The Story: Welcome to Makerfield
Today’s episode of The Story – the daily news podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times – is my adventures in Makerfield – the by-election to end all by elections. Makerfield isn’t actually a real place. It’s a group of former mining towns just south of Wigan, on the fringes of Greater Manchester, nestled […]
The Story: Who is Iran’s New Leader
I am hosting today’s episode of The Story podcast from The Times and The Sunday Times – and we’re exploring who Iran’s new Supreme Leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, really is. Thrust to power during a conflict that killed his father, with the Iranian regime as it’s most vulnerable, American fire power breathing down their neck, a […]
Meet the Attention Activists
Can I have your attention, please? Professor Graham Burnett would like it, too. Graham is an historian of tech and science… and through his research has become so passionate about reclaiming our attention from the grip of tech giants that he has started a new movement. Alongside some colleagues, friends, artists, activists and other researchers… […]
Why do we feel nostalgia?
Have you spotted this trend online of people reminiscing about, and pining for, 2016? People have been posting pictures of themselves a decade ago, getting back into the music, and using filters that have a 2016 feel about them. It’s curious on a few counts: 2016 wasn’t really that long ago, with much of characters […]
Inside the religious sect that believes Trump was anointed by God
Times Radio’s Jo Crawford travelled to Nebraska to investigate a fringe evangelical sect that believes the US is in the midst of a spiritual war and Donald Trump was anointed by God. She joined me on Times Radio to take us into her story.
TikTok’s Dystopian Britain
Last week I was in North America, and on more than one occasion I spoke to somebody who seemed to pity that I had to live in Britain. They were concerned for me. They told me they’d heard that Britain was a lawless hellhole… with gang ridden streets, wide-spread corruption and an authoritarian regime. Sure, […]
We Are Not a Conspiracy School – BBC Radio 4
Deep in the English countryside, at the end of a winding country late… a sign: NO TRESPASS. STRICTLY BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. If you listen carefully, you can hear the sounds of children playing, carried along by the breeze. Just beyond the hostile sign, there is a place – built around barns, marquees and organic allotments […]
How our biology is being weaponised against us
I have done something gross. I needed to do it. I did it for you. I did it for science, in the name of human exploration. I did it because I was a bit curious. Last week, late one evening, after my partner Michaela had gone to bed… I tasted a drop of her breast […]
Are these terrible times?
The sky was a deep purple, with lashings of red, as emerged from the radio studio a week last Sunday morning. It was a lovely morning. 04:08. Four hours and eight minutes after I should have originally gone home. It’s unusual for me to catch an early sunrise, so I drank in the quiet of […]
How to negotiate with hackers
You know that awful, gut-wrenching feeling in the pit of your stomach when you when you realise something has gone terribly wrong? The bosses of M&S know that feeling well. A few weeks ago, a cyber-attack crippled their business. We don’t know much about what the hackers have demanded, but we do know they sent […]