Intelligence Squared

Whether it's skiing in Afghanistan, eating lobster in Cuba, or a package tour in North Korea - here are some things to consider for when you plan your next holiday. 

In this episode of the podcast we explore the ethical boundaries of travel and tourism to countries under a repressive regime. Is it justifiable to travel to such places, potentially aiding oppressive governments with tourism dollars? Or, could these visits serve as a crucial bridge, creating an avenue for dialogue and cultural exchange, and an opportunity for the outside world to witness the realities on the ground?

Our host for this episode is Philippa Thomas, and our guests are James Willcox, Suki Kim, and Evan Dyer.

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We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. 

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In this episode we bringing you the recording of our event ‘Tory Nation: How One Party Took Over’, recorded on the 10th of May 2023.

The Conservative Party has been in power in the United Kingdom since 2010, stumbling its way through corruption scandals, the turmoil of Brexit, a pandemic, and five prime ministers. And yet it has won the last four elections in a row. How?

With host Commissioning Editor and Writer at the New Statesman, Will Lloyd, Samuel Earle came to Intelligence Squared to shed light on the Conservatives’ remarkable grip on power throughout history. Drawing from his new book ‘Tory Nation’, Earle explored the Conservatives’ ruling class origins in the eighteenth century, their influence on the British press and their historic appeal to working class voters to piece together the reasons for their political success. 

To hear the full length episode of this event and to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, head to intelligence Squared.com/members to become a member today.

This podcast was produced by Senior Producer Conor Boyle with editing by Executive Producer Rowan Slaney

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We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. 

Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to [email protected] or Tweet us @intelligence2. 

And if you’d like to get ad-free access to all Intelligence Squared podcasts, including exclusive bonus content, early access to new episodes and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today for just £4.99, or the equivalent in your local currency . 

Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. 

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To mark the passing of one of Britain's most celebrated writers, we’re replaying an event recorded with us in November 2020.

Martin Amis was often called the Mick Jagger of the British book world. As famous for his love affairs, his friendships and his complicated family history as for his dazzling prose, he dominated the literary scene for decades. 

In this exclusive Intelligence Squared event, made in partnership with Penguin Live, he speaks about his much anticipated autobiographical novel Inside Story. It is perhaps Amis’s most intimate book, a meditation on love, loss, ageing and death. We encounter the vivid characters who have helped define Amis – his father Kingsley, his literary hero Saul Bellow, the poet Philip Larkin and his novelist stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard. 

And of course there is his lifelong friend and conversation partner, Christopher Hitchens, whose death from cancer he chronicles in some of the tenderest prose he has ever written. 

In conversation with novelist Alex Preston, Amis reflects on his life and work and explore the hardest questions we all face: how to live, how to grieve, and how to die.

This podcast was produced by Executive Producer Hannah Kaye with editing by Executive Producer Rowan Slaney

To hear the full length episode in which Amis goes into the urgency of youth, the legacy we leave, and dealing with the death of Hitchens, become an Intelligence Squared Supporter today, just visit IntelligenceSquared.com/members

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We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. 

Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to [email protected] or Tweet us @intelligence2. 

And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today.

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This episode is part two of our live event on the end of the war in Ukraine. In March 2023, the BBC’s Clive Myrie, was joined by four leading historians, Orlando Figes, Max Hastings, Anne Applebaum, and Olesya Khromeychuk, to discuss when - and how - this almost decade-long conflict could end.

Part two and three of this event are available ad free, for subscribers now. And for our listeners who don’t subscribe part 2 will be available in our next episode. 

This conversation is part of Intelligence Squared’s live debate partnership with the Southbank Centre.

We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. 

Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to [email protected] or Tweet us @intelligence2. 

And if you’d like to get ad-free access to all Intelligence Squared podcasts, including exclusive bonus content, early access to new episodes and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today for just £4.99, or the equivalent in your local currency . 

Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. 

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With the Russian army struggling to make gains in Eastern Ukraine and the devastating impact of the war taking its toll, many are wondering if Vladimir Putin’s war may be nearing an end point, and what a realistic end to this conflict may look like.

In part one of this live event the BBC’s Clive Myrie, was joined by four leading historians, Orlando Figes, Max Hastings, Anne Applebaum, and Olesya Khromeychuk, to discuss when - and how - this almost decade-long conflict could end.

Part two and three of this event are available ad free, for subscribers now. And for our listeners who don’t subscribe part 2 will be available in our next episode. 

This conversation took place in March 2023 and is part of Intelligence Squared’s live debate partnership with the Southbank Centre.

We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. 

Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to [email protected] or Tweet us @intelligence2. 

