Novara Media

The 21st century runs on batteries: from phones and laptops to electric vehicles, drones and clean energy. Embedded in these batteries are rare earth minerals, drawn from a brutal supply chain that begins in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The race to electrify the global energy system is underway, but most people know almost nothing about how the necessary batteries are made – even those of us with green politics.

Aaron Bastani finds out more with Nicholas Niarchos, author of The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth.

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It’s the question that will come to define our lives: is our society going to collapse? But the field of collapse research is fragmented, chaotic, and often plain deranged. Who can you trust?

Luke Kemp is the author of Goliath’s Curse and a research affiliate at the Cambridge University Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. He’s also a political radical.

He told Richard Hames about how close we are to the same tipping point that brought down every other empire in history, why states are criminal gangs in disguise, and why Rome was the Isis of its day.

Do Your Own Research is a new show from Novara Media about the systems that make the modern world possible.

Music by Iglooghost.

As the American empire teeters, China gains dominance, and war spreads across Eastern Europe and West Asia, questions arise as to Europe’s place in this rapidly changing world order. On Downstream this week, Ash Sarkar speaks to Roderick Beaton, former Koraes Professor of History at King’s College London, about his latest book Europe: A New History.

How did the boundaries between Europe and Asia come to be drawn in the first place? How were immigration and borders managed by the ancients in Greece and Rome? How do the stories we tell about our collective history in Europe shape contemporary political thought? And in an age of mass migration, who gets to be European today – and why?

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To accompany our podcast series, Death in Westminster, hosts Kojo Koram and Dalia Gebrial met with investigative journalist Peter Geoghegan and former private wealth lawyer Stephanie Brobbey at EartH in Hackney last month.

Digging into the dark money that flows through Westminster, Kojo and Dalia find out what made Stephanie quit her job hiding rich people’s assets, why Peter couldn’t find anyone to publish his story about Labour corruption, and what normal people can do to challenge the global system of wealth extraction.

Listen to Death in Westminster, hosted by Dalia and Kojo Koram, in the Novara Media podcast feed. Follow Peter’s work through the Democracy For Sale newsletter.

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In China in the 1990s, the arrival of the internet was swiftly met with the ‘great firewall’: a complex matrix of censorship, surveillance and state control. Since then there have been two internets: the World Wide Web, and the Chinese internet. ​

Aaron Bastani talks to China analyst Yi-Ling Liu about the cultures and innovations that have evolved in this separate digital ecosphere. How have feminist and LGBTQ+ movements manifested through the Chinese internet? How has the Chinese Communist Party negotiated the promise and threat of the internet, and now AI? And why is the West suddenly so obsessed with China?

Yi-Ling Liu’s book is The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet.