Novara Media

Moya is anxious about her social life and wonders if there’s a better way to make friends – and keep them. Plus: advice for an international special one who feels directionless and disappointed.

Send us your dilemmas: [email protected]

Music by Matt Huxley.

You’ve probably heard of Boots Riley’s work – Sorry To Bother You starring LaKeith Stanfield was a surprise hit, and his series I’m A Virgo got picked up by Amazon Prime. But the Oakland-raised rapper-turned-director doesn’t just want you to leave the cinema having had a good time: he wants you to start a revolution.

His new film I Love Boosters – starring the incredibly charming Keke Palmer – is about three women who shoplift from high end boutiques, and sell the clothes at a cut price in the hood. But it wouldn’t be a Boots Riley film if it stopped there. What starts as a paean to shoplifters turns into a story of working class shop floor organisation - and international communist action.

Is all art propaganda? Is shoplifting a revolutionary act? What role does style play in the revolution? And what’s it like being the most high profile communist in Hollywood, in Trump’s America?

Spoilers Warning: Information about the plot is disclosed at 17:50 – 19:20, 26:40 – 27:50, and 54:10 – 54:50.

00:00 Introduction

00:53 What’s It Like Being a Communist in Hollywood?

02:24 The Contradictions of Having Radical Politics Under Capitalism

03:23 “Suits for Rage”: The Contradictions We All Embody

08:27 How Boots Riley Became Communist

09:03 Exposing Injustice Isn’t Enough: Action is Needed

11:24 What Actually Makes People Join Movements?

13:08 Hollywood’s Problem With Radical Politics

20:10 On Craft, Creativity and Alienation

23:08 Boots Riley’s Superhero Origin Story

31:00 General Strike Now!

35:02 Every Film Is Political

42:28 Is the Right Better at Propaganda?

48:05 How the Cops Manufactured a Shoplifting Panic

53:08 It’s All Propaganda

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Ever felt like an imposter? Jem, Nadia and Keir offer a weird-left analysis of confidence – from market dynamics and private school to the power of positive thinking – with ideas from Barbara Ehrenreich, Dale Carnegie and Foucault.

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Through the 1990s and the 2000s, the West told itself a story: let China get rich, and it’ll become like us. But then China got rich – and it become less and less like the West.

Kaiser Kuo – host of the Sinica Podcast, former Baidu executive, and founding guitarist of China’s first heavy metal band, Tang Dynasty – thinks we need to reckon with this fact: that China has not only now caught up, but is making its own path in modernity.

China has replaced liberal democracy with a strange alloy of Confucianism, Leninism, technocracy, state capitalism and markets – and that combination is outperforming the West. What liberals assumed was the triumphant end of history might turn out to have been a historical cul-de-sac.

Kaiser and Richard Hames talk Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, Wang Huning and the late Qing Dynasty, solar panels and performance legitimacy, and discuss what happens when the future stops looking Western.

Explore the map of everything in the world that has ever mattered. https://novaramedia.com/dyor

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00:00 Intro

03:35 Is Chinese Tech The Best?

10:42 The Great Reckoning: Why the West Must Rethink China

21:56 Confucianism, Leninism and Technocracy

31:03 Confucianism and Modern China

41:44 Can China's State Control Capitalism?

52:04 Many Kinds of Modernity: China as a Model and China Shock 2.0

1:02:53 Green Energy, Industrial Policy and US-China Convergence

1:16:20 Fukuyama, Huntington and Wang Huning: Visions of the Future

Ash has a big theory about our growing fear of cringe. How does the internalisation of secondhand embarrassment change our behaviour? Is it possible that to be cringe is to be free? Plus: advice for a listener who’s become scared of sex.

Send us your dilemmas: [email protected]

Music by Matt Huxley.

In Brighton, for a special recording of Downstream IRL, Ash Sarkar sat down with Naomi Klein, and organiser, writer and co-founder of the Debt Collective, Astra Taylor. They gathered to discuss their new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World.

An apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is gathering momentum. They aren’t just exploiting collapse, they’re provoking and accelerating it, whilst protecting themselves from the fallout. The world’s fate is increasingly in the hands of men who are ambivalent about its survival and betting money on the end.

