Left politics with teeth and range.
Novara Media treats politics as culture, history, money, and daily experience all at once. Its conversations move from China’s internet and Cold War covert operations to hobbies, housing, liberalism, and the strategic failures of the left.
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Novara Media is a left political podcast feed with a broad, argumentative sense of what politics includes. It covers elections and parties, but it also follows power into housing, internet culture, hobbies, markets, climate movements, and the memory of empire. The register is direct. Episodes often begin from a live political anxiety, then pull the thread back through history, theory, and media. Downstream brings long-form interviews with writers, campaigners, and political figures. ACFM turns everyday subjects into political terrain, treating leisure, time, gender, and work as serious questions without losing the pleasure of conversation. Do Your Own Research leans into historical investigation and political culture, moving from Cold War covert operations to hyperpolitics and strange markets for belief. The feed is not detached or centrist. It argues from the left, and it expects listeners to keep up. That gives the best episodes a distinctive energy: brisk, funny, morally serious, and often impatient with official explanations. Recent conversations have examined Chinese online expression with Yi-Ling Liu, Cold War history with Alfred McCoy, liberalism with Adrian Wooldridge, and left strategy with Ash Sarkar. Other episodes look at Roger Hallam’s movement strategy and Zack Polanski’s political rise. The show’s strength is range. A discussion of hobbies can become a discussion of capitalism and gendered time. A question about Iran can become a comparison with Suez and the limits of imperial power. A live audience conversation about the right can turn into a debate over organizing, social media, and real-world contact. It suits listeners who want politics treated as lived culture, not just breaking news. It can be blunt and irreverent, but the bluntness has a function: to make ideology visible.
Made for: For listeners who follow politics closely and want left analysis that connects headlines to history, class, media, and everyday life. It suits people who enjoy long conversations, ideological argument, and sharp humor.
What sets it apart: Novara Media stands out by treating geopolitics, culture, technology, and movement strategy as one connected field. Its episodes can move from Cold War history to online identity or from hobbies to capitalism without losing the political thread.
Novara Media is an independent media organisation addressing the issues—from a crisis of capitalism to racism and climate change—that are set to define the 21st century.
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Political news, nostalgia for mass politics, and the social worlds once built around parties and unions.
Parties and unions once gave many people on the left a social world as well as a political home. The conversation asks what happens when membership offers less of that, while political news demands more attention.
Ash Sarkar turns a live discussion of the right's gains toward the work of building political organizations.
At a live event for the paperback of Ash Sarkar's Minority Rule, the host asks why the right is winning. The discussion starts with the book's account of how political and media elites recast 'chavs' as the white working class.
Bregman asks what political work changes and looks to tax experts for a more useful answer.
On Downstream, Rutger Bregman asks politically engaged people what their work actually changes. Discussing Moral Ambition, he questions whether raising awareness and criticizing institutions are enough.
Muslim political thought for a burning world.
Dry politics for bad political weather.
Plain-language civics with historical teeth.
Hard conversations from the operational edge.
Russia, power, and narrative under pressure.
Capitalism through markets, power, and policy.
Owen Jones discusses the West's support for Zionism, media bias, and weaponization of anti-Semitism in the context of Israel's war in Gaza.
Novara Media's Downstream opens with Rutger Bregman saying tax avoidance matters more than philanthropy and that "Taxes, taxes, taxes" should be central to left politics.
Kojo Karam connects Julia Ramesh’s death while homeless near Westminster to the borough’s vacant homes and offshore-owned property.
Downstream host interviews Yi-Ling Liu, author of The Wall Dancer, about how China’s internet shapes dissent, commerce, propaganda, and political culture.
ACFM hosts Keir Milburn, Nadia Eidel, and Jeremy Gilbert examine hobbies as self-directed leisure and question where they sit between work, consumption, and pleasure.
Interview with historian Alfred McCoy about his new book on the Cold War and parallels to current tensions with Iran.
A discussion with Adrian Wooldridge about his book critiquing modern liberalism and its role in current global crises.
Kojo Karam and Anton Jaeger use Minneapolis, ICE, and the 2020 George Floyd protests to test whether today’s mobilizations can become durable institutions.
Ash Sarkar says useful politics must "bring you into contact with human beings in real life."
An interview with climate activist Roger Hallam about his role as a strategist in building mass movements like Extinction Rebellion and Just Stop Oil.
Green Party politician Zack Polanski discusses the party's rapid growth and overtaking Labour in polls, with a humorous start about his breakdancing past.
Investigative journalist Paul Holden discusses his book 'The Fraud' about Keir Starmer's rise to power and the machinations within the Labour Party.
Kieran Andrieu recounts his experience being kidnapped at sea by the Israeli military and discusses the disproportionate violence in Gaza.