And if you’d like to get ad-free access to all Intelligence Squared podcasts, including exclusive bonus content, early access to new episodes and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today for just £4.99, or the equivalent in your local currency. 

Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. 

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Human beings have been telling stories for thousands of years, but what actually makes for a good story? Authors have been trying to settle on the great principles of compelling writing for as long as people have been writing. Yet, as Deepa Anappara and Taymour Soomro argue, something has gone amiss in these manuals on the art of storytelling: they have tended to privilege a Western perspective.

Anappara and Soomro came to Intelligence Squared to talk about their new anthology, Letters to a Writer of Colour, in which they ask us to critically examine the assumptions that shape the way we think fiction should be written. What might fiction look like if we considered alternative ways of constructing narratives that were grounded in the experiences of a person of colour?

Together with with two of the contributors to the collection, Sharlene Teo and Leila Aboulela, they explored one of the things we all have a primal need for – stories, and lots of different kinds of them.

This podcast was recored on the 4th of April 2023 and was produced by Executive Producer Hannah Kaye. Editing was by Executive Producer Rowan Slaney

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Thanks for listening to this episode of Intelligence Squared! We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. 

Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to [email protected] or Tweet us @intelligence2. And if you’d like to get  ad-free access to all Intelligence Squared podcasts, including exclusive bonus content, early access to new episodes and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today for just £4.99, or the equivalent in your local currency . 

Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more. 

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In this episode we're joined by renowned economist and China expert Keyu Jin to ask whether the West really understands it's biggest geopolitical and economic rival? 

Keyu Jin was born in China and educated in the United States. She's now a professor of eco­nomics at the London's LSE and author of The New China Playbook which seeks to dispel myths about China's economy and people. You may remember her from our 2019 debate ‘China: Friend or Foe?’ and she joins us again today with Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs commentator for the Financial Times.

This podcast was Recorded on the 12th of May 2023 in London and was co-produced by Senior Producer Conor Boyle and the The Rachman Review podcast team at the Financial Time. Editing was by Executive Producer Rowan Slaney.

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Our listeners are the heart of Intelligence Squared, and we're always eager to hear from you. Let us know what you'd like us to talk about next, who you think we should invite as guests, and what debates you'd like to hear in the future. You can send us an email or voice note at [email protected] or tweet us at @intelligence2.

Our mission is to foster honest debate and compelling conversations worldwide, which is why we offer a wealth of free content every week. We rely on the support of our community to continue our mission, so If you're able, please consider joining us as a member of Intelligence Squared for just £4.99 a month.

As a member, you'll have ad-free access to Intelligence Squared podcasts, including exclusive bonus content and early access to new episodes. You'll also receive a 15% discount on all in-person Intelligence Squared events, and you'll get our member-only newsletter, The Monthly Read, delivered straight to your inbox. 

Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership

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In an age where the line between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation seems ever more blurred, can anyone actually own a culture? In this conversation acclaimed author and public intellectual Martin Puchner explains that the history of mankind has always been a story of borrowing from one another and that this is something to be celebrated, not lamented. The idea of ownership implicit in debates about cultural appropriation, he argues, presents an insular tale about how culture evolves — flattening out the complicated textures of human history and, in the end, what truly makes us us. Our host for this discussion is Edward Wilson Lee, fellow and lecturer at Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge.

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Louise Perry has been described as the most influential young feminist in Britain. She claims in her book The Case Against the Sexual Revolution that the contemporary world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn is harming women and she calls for a radical challenge to what she sees as the failed liberal feminism of the 20th century. Meanwhile writer Mary Harrington argues that the belief in the progressive march of history is misguided and that new technology, far from liberating women, has trapped them into commodifying their bodies in the false belief that they are empowering themselves. In this conversation hosted by Alice Thompson, columnist and interviewer at The Times, they present their case for why they think progress is at odds with feminism. 

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Mikhail Shishkin is one of the most celebrated living Russian novelists and the only author to have won all three major Russian literary prizes. All his books have been adapted for the stage in Russia and they have been translated into 30 languages. In conversation with historian Victor Sebastyen Shishkin traces the roots of Russia’s problems, from Kievan Rus via the Grand Duchy of Moscow, empire, revolution and the Cold War to the now thirty-year-old Russian Federation. He explores the uneasy relationship between the Russian state and its citizens, and set out his view that there are really two Russian peoples: the disillusioned and disaffected, who suffer from what he calls a slave mentality, and those who embrace so-called European values and try to stand up to oppression. And he addresses the most vital question of all: Will Russia continue its vicious circle of upheaval and autocracy, or will its people find a way out of history?

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