Already, anger at the building of data centres is cutting across left and right, in a way that climate politics rarely has – but how do we make sure that anger is heard? How do we separate necessary alarm from fatalism? And what can we prepare for the impending AI crash? 

End Times Fascism (2026) by Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor: https://shop.novaramedia.com/products/end-times-fascism

No one is disputed like Mao. Was he a mass murderer, a Communist hero, a charlatan, or a great poet? The saviour of the peasants, or the man who extracted from them all that he could?

Mao’s biography is a nest of contradictions. He led the largest revolution in world history, then presided over its largest famine – and even then, life expectancy rose 20 years over the course of his rule. He launched rebellions – against a government he already controlled. He purged his enemies and friends alike.

Some 50 years after his death, he remains a central figure in Chinese politics. The Communist Party of China posthumously declared him to be 70% right and 30% wrong, but his face still hangs over Tiananmen Square.

In this second episode on China’s history, Rebecca Karl – author of China’s Revolutions in the Modern World – returns to tell Richard Hames about the Mao era, with all its promises, contradictions and catastrophes.

Watch the previous episode with Rebecca, on China’s century of revolutions.

Explore the map we’re making throughout this series of DYOR, of all the people, events and ideas of the Mao era: https://novaramedia.com/dyor

00:00 Intro

4:00 Who Was Mao?

10:52 The 1950s: Land Reform & Early Socialism

24:27 Gender, Class Divides & Welfare

38:37 The Hundred Flowers Campaign Explained

50:15 Famine & The Great Leap Forward

1:03:09 Was the Famine the End of Socialism? Cold War & the Third Front

1:15:02 The Cultural Revolution Explained

1:28:57 How the Cultural Revolution Ended

1:37:30 Jiang Qing, the Gang of Four & Deng Xiaoping's Return

1:47:49 Mao's Legacy: Is China Socialist Today?

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A weird interaction on the dancefloor gets Ash thinking about ambiguity. How do we balance the need for clear consent with the perks of mystery and uncertainty? Has growing up online increased our need for clarity? Plus: a friend who's been separated from her besties.

Send us your dilemmas: [email protected]

Music by Matt Huxley.

Three years ago, just weeks after the genocide began, writer Omar El Akkad posted a tweet, attached to some footage showing the extent of the ruin that Israel had already visited on Gaza. The compelling thought, crystallised in that viral tweet, would go on to become the name of his bestselling book: One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. 

Steven Methven, editor of Novara Live, steps in for Aaron Bastani while he is on parental leave. He sat down with Omar to try to make sense of three years of horror. 

Why did Omar write his book focusing on the West’s role in the violence, rather than centring Palestine? What would meaningful accountability and justice for Palestinians look like? How does he think Hamas will be remembered? And has he found any source of hope amid the events he describes?

For a century, China underwent a series of invasions, revolutions and counter-revolutions. In China, it’s known as the Century of Humiliation.

It was a time of immense upheavals: from the Opium Wars of 1839, through the Taiping Rebellion, the Xinhai Republican Revolution, a Civil War, an invasion by the Japanese which merged into the Second World War; the resumption of the Civil War and, eventually coming to an end with the Communist Revolution of 1949.

Each one transformed the country more comprehensively than seemed possible beforehand.

Rebecca Karl is the author of China's Revolutions in the Modern World, which tells us not only what happened, but how its participants tried to make sense of it all, and why that still matters for understanding China now – after all, the Chinese Communist Party haven’t forgotten any of it.

She joined Richard Hames to discuss the century that destroyed imperial China and set the stage for the largest revolution in history.

There is much more to explore on the map we’re making for this series, which shows all the people, ideas and event that define China’s history, present, and future. Get it here.

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0:00 Intro

4:37 Opium Wars

12:58 The Man Who Claimed to Be Jesus's Brother

21:30 The Taiping Rebellion

30:16 1911 Revolution

42:47 The May Fourth Movement

52:10 How the Chinese Communist Party Began

1:01:38 Shanghai Massacre, Mao and the Long March

1:13:22 Japanese Invasion and World War II in China

1:24:30 Chinese Civil War and the 1949 Revolution