The right have ditched climate denial and found something worse. They’re doubling down on the exhaustion of people and planet alike, making us run ever-faster just to stay in place. Can we turn our collective exhaustion into a climate politics of rest and recuperation?

That’s the urgent question Ajay Singh Chaudhary asks in The Exhausted of the Earth: Politics in a Burning World. He tells Richard Hames about the strange new alliances forged by climate change, what we can learn from global peasant struggles, and the possibilities buried in a world coming apart at the seams.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: [email protected]

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

The difference between sex and gender is fundamental to how we talk about trans people. But what if it obscures the richness of life outside of gender norms?

There is so much more to gender non-conforming people than this academic, middle-class, distinction – so says Jules Gill-Peterson, a historian at Johns Hopkins University and the author of A Short History of Trans Misogyny.

In conversation with Eleanor Penny, Gill-Peterson reaches back into the past to explain what it means to be a queen, why trans women do sex work, and how to reignite the celebration of femininity as a cornerstone of feminist politics.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: [email protected]

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

No country has ever changed so fast as China. From the west, we see only the dazzling headline figures – 15% growth in some years. But it’s on the ground, in the huge shifts in the patterns of daily life, where the story comes alive.

Journalist Yuan Yang’s first book Private Revolutions provides just that insight, revealing the individual lives behind the increasing lines on the graphs. Born in China, Yang moved to the UK at the age of 4 but in 2016 returned to her home country to become deputy Beijing Bureau Chief for the Financial Times.

Now back in the UK, where she is running to become Labour’s MP for Earley and Woodley this year, she spoke to Richard Hames about how the disruptions of China’s recent history have set it on its present path and how the left’s love of China is misplaced.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: [email protected]

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

George Bernard Shaw once joked that the US and the UK are “two countries divided by a common language.” Can the same be said of their conservatives? As we brace for a joint election year, Eleanor Penny talks to Sam Adler-Bell and Matthew Sitman, two expert guides to US conservatism via their podcast Know Your Enemy, to analyse the special relationship between right-wingers on both sides of the pond.

They discuss the differences between US and UK conservativism, the different factions that have jostled for supremacy since the 1950s, the rupture that Trump’s presidency represented, and what they expect from the upcoming elections.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Email us with comments, criticisms and suggestions: [email protected]

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

In the ’00s, animal rights protestors nearly won their battle to ban vivisection in the UK, shutting down multiple breeding farms that were supplying laboratories with cats, dogs and guinea pigs. But at the last moment, the government made a dramatic U-turn, blocking their attempt to shut down Huntingdon Life Sciences and throwing activists in jail.

How did this winning campaign fall apart? Why was the war on terror a crucial turning point? And what might the Palestine movement learn from its tactics?

Rivkah Brown is joined by Tom Harris, an activist with Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) and author of Your Neighbour Kills Puppies: Inside the Animal Liberation Movement.

Novara FM now has its own inbox – email your comments, criticism and suggestions to [email protected]

The exhortation to “read some effing Orwell!” is an old chestnut of the online left, whether ironic or sincere, or somewhere in between. But if we’re looking for a writer whose body of work truly anticipates the world we live in now – globalised, postcolonial, postmodern – we might instead turn to the American Marxist cultural critic Fredric Jameson.

He’s just turned 90 and, in characteristically productive style, has three new books out this year. But where to start? To get a grip on Jamesonian thought, Richard Hames invites Sianne Ngai and Matthew Beaumont, both incisive critics in their own right, to discuss the breadth of his life and work, from postmodernism to the political unconscious to Jaws.

Sianne and Matt recommend that new readers of Jameson start with The Geopolitical Aesthetic or the essay ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture‘.

Read Sianne and Matt’s recent essays on Jameson over at the Verso blog.

Novara FM now has its own inbox – email your comments, criticism and suggestions to [email protected]

London is a foodie metropolis: undoubtedly one of the best places to eat in the world.

But eating in London is also, like everything else in the city, shaped by its history as the capital of a globe-spanning empire.

How did the contraction of this formal empire change infamously terrible British cuisine? How did multiculturalism become an excuse for underpaid racialised labour? And how did landlords ruin Chinatown?

The essay collection London Feeds Itself, now in its expanded second edition, is one of the most ambitious attempts to ask all of these questions.

Eleanor Penny sat down with its editor Jonathan Nunn, also editor of Vittles, and contributor Amardeep Singh Dhillon to tuck into the history and present of food in the capital.

Novara FM now has its own inbox – email your comments, criticism and suggestions to [email protected]

Centuries of colonial capitalism have reordered life on the planet and inside our bodies, from industrial farming and the uneven advances of modern medicine, to night shifts, chronic stress and inflammation. Has the system made us sick?

That’s the concern of Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, who join Eleanor Penny to talk about the history of medical injustice and environmental toxicity, and what can be done start the healing process. Their book, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice, is available from Penguin.

This episode first aired in August 2022.

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Send your comments, criticisms, corrections and provocations to [email protected]

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

Why is it so expensive to rent in the UK? In a divisive new book, barrister Nick Bano places the blame squarely on price-gouging landlords, rejecting the conventional wisdom that calls for more new housing as a solution to the crisis.

He goes head to head with Novara Live’s Michael Walker to explain the thinking behind Against Landlords: How to Solve the Housing Crisis, out on Verso Books.

This episode was produced in a collaboration with the Crash Course With Michael Walker podcast.

*

Novara FM now has its own inbox. Send your comments, criticisms, corrections and provocations to [email protected]

We’re living in a world of hurry and shortcuts, of intimacy on tap and just-in-time production. Immediacy, according to Anna Kornbluh, is the link between flow-states and Fleabag, between food delivery apps and a mistrust of political systems.

She joins Richard Hames to explain the thinking behind her new book – Immediacy: Or, The Style of Too Late Capitalism – and what the effects of immediacy both reveal and conceal about our world.

Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support