDDLED with e.coli, or indeed tragically drowning while swimming in unsupervised ‘unofficial’ spots?

We discuss the stunning mental health benefits of shocking your body swimming outdoors, especially profound in what Kasia calls “the hard floor of winter” – or in Dan’s case, shouting “WIM HOF!” and bellowing Daniel Bedingfield songs while having cold showers. 

Can places like Hampstead Heath’s famous ponds provide the urban community and conviviality neoliberalism has been stripping away from us? Even while it faces down political controversies and Bougie London Literary Woman jokes?

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Do please consider supporting our Patreon! The first of the all-new Cursed Side Quests is coming exclusively to Patreon very soon.

You'll also get a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps, and it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to support your favourite cultural historians: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

Luke Skywalker, shut up and eat your jelly! As everyone knows, Christmas is like Cursed Objects Christmas, and so sure enough: it’s the long-awaited CO Christmas Special. REJOICE!

This year, we are talking about childhood experiences of Christmas, then and now. Starting off with toy crazes, from Optimus Prime to Cabbage Patch Dolls, and therefore, the true meaning of Christmas: supply-chain economics. “Kids used to be satisfied by a promissory bond!” Kasia rightly complains. We discuss our own childhood moments of WONDER and AWE, Dalmation-related magick, votive offerings to Father Christmas, and the varied acts of parental pageantry required by the season.

We learn that Wu-Tang Clan are not just for Christmas - Raekwon is a year-round commitment - ask whether Darth Vader is the original Grinch, why children are such sticklers for the rules (and such fans of Dostoevsky), and introduce perhaps correctly overlooked festive characters Krampus and Farmhand Rupert, Santa’s designated driver and NPC.

Have a wonderful holiday, love from Kasia, Dan, Nick and Archie - see you in 2026! x

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Christmas is a time of giving, so do please consider supporting our Patreon:

To access a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

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Theme music and production: Mr Beatnick

Artwork: Archie Bashford

What would Christmas be without a tour of London’s lights? For the first of our free xmas podcasts, Kasia and Dan go UP TOWN for an outside (!!) walking tour through Covent Garden, Leicester Square and Piccadilly Circus. Known as stressful hot-spots for holiday season breakdowns, these Central London capitalistic hell-holes must have some redeeming features, right?! 

We find out what London’s markets were like in 1870, and why Covent Garden has become London’s epicentre of festive fun. And we ask: why have Germanic Christmas markets sprung up everywhere via American films that make Christmas seem more idyllic than it really is? Admiring the neat Bratwurst, surprisingly acceptable beer and very poor puns, we throw ourselves into the Leicester Square ‘experience economy’. Finally, given that they want us to look up and marvel at the Christmas lights (rather than be terrified of oncoming traffic), why has the City of London not just pedestrianised central London? 

Christmas is a time of giving, so consider supporting our Patreon:

To listen to this episode and all the rest too - including a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps - it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians:

https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

Not the Queen of Hearts! Greetings, England's roses, and welcome back to the People's Podcast - this week, it's the original parasocial relationship: ROYALTY. 

Kasia is being pursued by a stream of Lady Di-themed cursed objects, and with Dan explores the universe of royal tat, Diana standom, 90s tabloids and the media hysteria around her death and funeral, when Britain discovered EMOTIONS and behaved like honking loons. Some younger listeners may not realise that in the days before TikTok and BBC News 24, commemorative plates were the primary means of news dissemination, and mass-produced soft toys could be a profound avatar for loss.

So it's a wild ride in a white Fiat Uno, discussing dark souvenirism, the anatomy of a Beanie Baby, royal grief in Harvester, the hoarding of historic newspapers, a riot in Woolworths over Candle in the Wind '97, and er ... whatever happened to jacket potatoes?

Regular free and regular Patreon-exclusive episodes are back, baby!

To listen to this episode and all the rest too - including a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps - it is STILL ONLY £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians:

https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

"Escape to the King's Cross Riviera," said the sign on the construction hoardings - so we did! And it forced us to ask questions like: 'What if you threw a major urban regeneration zone and lots of people came, but then they wanted a branch of All Bar One when they got there?'

In this brand new episode, Kasia and Dan are on an Outside Broadcast Adventure (OBA), captured live during the heart of the London summer in King's Cross, one of the capital's Regeneration Ground Zeroes, a bouji office and leisure district that has been transformed into shiny glass and steel towers in the last 20 years.

Kasia takes Dan on a public art walking tour, and they navigate the glitzy commercial areas, swish landscaped gardens and astroturf seating that have replaced the brick buildings stained with soot, heavy industry and brownfield sites - although clubs like The Egg are hanging on from its edgier era: the rogue nightclub you go to when all the others are shut.

We discuss Google's new side-scraper 'campus', how the knowledge economy and the creative industries became New Labour's engine of urban change, and how you bring joy and a settled identity to areas usually defined by transience, like major railway stations. Also, why are small children so interested in large infrastructure projects?

Regular free and regular Patreon-exclusive episodes are back, baby!

To listen to this episode and all the rest, in full - including a back catalogue of over 30 exclusive bonus eps - it is STILL only £4 a month to sign up, and support your favourite cultural historians:

https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

We are back with another brand new episode, another very special guest, the brilliant Fearghus Roulston, and another fascinating assembly of some very Cursed Objects subjects – histories of conflict, conviviality, getting pissed, listening to punk and misremembering our own lives and favourite counter-cultural spaces. 

