Adam Shatz talks to Chowra Makaremi and Amir Ahmadi Arian about the evolution of public dissent in Iran since 1979 and the origins of the latest protests.
‘Anti-communist dandy, scourge of Ivy League administrators, magazine chieftain, amanuensis to Joe McCarthy, father-confessor of the Nixon White House, Ronald Reagan consigliere: is it any wonder that William F. Buckley is still the patron saint of the American right?’. Thomas Meaney joins Thomas Jones to discuss Buckley’s life and legacy: his proselytising for segregation at home and imperialism abroad, and how he laid the groundwork for Trump’s path to the White House.
James is joined by historian Greg Grandin to discuss what the seizure of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, reveals about Trump’s intentions in the region and his wider foreign policy, and why, as in the past, such adventures will ultimately expose the limits of US power.
‘Is it a bubble?’ John Lanchester asked in a recent LRB of the colossal amounts of money pouring into AI firms. ‘Of course it’s a bubble. The salient questions are how we got here, and what happens next.’ John joins Thomas Jones to discuss some possible answers to those questions. They talk about the history of companies such as Nvidia and OpenAI, the reasons ‘artificial intelligence’ is a misnomer, the harms that large language models can cause and why you shouldn’t rely on them for advice in the kitchen.
In ‘The Man Behind the Curtain’, a bonus Close Readings series for 2026, Tom McCarthy and Thomas Jones examine great novels in terms of the systems and infrastructures at work in them. For their first episode, they turn to the book that invented the modern novel. Don Quixote, the ingenious man from La Mancha, is thought to be mad by everyone he meets because he believes he’s living in a book. But from a certain point of view that makes the hero of Cervantes’ novel the only character who has any idea what’s really going on.
Colin Burrow and Clare Bucknell join Tom to consider why Dickens’s dark tale has remained a Christmas staple.
Bee Wilson joins Malin Hay to discuss Judy Garland’s years at MGM Studios, where she was mistreated and overworked by her employers but also made some of her best pictures, growing from a contract player into a star.
James is joined by Colin Yeo and Nicola Kelly to explain how Britain's asylum system works and assess the recent changes by the home secretary Shabana Mahmood.
Adam Shatz talks to Sepideh Farsi about the process of making Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, her film about the Palestinian photographer Fatma Hassona.
As the BBC falls into crisis again, James is joined by former BBC journalist Lewis Goodall and author Dan Hind to ask if the corporation is capable of surviving in the digital era.
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. Brett joins Tom to discuss what happens to our rubbish after we throw it away.
James is joined by Tony Wood and Camila Vergara to discuss why the Pink Tide governments in Latin America 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.
Between the 1960s and the turn of the century, an astonishingly large number of serial killers operated or grew up 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.
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. James is joined by Andy Haldane and Daniela Gabor 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.
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 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.