Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.

In part two, Ian and Dorian talk about the single most important liberal book ever written, track the ups and downs of the couple's tumultuous affair, and show how Mill became a woke warrior in his old age, fighting against racism and sexism and destroying his carefully-built Victorian reputation in the process.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history.

In part one, Ian explains Mill's devastating childhood, Taylor's cutting social commentary, their love affairs which rocked Victorian London, the evidence for her co-authorship of several key liberal books, and how they delivered some of the earliest works of British feminism.

• See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?)

Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) - The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - On Liberty (1859)

John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - The Subjection of Women (1869)

John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham - Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987)

Richard Reeves - John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In part two of George Orwell, Dorian picks up the story in 1941, with Orwell taking a job at the BBC. The war grinds on, and so does George, until his anti-Stalinist fairy tale Animal Farm changes everything. We’re on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four but it is littered with obstacles: grief, madness, bombs, tuberculosis. After the war, Orwell is writing his finest essays but his life is mayhem so he escapes to the Scottish island of Jura with his baby son to write the novel that, little does he know, will make him a legend.

It's the story of a writer reaching the height of his powers while everything around him seems to be falling to bits. How did a sick man on a lonely island write perhaps the most influential novel of the twentieth century? Why is his strange masterpiece so widely misunderstood? What were Orwell’s blindspots? Would he have been a good hang? And are taking the right lessons from his life and work? All this, plus Nye Bevan, HG Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley and the atomic bomb.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Image: Peter Cushing (Winston Smith) with Yvonne Mitchell (Julia) and André Morrell (O’Brien) in the 1954 BBC production of George Orwell’s 1984. (Getty)

Reading list

Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984)

Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006)

Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971)

Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019

Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975)

John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989)

William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023)

Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey.

In this opening two-parter Dorian bows to the inevitable and tells the story of the subject of his book, The Ministry of Truth. When George Orwell died on 21 January 1950, at the age of 46, the phenomenal success of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it international news. The obituaries hailed him as a beacon of decency, sanity and wisdom during the darkest years of the twentieth century — “the wintry conscience of a generation” in VS Pritchett’s ringing phrase. To this day, his moral authority is claimed by people across the political spectrum. Behind the myth, Orwell was a complicated man, full of flaws and contradictions. His road to success was long, painful and ridiculously eventful.

In part one, Dorian explains how Eric Blair became George Orwell, from Eton to Burma to Paris to Wigan. We then follow Orwell to the Spanish Civil War, where he is shot by fascists and hounded by Stalinists, and finally to Blitz-torn London. It’s the story of a man working out who he is, as a writer and a moral agent, in a world tumbling towards catastrophe. How did Orwell become a socialist? Why did he wind up the other socialists? Why was Spain the great turning point in his life? Are his early novels any good? And was his wife Eileen the queen of deadpan one-liners? All this and more in the return of Origin Story.

• Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. 

• Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

• Support Origin Story on Patreon

Reading list

Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984)

Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002)

Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006)

Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971)

Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019

Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975)

John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989)

William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003)

DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023)

Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020)

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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We’ve covered ideas, phrases, people and historical events. Now Origin Story profiles its first building: Number 10 Downing Street. 

Following Dorian’s bonus episode about the birth of end of the world fiction, based on his new book Everything Must Go, Ian goes deep on a topic from his bestselling book How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t. He explains how a house built on marshland by a 17th century scoundrel gradually became the prime minister’s official residence, and how its cramped, chaotic floorplan still influences how vital decisions are made. Why does tradition trump efficient governance? How do wily advisers exploit the layout to increase their influence over the PM? Is the door more important than the rest of the house put together? And is it finally time to say goodbye to Number 10?

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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• Join Ian and Dorian for Origin Story Live in London on Tue 7 May. They’ll be looking at how the Conservative Party got addicted to conspiracy theory, and more.

This time: The Illuminati were a group of Enlightenment idealists who existed for just a few years in 1780s Bavaria. Or were they? The Illuminati have since been blamed for everything from the French Revolution to communism to 9/11. How did a powerless club of intellectuals become reimagined as the secret rulers of the world? And how did the myth of the Illuminati become the template for every megaconspiracy theory about plots to put humanity under the heel of a one-world government?

Dorian and Ian unravel this amazing yarn, which takes in America’s Founding Fathers, British fascists, the Knights Templar, David Icke, Jay-Z and the Playboy letters page. The truth is in here.

Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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For 1800 years, Western conceptions of the end of the world were dominated by the Book of Revelation: Armageddon, the Millennium, Judgement Day. But in 1816, political upheaval, Enlightenment science and the Romantic imagination converged to give birth to a radical idea: the end of the world without God. When Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley came together beside Lake Geneva that summer, a volcanic eruption was producing endless rain and apocalyptic prophecies.

Drawing on his new book Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, Dorian explains how that season of confusion and gloom led to not just Frankenstein but Byron’s revolutionary poem Darkness. And how the deaths of her companions led Mary to write The Last Man, the first ever novel about a world-destroying pandemic.

It’s a story of personal tragedy, temporary climate change, shocking new ideas about the past, present and future of life on earth, and the summer that kicked off two centuries (and counting) of apocalyptic fiction.

