The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

In 2025, Elon Musk took on an extraordinary role inside Washington, leading something called the Department of Government Efficiency - or Doge.

What followed was a radical experiment: an attempt to remake the machinery of the state using the logic of Silicon Valley and the language of memes.

To understand that moment, it helps to understand Musk himself. This is a figure shaped by his upbringing in apartheid South Africa and by coming of age alongside the early internet. He built his reputation by disrupting entire industries -  even extending his reach beyond Earth -  by moving fast, ignoring convention, and pushing his teams to extremes.

So what happens when you apply that philosophy to the state?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Ben Tarnoff and Quinn Slobodian.

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Despite KPop Demon Hunters becoming Netflix’s most-watched film in history and dominating music charts for months, it’s also the kind of cultural phenomenon many people might never have encountered.

The animated musical feature has been cleaning up at awards season and this weekend it could pick up two Oscars.

In this episode of the New Society, we discuss how the film became a global hit and the rise of K-pop and fandom culture.

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If you’ve ever taken a random walk around the block to push your step count to 10,000… rushed through a lesson on Duolingo to keep your streak alive… or checked a post one more time to see if the likes have ticked up - you’ll know the quiet power of the score.

Philosopher C. Thi Nguyen thinks modern life is increasingly organised around scores, rankings, targets, dashboards, and that these numbers don’t just track what we value. They quietly replace it. In his new book, The Score, he asks a simple question: how did we all end up playing someone else’s game, and how do we stop?

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In 2014, Helen Macdonald published H is for Hawk - a book that arrived, at least on the surface, as a memoir about grief: the death of their father, and Macdonald's decision to train and live with a goshawk in the aftermath.

It was nature writing, literary biography, cultural history, and a deeply personal account of what happens when someone steps sideways out of ordinary life and into something more feral. Readers found their own stories in it about parenthood, identity, politics, and the uneasy relationship between the human world and the wild.

More than a decade on, that story has taken another form.

You can read more from Helen Macdonald here

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For one of the most famous historians in Britain, conquering the past is not enough.

This month, alongside co-host Tabitha Syrett, Dominic Sandbrook is launching a new podcast - this time shifting his focus from history to literature.

Tanjil Rashid sat down with Sandbrook to talk about this new venture, what he’s reading (he insists it’s a balanced diet) and why reading still matters, not just to us as individuals, but to the health of society itself.

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Wuthering Heights is a story that has been told and retold, adapted and reinterpreted so many times since publication in 1847.

Every generation seems to rediscover Emily Brontë’s ever-enduring novel, and every generation seems convinced it finally understands it.

Now, it’s British filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s turn. And once again, we’re left asking: is this a love story, a ghost story, a story of obsession, or something stranger that refuses to settle into any single interpretation?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Lucasta Miller.

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A new documentary, Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision, offers a rare glimpse into the deeper ideas shaping King Charles’s view of the world. Known for decades as an environmental campaigner, the King has often spoken about the need for “harmony” between humanity, nature and the environment - but what does he really mean by that?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Mark Sedgwick.

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Thirty years ago, David Foster Wallace published Infinite Jest - a novel so sprawling, so formally strange, and so unnervingly prescient that it has never quite stopped happening.

Set in a near-future North America obsessed with pleasure, entertainment, and escape, the book asked a question that feels even sharper today than it did in 1996: what happens when a culture confuses happiness with anaesthesia?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by DT Max and Jonathan Derbyshire to discuss why the novel still matters, and what it can tell us about the world we’ve built since.

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Over 100 million people around the world have downloaded AI companion apps. Friends, therapists, lovers ... mediums - for some, their closest connection in this life is a chatbot.

How did we get here?

Catharine Hughes is joined by James Muldoon, sociologist and author of Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships.

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A professional sumo tournament in London in October 2025 offered more than sporting spectacle.

It became a lens through which to view Japan’s growing cultural pull in the West, a society where ancient ritual, hierarchy and Shinto belief coexist with hyper-modern life.

Tanjil Rashid is joined by historian Christopher Harding to explore how Japan balances tradition and modernity, and why that balance is proving increasingly compelling to Western audiences.

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