In the years since October 7th, the world has been bitterly polarised over how to make sense of the violence. While polling shows that a majority of people do believe Israel’s actions amount to genocide – having witnessed it with their own eyes via their smartphones – it has been woefully hard to find mainstream media outlets in the West prepared to use this language. On Downstream this week, Aaron Bastani sat down with Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra. His most recent book, ‘The World After Gaza’ takes stock of a world order shattered by the genocide, and a media class unprepared to recognise the truth. In response to these crises, Mishra and colleagues have just launched Equator magazine, pulling together leading writers from across the globe who are unafraid to tell the truth. When did the so-called West first begin to lose standing in the eyes of the rest of the world? Why is the British media class positioned so uniquely close to power, so delusional, and so compromised over Gaza? Will China replace America, in the coming century, as the new hegemonic power? Has it already?

Joshua Citarella built his reputation by mapping synthetic e-deologies of terminally online politics, expressed in memes, micro-disputes and merch drops. Now the artist, Doomscroll host and Do Not Research founder has come to a blunter conclusion: it’s time to lock in. Behind the seeming diversity of online politics, one ideology has already won: the technolibertarianism of the platforms and supply chains that actually make it all run. So maybe it’s time to get serious, tune out the noise, and get back to basics: workers versus capital. This episode is the finale of Do Your Own Research Series 1. We’ll be back soon. Get the map: novaramedia.com/dyor Music by Iglooghost.

Andy Burnham has said he is “on a mission” to reduce the number of young people not in education, employment or training (NEETs), but has stopped short of pledging a concrete target. Plus: The number of millionaires in Britain is falling, Reform UK appears to be having a complete meltdown,  With Aaron Bastani & Michael Walker.

A new consensus has emerged in Westminster, seemingly overnight: we need more defence spending, and we need it now. But the Ministry of Defence has a record for waste that would put Tony Soprano to shame. £13 billion down the drain, since 2010, at the very least. Aircraft carriers that come in late, overbudget, and beset by mechanical failures. IT systems that cost millions, and are wildly out of date. No other government department could get away with it. But the arms trade spends billions of dollars on greasing the wheels of political consent. They employ armies of lobbyists, print reams of analysis, and bribe politicians the world over to keep the war machine funded. The result isn’t just a crisis of corruption. It’s a threat to our survival as a species. Andrew Feinstein is a former-minister in the South African government, turned investigative reporter. He is the executive director of Shadow World Investigations, and serves on the board of Declassified UK. And in 2024, he stood against Keir Starmer in Holborn and St Pancras. He joins Ash Sarkar on Downstream to lift the lid on how the arms industry really works, and tell us about his political journey.

The American empire is in crisis – and there is a new generation of more vocal critics coming from the right. So what do JD Vance and Tucker Carlson actually believe about American power? James Pogue has reported on empires and their decline for years, from West and Central Africa, where Wagner Group picked over the corpse of French neo-colonialism, to California’s secessionist fringe and the absurdities of Washington. He also happens to be one of the closest observers of JD Vance, who is just a heartbeat from one of the most powerful positions in the world. The president’s real job is keeping the machine running: asset prices up, markets juiced, the war economy fed. Can anyone actually change that? And would we even want them to try, if it’s as ideologically peculiar and dangerous as Vance? Get the map: novaramedia.com/dyor Music by Iglooghost.

We live in times of crisis. But perhaps none of the crises affect so many people in the here and now, as the housing crisis. Solving it could provide the skeleton key to unlocking so many of society’s problems. Despite this, decades of successive governments in the UK have failed to bring housing under control. The social contract which told us that if we worked hard all our lives, we can own a home and be secure in retirement, has been completely broken. To discuss the crisis in Britain and beyond, Aaron Bastani sat down with Peter Apps. He is an award-winning journalist who knows the field of housing – its failures and its potential fixes – better than almost anyone. He wrote an article about the threat of flammable cladding a month before Grenfell caught fire. How has housing policy shaped Britain in the last 50 years? Who did more to damage the housing system, Labour or the Tories? Is more housing supply always the solution? And why is no one talking about the crisis facing our ageing population, one million of whom will be in housing insecurity and poverty by 2030?

The idea of a wealth tax has never been more popular in Britain, and while many have campaigned for it, none have done more to boost the demand than one man: Gary Stevenson. The former city trader first joined us on Downstream four years ago. A lot has changed since then. This week, after a bruising round of media including attacks from Piers Morgan and the Guardian, Gary sat down to give his side of the story to Novara Media’s Aaron Bastani. What are the fair critiques of a wealth tax, and how does Gary engage with them? What would he say to Andy Burnham? What does he think needs to be done to keep out Farage and Reform? And do the recent spate of attacks in the media show that Gary’s actually winning the argument?

The Meditations of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius are perhaps the best-selling self-help book of all time. Rooted in the rational philosophy of the Stoics, the 12 books offer a stream of personal musings on everything from cultivating self-discipline to being a successful leader. Following their episode on Resilience, Nadia, Keir and Jem offer a weird-left perspective on the Meditations, looking at their influence on western thought and current popularity among tech bros and the alt-right. Sign up to the ACFM newsletter: https://novaramedia.com/newsletters Help us build people-powered media: https://novara.media/support

AI boyfriends and girlfriends are all the rage – for some. For others, they just inspire rage. So what’s the truth about these seductive machines? Do they open up our erotic potential, or are they just an absurd fantasy? And how are they even made? James Muldoon is the author of Love Machines: How Artificial Intelligence is Transforming Our Relationships and co-author of Feeding the Machine: The Hidden Human Labour Powering AI. Put these two books together, and his work takes us along the strange journey of AI from deeply exploited workers in the slums of East Africa to the cores of our deepest desires.

Last year, Zack Polanski’s Green Party suggested changes could be made to Britain’s prohibitionist approach to drugs – and felt the full force of the mainstream media’s indignation. But all over the world, the War on Drugs is shifting shape. Drugs are being legalised and commercialised. America now has its first legal weed-selling billionaire, while others serve out huge prison sentences for possession. Ash Sarkar sat down with Professor Kojo Koram, to discuss his latest book The Next Fix: The Winners and Losers in the Future of Drugs, which travels from a plantation-turned-prison in Louisiana to the psychedelic boom of Silicon Valley. So what does a drug policy fit for the 21st century actually look like?