Buy Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production

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In the last episode of season four, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey discuss effective altruism. Last month the US entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the dramatic collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was also a prominent advocate of effective altruism, a philanthropic movement based on utilitarian philosophy, and the scandal has thrown the EA community into crisis.

Dorian and Ian explain how two maverick young Oxford philosophers ended up creating a multi-billion-dollar movement, explore the ideas behind it, and track its journey towards long termism: the philosophy of safeguarding the future of the human race from threats such as hostile AI. Are the principles of EA sound? Did the influx of billionaires and the obsession with existential risk knock it off course? Was Bankman-Fried a true believer who blew it or just a grifter who took the idealists for a ride? And can EA survive one of the biggest financial scandals of this century? When big ideas collide with big money and big tech, things get messy.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Reading list

Books:

Carol J.Adams, Alice Crary, Lori Gruen, (eds.) — The Good it Promises, the Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Alturism, (2023)

Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (eds.) — Global Catastrophic Risks

(2008)

Nick Bostrom — Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014)

Zeke Faux — Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering

Fall (2023)

John Leslie — The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human

Extinction (1996)

Michael Lewis — Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023)

William MacAskill — Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You

Can Make a Difference (2015)

William MacAskill — What We Owe the Future (2022)

Toby Ord — The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

(2020)

Online:

Core EA Principles, Centre for Effective Altruism

Peter Singer — Famine, Affluence and Morality, 1971

Peter Singer — TED talk, 2013

William MacAskill — The history of the term ‘effective altruism’, Effective

Altruism Forum, 2014

Raffi Khatchadourian — The Doomsday Invention, New Yorker, 2015

Gideon-Lewis Krauss — The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism, New

Yorker, 2022

Charlotte Alter — Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned

About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed, Time, 2023

Sophie McBain — Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion,

New Statesman, 2023

Podcasts:

80,000 Hours: Sam Bankman-Fried, 2022

80,000 Hours: Toby Ord, 2023

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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In part two of the history of eugenics, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey explain how the pseudo-science of “racial hygiene” seduced everyone from feminist birth-control pioneers and social democrats to the ardent white supremacists whose screeds shaped US immigration laws and influenced Hitler. Then they turn to the rise of eugenics in Germany and how it enabled the Nazis to introduce massive programs of sterilisation and extermination.

After the Second World War, the name of eugenics was discredited but many of its leading thinkers and institutions kept going under the more acceptable guise of genetics. How was eugenics quietly rehabilitated by IQ fetishists and population-control advocates? Why has it become so popular in Silicon Valley? And does it even make scientific sense or is it really a pseudo-science designed to formalise bigotry? Despite its association with historic atrocities, the belief that biology is destiny and procreation is political has not gone away.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits including an extended version of the podcast. www.Patreon.com/originstorypod 

Reading list:

Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) - The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010)

Edwin Black — War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003)

Elof Axel Carlson — The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001)

GK Chesterton — Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)

Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man (1871)

Lyndsay Andrew Farrall — The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (1969)

Francis Galton – Hereditary Genius (1869)

Henry H Goddard – The Kallikak Family (1912)

Stephen Jay Gould — The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1996)

Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Philippa Levine — Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017)

Gina Maranto — Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996)

Adam Rutherford — Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)

Lothrop Stoddard – The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920)

HG Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) 

Online:

Quinn Slobodian — ‘The rise of the new tech right’, The New Statesman (2023)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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This week, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey get started on the history of eugenics, the idea of finding biological solutions to social problems. Say the word now and it calls to mind skull-measuring cranks or Nazi death camps but for decades it was a mainstream project in many parts of the world, attracting not just white supremacists and elitist snobs but liberals, socialists and feminists. Winston Churchill, HG Wells, Nikola Tesla and John Maynard Keynes all expressed an interest. How did bad science and dangerous politics become so popular?

Dorian and Ian explore how Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer’s fascination with inherited characteristics was supercharged by Victorian science, from Darwin’s theory of evolution to early breakthroughs in genetics. They talk about how Galton’s voluntary “positive eugenics” led to the authoritarian “negative eugenics” of compulsory sterilisation, and how hardcore American eugenicists drew up a blueprint for Hitler. Also: the birth of scientific racism, the sinister history of IQ tests, how GK Chesterton helped save Britain from eugenics laws, and, yes, the people who thought you could identify criminals by the shape of their skulls. It’s a disturbing and complicated story which mangles your political preconceptions.

Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits.

Reading list

Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) - The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010)

Edwin Black — War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003)

Elof Axel Carlson — The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001)

GK Chesterton — Eugenics and Other Evils (1922)

Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man (1871)

Lyndsay Andrew Farrall — The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (1969)

Francis Galton – Hereditary Genius (1869)

Henry H Goddard – The Kallikak Family (1912)

Stephen Jay Gould — The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1996)

Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race (1916)

Philippa Levine — Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017)

Gina Maranto — Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996)

Adam Rutherford — Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022)

Lothrop Stoddard – The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920)

HG Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901) 

Online:

Quinn Slobodian — ‘The rise of the new tech right’, The New Statesman (2023)

Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.

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