The Chatterbox

Brian Cox and Robin Ince dig deep into the strata of an imagined human history to unearth the curious concept of technofossils. Joined by paleobiologist Sarah Gabbott, material scientist Mark Miodownik and comedian and tech enthusiast Aurie Styla the panel unearth how the everyday objects that we throw away today compare to fossils of the past.

Series Producer: Melanie Brown

BBC Studios Audio Production

In this wide reaching discussion, we sit down with historian Alex Marshall. Using his own works such as "The Caucasus under Soviet Rule" (2010) and the edited volume "Global Impacts of Russia's Great War and Revolution: The Arc of Revolution, 1917-24" (2019) as jumping off points, we discuss everything from how Soviet history is written and persistent historiographic debates, to why the Soviet past is still relevant to the left and how current political shifts influence how questions about the Soviet Union are asked and why. Framing the whole discussion is liberalism's terminal crisis, and what this means for history writing about the Soviet Union, the historical and political imagination of the left and more.

Alex Marshall is a senior lecturer of History at the University of Glasgow. His books include "The Caucasus Under Soviet Rule" (2010) and the edited volume "Global Impacts of Russia's Great War and Revolution: The Arc of Revolution, 1917-24" (2019). He is currently working on a manuscript about Soviet Second Secretary during the Cold War, Mikhail Suslov.

On resistance and reform in southeast Asia.

Historian Sean Fear talks to Alex H and Lee Jones about Vietnam on the 50-year anniversary since the end of the war.

How is Vietnamese identity wrapped up with the notion of resistance?

Is Chinese influence as great as resistance to China?

How is the ‘American War’ thought about in Vietnam today?

How similar is Vietnam to China: defying Fukuyama’s thesis by retaining a state-socialist political system while adopting capitalism?

Why has Vietnam achieved rapid growth and development while neighbours have failed?

How is Vietnam reacting to being at the centre of Trump tariff disputes?

For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast

Links:

The Republic of Vietnam, 1955–1975: Vietnamese Perspectives on Nation Building, Sean Fear, Tuong Vu (eds.), Cornell UP

/115/ Singapore Shangri-La ft. Lee Jones

Post-Cold War Vietnam: stay low, learn, adapt and try to have fun – but what about the party?, Adam Fforde

This week, Emily Hart speaks to multi-award-winning translator Frank Wynne about Latin America's most beloved cartoon - Mafalda - and how he brought her to life in English.

Dubbed 'a hero of our time' by Italian philosopher Umberto Eco and 'Charlie Brown with Socialism' by the New York Times, Mafalda is a precocious six-year-old girl living in 1960s Argentina - full of questions and observations about the world and the adults who surround her. She loves democracy; she hates soup and yoyos.

Though often lighthearted and sprinkled with slapstick and wordplay, her curiosity and questions are more than they initially appear: illustrator Joaquín Lavado, known as 'Quino' uses her seemingly innocent interrogations to skewer the hypocrisies and nonsense of contemporary politics.

In the voice of a cartoon child, these questions and criticisms ran under the radar, but in 1970s Argentina, even her voice felt too critical: Quino left the country, which then suffered a coup and a subsequent military junta. He later said he would have been arrested had he continued to publish Mafalda; many of his friends and collaborators were.

Though the cartoon strip only ran for ten years, and Quino himself died in 2020, Mafalda has a huge and lasting legacy across the world - from Argentina where it began, to Chile where it was banned, and here in Colombia too: you can see statues and graffiti of her in Buenos Aires, and buy her merchandise down the banks of the River Seine.

Frank will be telling us about this Latin American icon and the process of translating her into English – the first translation ever published, which came out in June of this year. He'll be tackling the tensions inherent in translating comedy – especially in cartoon strip form – as well talking about the stealthy satire and societal critique which Mafalda was able to enact: a crucial humanist and critical voice, disguised as a child.

We'll also talk about how Mafalda's relevance reaches way beyond her context and time, about modern censorship and satire amid deepening repression, and why now is the perfect time for Mafalda to reach English-speaking audiences - particularly (perhaps) in the United States.

Frank also tells us who Mafalda would have been if she was born today, and who she'd have been if she grew up…

Plus the Colombia Briefing - also reported by Emily Hart.