Fearghus wants to make it clear he is not a “Punkademic”, but that it’s fine if other people are. Drawing on his fascinating oral history work on the Belfast punk scene, we start with a pack of cards, a set of pubs, and the internationalism of the Titanic Museum. We discuss gentrification and tourism in Belfast since the Good Friday Agreement – pacification by Guinness? – “defensive planning”, defensive pubs, international Irish pubs, luxury hotels and student housing.

How does history get cleaned up for international capitalism? Can tourism embed peace, and can peace embed tourism? What happens when a city designs a version of itself just for the tourist gaze? What gets fetishised, or turned into tourist souvenirs? 

Why are we all so emotionally drawn to these stories of unity and progress coming through sub-cultures? Fearghus has the answers: “Max Weber says that politics is drilling through hard boards, and I guess it’s nice to imagine change as not involving drilling through hard boards – as something that can happen in the back room of a pub.”

Fearghus Roulston is a history lecturer at Strathclyde in Glasgow. He’s working on a new book on temporality and the legacy of the Troubles. His last book, Belfast Punk and the Troubles: An Oral History, is available to buy here https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526182463/

And you can support this podcast by paying just £4 a month to become a Patreon subscriber - unlocking the 50% of episodes that are only available to Patrons, and earning Dan and Kasia's eternal gratitude: https://www.patreon.com/cursedobjects

This week, Dan and Kasia forage for meaning in the fertile terrain of culinary "movements", globalisation, multiculturalism and identity, megabucks fine dining, and the desperate search for authenticity in food.

Earlier in the summer, Dan was sent to Oslo - for work, not as punishment - to explore 20 years of New Nordic Cuisine, a hugely ambitious attempt by 10 Scandinavian chefs to overhaul the way we think about, source, cook, serve and eat our dinner. How did they get on? What was wrong with Old Nordic Cuisine - a bit too elk-y? What do pansies taste like? Has New Nordic changed us for the better, pushing us all towards more sustainable and inventive food, or was this just a bunch of white bro-chefs smugly railing against globalisation, while charging €500 a head for dinner, with a business model built on unpaid internships?

And where is the IKEA meatball in all this, not to mention the McHerring Burger?

Kasia gets very excited about a surprise manifesto, and introduces Dan to the upsetting term 'glocalisation'; three-cornered leeks get a long overdue shout-out, and the gang get briefly side-tracked by a Danish rave boat and 'the N-Dubz bridge'.

Thanks again for your support while we a) put on a very successful two-month-long exhibition, and b) had a vital summer break in July and August. Regular free and regular Patreon-exclusive episodes are back, baby!

To listen to them all (including a back catalogue of 30+ exclusive bonus eps), it is STILL only £4 a month:

https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects

“I have been objectified as a vehicle”. We are delighted to welcome back our most-returning guest, as the brilliant historian and author Charlotte Lydia Riley talks us through the cursed world of being pregnant in public; about the way pregnant women – and, in different ways, mothers! – are treated by a frequently confused society. Why is there so much twee culture surrounding pregnancy, and how has it become so common to infantilise expectant mothers? And what is the role of the pin badge, as a way of announcing who we are?

This takes us into discussing public information films, government propaganda, behavioural ‘nudge’ messaging (“don’t swim in gravel pits!”), ‘chivalry’ and how people behave around each other on trains and buses.

Also: what does it mean that Starmer's government is one of fare evasion officers, not bus conductors?

Dr Charlotte Lydia Riley is a historian of twentieth-century Britain at the University of Southampton, specialising in questions about empire, politics, culture and identity. She is the author of Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain and the co-author of Is Free Speech Under Threat? Listen to her first Cursed Objects episode here: https://www.cursedobjects.co.uk/episodes/rainy-empire-island

Also, thanks again for your patience while we a) put on a very successful two-month-long exhibition, and b) had a break over the summer. If you'd like to join our Patreon, it is still only £4 a month, and there are 30+ bonus episodes in there already - our next episode will be Patreon-only: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects 

Sit down please. We have something very serious to tell you. We have made a severe and continuous lapse in our judgement. We are sorry if you feel offended, for some reason. We are sorry if you feel like you've been scammed - please believe that that was never our intention. WE'RE SORRY, OKAY!!!!

After a summer taking some time to reflect on our mistakes and do the work, we are so back - talking public apology videos, Dapper Laughs, public accountability, crocodile tears, Blue Peter, Boris Johnson and why wearing a rollneck might be a sign that you have sinned.

One thing Kasia and Dan will never apologise for: being back (so back), with a bunch of great new episodes in the tank for the weeks ahead.

Thanks for your patience while we a) put on a very successful two-month-long exhibition, and b) had a break over the summer: especially huge thanks to our Patreon subscribers - you'll be getting regular Patreon-only episodes again now. If you'd like to join our Patreon, it is still only £4 a month, and there are 30+ bonus episodes in there already: https://www.patreon.com/c/cursedobjects 

Also a small content note: this is a light-hearted episode, but some of the things the public figures are apologising for include rape jokes and visiting a 'suicide forest', which are rather more grim, in case you'd rather avoid.