Novara Media

What role does literature play in revolution? If the question seems bizarre to you and the answer obvious, you’re not alone.

Yet some of the most important revolutionaries in history have turned to literature in times of crisis. Mao Zedong started writing poetry during the Chinese Red Army’s retreat, adopting traditional Chinese forms to do so. Leon Trotsky, founder of the Russian Red Army, having just won the Russian Civil War, turned his mind to the question of literature in a communist society. And Friedrich Engels wrote that he had learned more from the novelist Honoré de Balzac than from any historian, economist or statistician.

For another episode in our series on class, Juliet Jacques and Nihal El-Aasar talk to Mark Steven about revolutionary literature and the struggle for a better world. His book Class War: A Literary History is available from Verso Books.

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Discussion of climate change mainly focuses on mitigating rising temperatures, de-carbonising and getting to ‘net zero’.

Author and broadcaster Gaia Vince argues that we also need to focus on how we’ll deal with with’s already happening and about to get much much worse: huge swathes of the planet becoming uninhabitable and 2 billion people needing to find somewhere new to live.

She argues the solution to this problem is a radical reframing of how we think about migration.

She sat down with Aaron to talk wet bulb temperatures, demographic aging and the Japanese nappy market.

Gaia’s book Nomad Century is available from Penguin.

January is historically the busiest month of the year for holiday bookings. But if you’ve ever felt uncomfortable with the idea of being a tourist, you’re not the first. Back in 1976, anthropologist Dean MacCannell theorised both our drive to see the world and its manipulation by capitalism in his book The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class.

Travel has changed almost beyond recognition since then: staged authenticity is the norm, and the places you’re most likely to visit are sourced from Trip Advisor and Instagram. Plus, tourism is now shrouded in environmental guilt – what the Swedish call ‘flygskam’.

Fifty years after The Tourist, Novara Media contributing editor Moya Lothian-McLean speaks to MacCannell about disaster tourism, how sightseeing became sacred, and our destructive search for authenticity.

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From his radical youth in 1970s Italy to his research as one of the world’s leading theoretical physicists, Carlo Rovelli is as comfortable talking politics as he is explaining quantum theory.

He sat down with Aaron to talk about the future of Europe, his theory of white holes, and why we’re not actually living in a simulation. His book White Holes: Inside The Horizon is available from Penguin.

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A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

Is football the place for political struggle? Is there a limit to the success of fan-owned clubs? How disappointed can we be when pundits and players turn out not to be comrades?

Cultural critic Juliet Jacques and Pro Revolution Soccer host Tom Williams unite for a conversation inspired by Mickaël Correia’s book, The People’s History of Football. They talk about the commodification of football, how a politics of resistance has inspired teams from Cairo to Clapton, and why a supporter-owned club would ever want to sell up to Disney.

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A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

For this end-of-year edition of Downstream, the Novara Media team look back on the biggest stories of the year. Ash Sarkar is joined by Moya Lothian-McLean, Michael Walker and Owen Jones to talk about the Labour Party, the climate crisis, the rise of AI and the war on Gaza.

From clouds brightening to prospects dimming, it’s a conversation with a surprisingly high level of off-brand festive cheer. This conversation was recorded live in London on 7th December.

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A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

The ACFM gang get together for the last time this year to deliver a Festive 50. Keir, Jem and Nadia select the best bits of culture and politics from 2023, from music, films, books to games, strikes and actions.

Unwrap to find sci-fi blaxploitation, comedy history, gobby glam-punk, Judge Dredd analysis, a fresh angle on Silicon Valley billionaires and much more.

Thanks for listening to the show and for all your support this year – we couldn’t do it without you. https://novara.media/support

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Produced and edited by Matt Huxley and Chal Ravens. PRS licence number: LE-0016481

Released in 1946, Frank Capra’s fable of Christmas despair in small town America has become – rather improbably – a staple of festive television. Starring Jimmy Stewart as virtuous everyman George Bailey, It’s A Wonderful Life is not just a feelgood tale of moral redemption, but a clue to the shifting social terrain of post-war America.

Is it a film about capitalism? Angels? Individual liberty? The subversion of community values? The trauma of the second world war? James Butler, co-founder of Novara Media and a contributing editor at the London Review of Books, and host Eleanor Penny reflect on their very first viewing (!) of the movie.

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A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support

Asset management companies like Blackrock, Vanguard and Macquarie have avoided real scrutiny for decades, but their secretive activities are starting to attract attention from political researchers and academics. What do these companies do, and what risk do they pose to society?

Author and academic Brett Christophers sets out to answer this question in his new book, Our Lives in Their Portfolios: Why Asset Managers Own the World. He sat down with Aaron for a crash course in the world of asset management, discussing the dangers of financialisation, how UK infrastructure has been gutted by privatisation, and what we can learn from the case of the City of Chicago vs. Morgan Stanley.

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A huge thank you to everyone who has chosen to back our journalism this year. You’ve made everything we do possible. https://novara.media/support