The BBC is in crisis, again. A leaked dossier alleging a lack of impartiality in its reporting on Trump, Israel, race and gender has felled its director general and drawn threats of a defamation lawsuit from the White House. Yet many at the corporation point to the dossier’s culture war slant as evidence of a right-wing plot against the BBC. Defensive and stolid, Britain’s main news and media organisation now flinches from any real conflict. Is the BBC capable of surviving in the digital era? Joining James is the former BBC journalist Lewis Goodall, now a prominent face of digital political journalism as part of the News Agents, and Dan Hind, publisher and author of The Return of the Public: Democracy, Power and the Case for Media Reform.

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In the days after 9/11, George W. Bush declared a state of emergency and initiated what would become an unprecedented expansion of US power. Public debate narrowed: there were new limits on what was acceptable, and not acceptable, to say. The London Review of Books published a number of pieces that challenged this consensus, forcing its editor, Mary-Kay Wilmers, to defend the paper on national radio.

This is the first episode in a six-part series. To listen to the rest of the series follow Aftershock: The War on Terror in:

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Archive:
Rutgers Law Review, ‘CNN Live’/CNN, ‘Good Morning America’/ABC, ‘Good Day New York’/FOX5 New York/FOX, ‘SmackDown’/USA Network/WWE, ‘Meet the Press’/NBC/NBC News Productions and ‘Broadcasting House’/BBC Radio 4/BBC

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Since the 1980s, Brett Christophers wrote recently in the LRB, ‘firms have made vast amounts of money by sending the rich world’s waste to the global South’ – hazardous waste at first, joined more recently by discarded electronics, clothes and plastics. Literal mountains of our rubbish are accumulating on the peripheries of cities such as Accra and Delhi. Waste, like wealth, is unevenly distributed.

On this episode, Brett joins Tom to discuss what happens to our rubbish after we throw it away. They talk about where it goes and why it’s so difficult actually to get rid of it, let alone reduce the amount we discard, when the creation of waste is so much more profitable.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/wastepod

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After 9/11, George W. Bush launched a global War on Terror. What followed was an unprecedented expansion of American power, from Guantánamo Bay to drone strikes, mass surveillance to the weaponisation of the financial system. Asked when it would end, Vice-President Dick Cheney replied: ‘Not in our lifetime.’ Two decades later, we’re still living in its shadow.

Aftershock: The War on Terror is a new six-part podcast from the London Review of Books. Daniel Soar, a senior editor at the paper, revisits the magazine’s coverage and reflects on the ways 9/11 has changed the world we live in.

First episode coming 20 November. Find the series in:

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Or wherever you get your podcasts.

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At the end of the 20th century and across the first decade of the 21st, a swathe of countries across Latin America elected left-wing governments in what became known internationally as the Pink Tide. In more recent years, what many have seen as a second wave of progressive governments have collapsed, giving way to right-wing leaders such as Milei, Bukele and Bolsonaro, with support from international libertarian movements. In this episode, James is joined by Tony Wood, who wrote about this shift in the latest issue of the LRB, and Camila Vergara, a critical legal theorist at the University of Essex, to discuss why the Pink Tide governments failed, where the new brand of right-wing politics comes from, and whether the revolutionary energy found across the continent could lead to further change.

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Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers grew up or operated in America’s Pacific Northwest. Caroline Fraser’s book Murderland, reviewed in the LRB by James Lasdun, argues that a significant contributing factor may have been the spew of lead fumes and other toxic emissions that billowed unchecked across the region during those decades. On this episode, James joins Tom to discuss the evidence, and what the juxtaposition of industrial lead poisoning and serial murder may tell us about different kinds of violence in modern America, even if a direct causal link remains unproved.

Find the piece and further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/leadpollutionpod

Read more from James Lasdun for the LRB in the archive: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/james-lasdun

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Andy Burnham recently said that the government is ‘in hock to the bond markets’, and the political turbulence of the past few years, not least the downfall of Liz Truss following her ‘mini-budget’, would seem to back this up. But the bond markets are only part of the picture: the actions of the Bank of England and the fiscal rules a government sets for itself also play significant roles in the decisions a chancellor can make. In this episode James is joined by former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane and Daniela Gabor, professor of economics at SOAS, to consider why governments are so afraid of ‘bond vigilantes’ and the increasing influence of central banks on policy since the financial crisis of 2008. Should the Bank of England remain independent? And what room for manoeuvre does Rachel Reeves have in her budget next month?

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One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons’.

Lorraine joins Tom to explore the ways that ideas about extinction are warped by our timescales and politics. They discuss how the language of natural selection was used to excuse violence and ecocide, and the continued influence of ‘empirical’ myths on approaches to conservation and human culture today.

Find further reading on the episode page: https://lrb.me/evolutionpod

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For the best part of a decade, a new type of anti-systemic, nationalist politics has been emerging from different corners of the online world. In Britain, this has united with older forms of cultural conservatism to propel Nigel Farage and Reform UK to within touching distance of power (at least for now). In this episode, James is joined by political theorist Alan Finlayson to understand what’s driving these changes and the ways in which different styles of online rhetoric, on both the left and right, are shaping our political discourse. They also consider whether the distinction between left and the right is still meaningful and why the way we understand equality has become the fundamental political dividing line.

Alan Finlayson is professor of political and social theory at the University of East Anglia.

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Adam is joined by Robert Malley to discuss the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and the long history of the peace process, in which Malley has been involved on behalf of several US administrations. They also talk about his recent book about the conflict, Tomorrow Is Yesterday, co-authored with Hussein Agha, why attempts to broker a lasting peace have failed and what the future might hold for the Palestinian movement.

Find further reading on the LRB website: https://lrb.me/peaceprocesspod

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