In the third episode of Season Two of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares take you on an immersive journey through the hot nights and wild streets of Lower Manhattan during the Seventies. For this episode, Jesse Rifkin, a New York-based music historian and the owner and sole operator of Walk on the Wild Side Tours NYC, designed a specialized tour for Soundscapes NYC that explores key venues in the history of disco. Clubs like Paradise Garage, Nicky Siano’s Gallery, and repurposed residential spaces like David Mancuso’s Loft were all critical incubators of the sound and culture we call disco today. This is dense cultural geography, hardly more than one square mile, within and around a neighborhood known today as “Soho”. But in the Seventies it was sometimes known as “Hell’s Hundred Acres” due to the propensity of building collapses and fires among the old hotels and loft builds that constellated the area.

Soundscapes NYC welcomes back Jesse Rifkin, who appeared on Season One on the queer history of punk culture (S1.E4. Sounds of the City Collapsing). Rifkin is the author of This Must Be the Place: Music, Community, and Vanished Spaces in New York City (Hanover Square Press, 2023), and his work has been celebrated in the New York Times, Conde Nast Traveller, among others. His Substack (Walk on the Wild Side NYC) is a trove of incisive music criticism and revealing interviews with dynamic artists from the Seventies to today.

Contact Soundscapes NYC Here

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Margaret talks to Sarah Marshall about the Independent Media Centers that helped protesters build movements and changed how online communication happens.

Sources:

https://daily.jstor.org/the-invention-of-journalistic-objectivity/

https://daily.jstor.org/to-fix-fake-news-look-to-yellow-journalism/

https://web.archive.org/web/20200304071058/http://www.infoshop.org/about-us/

https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3485447.3512282#fig3

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0163443720926039

https://www.academia.edu/21814073/Indymedia_Journalism_A_Radical_Way_of_Making_Selecting_and_Sharing_News

https://www.academia.edu/45052617/Indymedia_and_Media_Activism_at_the_Turn_of_the_Millennium

https://crimethinc.com/2017/08/25/german-government-shuts-down-indymedia-what-it-means-and-what-to-do

https://crimethinc.com/2022/10/28/the-billionaire-and-the-anarchists-tracing-twitter-from-its-roots-as-a-protest-tool-to-elon-musks-acquisition

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeldelcastillo/2022/09/11/jack-dorseys-former-boss-is-building-a-decentralized-twitter/

https://libcom.org/article/sources-and-police-raid-bristol-indymedia

https://www.cjr.org/business_of_news/local-news-indymedia-network-25-anniversary.php

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From the assassination that sparked the First World War to the covert drone strikes of today, targeted killing has been used to shape history and shift the balance of power for generations. Today in The Bunker, Seth Thévoz is joined by Simon Ball, professor of international history and politics at the University of Leeds and author of Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination, to explore the long, shadowy history of assassination as a political tool.

Buy Death to Order: A Modern History of Assassination through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund The Bunker by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too.

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Written and presented by Seth Thévoz. Producer: Liam Tait. Audio editors: Tom Taylor. Managing editor: Jacob Jarvis. Music by Kenny Dickinson. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. THE BUNKER is a Podmasters Production.

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At the 2025 Panamerican Congress in Mexico City, held August 1st to 3rd, hosted by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and her Morena Parliamentary Group, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein gave remarks at the Esperanza Iris theatre.

The author of 'The Shock Doctrine,' 'No Logo,' and most recently the memoir 'Doppelganger,' presented remarks to delegations at the Panamerican Congress, an annual conference of progressive legislators from Nunavut to Tierra del Fuego, entitled: 'The Rise of End-of-the-World Fascism and Resistance from the Global South.'

See other political speeches from Álvaro García Linera, Clara Brugada, Ilhan Omar, Andrés Arauz, and Gerardo Pisarello at the 2025 Panamerican Congress, CDMX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=siUwTSBAmNU

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Is the world even collapsing?

Joseph Tainter is a Professor at Utah State University and the author of The Collapse of Complex Societies. He explains on this episode that collapse happens when a civilisation experiences a diminishing return on complexity, the fact that it takes more capital, more energy, more resources to maintain society until eventually that maintenance is no longer useful.

We discuss his research and apply it to today’s world, linking in energy, technology, even geopolitical order, with Joseph—surprisingly, despite all the evidence that points to this moment in history as truly exceptional given Earth’s systems breakdown—stating that there is nothing special about the world we live in and its precarious future.

Planet: Critical investigates why the world is in crisis. Join subscribers from 186 countries to support independent journalism.