Skip to content

EscapePod Podcasts

Shows worth your time, picked up where you left off.

TN

Arts

The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

The New Statesman

Your weekly review of culture, life and society from the New Statesman, hosted by Tanjil Rashid. Featuring interviews with literary and artistic greats, reviews of the latest cultural moments, and in-depth discussion to help you understand how culture shapes society – and our place in it. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

41 episodes

How to write when everything’s in flux 3 Oct 2026 · 40 min Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting. What if that isn’t true? Can you write when everything is in flux, when you are unmoore…

Katherine Rundell: In today's world, wonder is political 26 Sept 2026 · 51 min "We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell. If you haven't come across Rundell's work yet, you will soon. She's written over a dozen books, including an a…

James Marriott: what happens when we stop reading? 19 Sept 2026 · 38 min A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore. And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most…

Salman Rushdie: "I feel a line of connection with 9/11" 11 Sept 2026 · 32 min Terror has sought Salman Rushdie out time and time again for the past 40 years, ever since the controversial publication of his novel The Satanic Verses and the furious response t…

RF Kuang is back with her most personal story yet 5 Sept 2026 · 55 min Historical fantasy, campus satire, industry exposé; five books in, and no one's quite worked out what a "RF Kuang novel" is supposed to look like. That's rather the point. This Se…

Simon Sebag Montefiore on Israel, Gaza and a Middle East in crisis 3 Sept 2026 · 55 min From the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the current escalation of the war between Israel, Palestine and their neighbouring countries, the Middle East has been besieged by almost co…

This is how Ukrainian artists are fighting back 22 Aug 2026 · 33 min Charlotte Higgins has spent most of her career interviewing and critiquing artists, authors and poets as the Guardian's chief culture writer. It was unlikely that her work would e…

Why we must unite working class communities across racial divides 8 Aug 2026 · 42 min In the summer of 2024, riots tore through British towns, and since then old questions have continued to resurface about who belongs in the country. Taj Ali has spent years digging…

Britain is losing its libraries and its cultural memory 1 Aug 2026 · 36 min Every year, more libraries across Britain close their doors. As councils have their funding slashed, these are often the first spaces to go. What do we lose when we stop reading a…

Why is sex political? 25 Jul 2026 · 55 min To hear more conversations like this search "The Exchange" wherever you get your podcasts. When Amia Srinivasan published The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century in…

Can we separate great art from bad artists? 18 Jul 2026 · 32 min Throughout history, art, and artists, have caused moral outrage. For a long time we had the liberal notion that we could separate great art from bad artists, but we do seem to liv…

Odyssey mania is upon us 11 Jul 2026 · 1 hr 5 min Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation of Homer’s epic poem is one of the most anticipated films in recent cinema history. But what is it about this story, first told maybe 3000 year…

Was the American revolution really American? 4 Jul 2026 · 36 min Hot dogs, fireworks, old glory, it’s the 4th July. This year marks the 250th anniversary of the USA’s Declaration of Independence. What led up to these crucial events in 1776? Was…

"I thought Jimmy Carter was black" | Tayari Jones interview 26 Jun 2026 · 32 min Tayari Jones is one of America's most celebrated novelists, twice chosen by Oprah, shortlisted for prizes on both sides of the Atlantic, and read by presidents. Her newest book wa…

Will Hockney be remembered as one of the greats? 20 Jun 2026 · 42 min Andrew Marr and the New Statesman's art critic Michael Prodger join Tanjil Rashid to discuss the life and legacy of David Hockney, who passed away last week. A Bradford boy who be…

Does travel actually broaden the mind? 13 Jun 2026 · 44 min “The traveller sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.” Andrea Wulf joins us to discuss her new book The Traveller, about George Forster - the forgotten natur…

This house believes that Britain’s best days are behind it 6 Jun 2026 · 1 hr 11 min There is in Britain today a widespread mood of public despair, a deep premonition of imminent national decline. According to Ipsos, just over half of Britons feel worse off since…

Can architecture be democratic? 30 May 2026 · 38 min What is the relationship between politics and the built environment? between the spaces inhabited by the public and the policies that govern them? From parliaments to monuments… f…

Katja Hoyer: How fascism takes hold of a city 23 May 2026 · 50 min Political instability, democratic decline, the rise of populist movements - politicians and headlines today are quick to diagnose things as modern day Weimar. But what was Weimar…

Munya Chawawa: Trump's presidency is based on WWE 16 May 2026 · 22 min Donald Trump’s political style has often been compared to reality TV - but what if the better comparison is professional wrestling? Satirist Munya Chawawa joins Luke O’Reilly to d…

William Boyd on spy fiction and the British psyche 9 May 2026 · 36 min What makes someone a good spy? And does the fiction writer, in many senses a professional liar, share the traits of a double agent? Novelist and screenwriter William Boyd first ex…

James Baldwin would be a leading progressive voice today 2 May 2026 · 30 min For decades, James Baldwin has stood as one of the most piercing moral voices of the 20th century, But Baldwin himself has remained, in his own words, elusive. A new biography by…

Mark Gatiss: What it's like to play Hitler 25 Apr 2026 · 28 min The Resistible rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht's darkly comic allegory of authoritarianism is a play that straddles past and present. Written in 1941, it was conceived as a warn…

Are we truly living in 'Orwellian times'? 18 Apr 2026 · 21 min Or has the term lost its meaning? It’s a label that’s everywhere now: used by political commentators, thrown around on social media, and increasingly a part of everyday conversati…

When it comes to the Moon, we've only scratched the surface 11 Apr 2026 · 31 min Last night, the Artemis II crew splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after a 10-day mission to space and a lunar flyby. The voyage, which included the first woman and a non-US citiz…

What was life like before capitalism? 4 Apr 2026 · 32 min It's almost impossible to separate how we think about modern life from the phenomenon that is capitalism, and to think, what would life look like without it? Tanjil Rashid is join…

What do mushrooms have to do with consciousness? with Michael Pollan 28 Mar 2026 · 52 min Michael Pollan, a writer best known for his work on the effect of psychedelics, has taken a journey into the inner mind. For much of modern history, we’ve understood the mind in c…

How Elon Musk redefined power 21 Mar 2026 · 29 min 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 experim…

How KPop Demon Hunters became the biggest event of the year 14 Mar 2026 · 32 min 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 neve…

Metrics now control our lives 7 Mar 2026 · 30 min 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 ti…