David and Helen talk with Diane Coyle about what the pandemic has revealed about the changing nature of work.
Helen Thompson is Professor of Political Economy. Plus we explore the impact of the digital revolution on how we get rewarded for what we do and we ask whether the big tech firms can continue to hoover up so many of the rewards.
Which jobs are not coming back?
David reflects on what difference those four years have made to how we think about these questions now.David talks to the writer Anne Applebaum about her highly personal new book, which charts the last twenty years of broken friendships and democratic failure. What explains the prevalence of conspiracy theories in contemporary politics? That conversation touched on many of the themes that we've kept coming back to in the four years since: the power of the big technology companies; the vulnerability of democracy; the deep uncertainty we all feel about the future.
Trump! Plus we talk about whether understanding where political ideas come from is liberating or limiting and we ask how many of them were just rationalisations for power.David talks to the writer James Meek about what the Covid crisis has revealed about how we understand healthcare and how we think about the organisations tasked with delivering it. A conversation about hospitals and community care, about Trump's America and Johnson's Britain, and about WHO and NHS. He is the author of Chris Bickerton is a Reader in Modern European politics at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge. We start in Poland with the story of what happened to the high hopes for Polish democracy, including what we've learned from this week's presidential election. His research focus has been on issues of governance in a European context including work on EU social and economic governance. Educated at the universities of Oxford and Geneva, he taught previously at the University of Amsterdam and Sciences Po, Paris.
Climate!
More of James' writing on these themes is available on We have passed the deadline for any extension to the Brexit trade negotiations - now it's 31 December or bust.
The entire Talking Politics team is profoundly saddened at the loss, and extend … This week we go back to the first ever interview we recorded for Talking Politics, when David talked to Yuval Noah Harari in 2016 about his book Homo Deus. She is a regular panelist on Talking Politics. Since 2008 she has worked on questions generated by the 2008 financial crash and the eurozone crisis, including their historical origins in the fallout of the economic and political crises of the 1970s.
Plus we asses the impact of the Covid crisis on the fate of Brexit and its implications for what might happen later this year. Politics has never been more unpredictable, more alarming or more interesting: Talking Politics is the podcast that tries to make sense of it all. Every week David Runciman and Helen Thompson talk to the most interesting people around about the ideas and events that shape our world: from history to economics, from philosophy to fiction. Talking Politics is an audio podcast hosted by British academic David Runciman, Professor …