Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman
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Audio Long Reads, from the New Statesman
The New Statesman is the UK's leading politics and culture magazine. Here you can listen to a selection of our very best reported features and essays read aloud. Get immersed in powerful storytelling and narrative journalism from some of the world's best writers. Have your mind opened by influential...
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The UK’s leading romance fraud specialist
How did one detective take on an international network of romance fraudsters?
This episode was written Stuart McGurk and read by Will Dunn. The...
The great private school con
They no longer have a stranglehold on Oxbridge and would lose tax breaks under Labour. So what is elite education really selling?
At the Labour...
How Rishi Sunak became the first Silicon Valley prime minister
On 2 November 2023, Rishi Sunak closed his global AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park by interviewing the richest man on Earth, Elon Musk. The mood was...
Israel, Hamas and the unravelling of the West
What might be the long term impact of the Israel-Hamas war on global alliances? In this week’s audio long read, the New Statesman’s contributing write...
Has your AI therapist got your back?
In May this year, an American woman sought the help of a chatbot on an eating disorders website. The bot, named Tessa and running on an evolving, gene...
How Britain became a dangerous place to have a baby
What are the roots of today’s maternity crisis? Recent research by the Care Quality Commission has found a “concerning decline” in England, with over...
A year inside GB News: "We’re going to disrupt"
For today’s Audio Long Read we’re bringing you one from our archives, which is suddenly extremely prescient. This week GB News is in the spotlight onc...
The philosopher and the crypto king: Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion
At the time of writing, the crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is due to stand trial on 3 October 2023. He stands accused of fraud and money-launder...
How Chile (almost) democratised Big Tech
Fifty years after Salvador Allende was ousted, might his greatest legacy be his battle with the emerging tech giants?
On 1 August 1973, a seemin...
The prime minister and the AI that solved the climate crisis
After the extreme heat of summer 2024, which saw children stretchered out of their exams, Britain’s prime minister calls a press conference in Westmin...
Summer of Light: a new short story by Jonathan Coe
In the summer of 1924, a highly regarded painter falls – or is he pushed? – into the canal while celebrating his exhibition at the Venice Biennale. Tw...
Escaping Eden: life after the Plymouth Brethren
For those who leave the ultra-conservative Christian sect, separation comes at great personal cost.
The New Statesman’s assistant editor...
In defence of counterfactual history
What if the rush to war in 1914 had been averted? What if the Berlin Crisis of 1961 had led to nuclear war? What if the liberal revolution of 1848 had...
What Simone De Beauvoir knew about loss, by Ali Smith
The novelist Ali Smith first came across the work of Simone de Beauvoir in an Inverness bookshop, aged 18 or 19, and was instantly compelled by her “t...
George Monbiot: how I escape climate despair
There is one question the environmental journalist and author George Monbiot is asked more than any other: how do you cope? When your job is to report...
The 1922 committee: inside the Conservatives’ assassination bureau | Audio Long Read
The Conservative Private Members Committee, informally known as the 1922 Committee (or the ’22), is the Tory confessional, its trade union and backben...
How Saudi Arabia is buying the world
When Saudi cinemas reopened in 2018, for the first time in 35 years, they screened the Marvel movie Black Panther. Many saw parallels between the king...
The Spanish election reveals the future of Europe
Since 2018, prime minister Pedro Sánchez has led a surprisingly durable and impactful Spanish government, implementing progressive policies such as im...
Is male fertility in freefall?
In recent decades, studies have shown a significant decline in sperm quality and count. The average sperm count has fallen by 62% since the 1970s, imp...
What we learned from the Wagner mutiny
On June 23 the New Statesman’s contributing writer Bruno Macaes visited Ukraine’s head of military intelligence Kyrylo Budanov in Kyiv. They discussed...
A warning from the godfathers of AI
On 31 March this year, the British scientist Geoffrey Hinton resigned from Google, where he had directed AI research for a decade. Artificial intellig...
The risky rise of medical self-diagnosis
Recent years have seen a proliferation of health charities in the UK, raising awareness and funds - but also contributing to impossible demands on the...
How did parenthood become an unaffordable luxury?
The UK is now one of the most expensive places in the developed world to have a baby. Our childcare costs are the highest, with a full-time nursery pl...
How the rich got richer: welcome to the age of ‘greedflation’
In a bid to curb inflation, the Bank of England has raised interest rates 12 consecutive times – but the cost of goods continues to rise. The poorer h...
Inside the Conservative party’s radical right
May 2023 saw two significant gatherings of the Tory right: the Conservative Democratic Organisation (CDO) in Bournemouth, and the National Conservativ...
‘It’s a state of terror’: inside Haiti’s descent into chaos
In May 2023, the UN reported that 600 people had been killed in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince in the previous month alone – victims of gang violence...
Why Liverpool bet big on Eurovision
Liverpool has a rich musical history, from the Beatles to Echo and the Bunnymen, and beat six other British cities to become the 2023 host of Eurovisi...
Inside the mind of King Charles III
Since 1993, the king has been visiting a village in deepest Romania – once a year, alone. He owns two houses there, and is revered by the locals, for...
The slow, sad death of the print newspaper
The freelance journalist Tim de Lisle is a lifelong newspaper addict, and still buys two papers a day, three at weekends. In this elegy to their demis...
Xi, Putin and the new world order
In the postwar world, Stalin and the Soviet Union wielded greater power over Mao Zedong's new communist China. Today, following China’s rise as an eco...
Confessions of a philosopher: Bryan Magee’s final interview
As a philosophy student in the 1980s, the New Statesman’s editor-in-chief Jason Cowley learned more from Bryan Magee than from any seminar or lecture....
Inside the migrant revival of British Christianity
According to the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, the face of British Christianity is changing rapidly. London is now home to the grea...
Why Taiwan is already under attack
In January 2023, a leaked memo from the US air force general Mike Minihan revealed that he expected to be at war with China over Taiwan by 2025. Russi...
Are we headed for another banking crisis?
After a series of bad bets on the post-pandemic economy, California-based Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) lost 60% of its value on the evening of 8 March 20...
The long shadow of the Iraq War: how one town honoured Britain’s fallen soldiers
It started as an accident of geography: after one RAF runway closed, the bodies of British soldiers killed in action were repatriated from Iraq and Af...
The long and stupid decline of the British university
Once the envy of the world, British universities are being hollowed out by a managerial class, argues Adrian Pabst, a New Statesman contributing write...
The strange death of moderate conservatism
Much ink has been spilled in recent years on the woes of centre-left parties across the West – some of it prematurely, as Joe Biden, Olaf Scholz, Spai...
The rise and fall of Nicola Sturgeon
The New Statesman’s Scotland editor Chris Deerin has been reporting on the SNP since 1996, when as a young political correspondent he sparred with its...
Can literature teach us how to grieve?
When her mother died Johanna Thomas-Corr, the literary editor of the Sunday Times, fretted that she was misremembering her somehow. “I kept reaching f...
The great housing con: why the coming crash will rewrite the UK economy
Every year since 2009 new records have been set for UK house prices, and every year people have asked how long the market can continue to defy gravity...