Novara Media

What’s the point of comedy? Stand-ups were at the forefront of the cultural backlash against Thatcherism, but today’s meme-driven lols are rarely in the service of left-wing politics. Meanwhile, the world’s most powerful people seem intent on having a laugh, from podcasting politicians to presidential comedians. In this Trip, Jeremy Gilbert, Nadia Idle and Keir […]

In 1989, the Berlin Wall came down and the experiment of communist East Germany came to an end. Yet for a while it was a successful project, raising living standards against massive odds and providing stability for the first time in half a century. So is it time to reassess Europe’s most wealthy, and advanced […]

Despite the gains won by a century of feminism, the conveyor belt of normie life still pushes us towards the nuclear family and the picket fence. We can sense that our freedom is still limited by our material conditions – the prohibitive cost of housing, for instance – but is it also limited by our lack […]

Palestinians don’t often get to tell their own stories, and on the rare occasion they do it’s on highly limited terms. Ash Sarkar speaks to writer and poet Mohammed el-Kurd, Palestine correspondent for The Nation, about growing up in occupied territory and why journalists fail to tell the truth about Israel.

Since the 1950s, nuclear power has been met with a resounding “nein danke!” from many left-wing campaigners, even as it has become a fixture of the energy mix, powering 15% of the UK grid today – down from 25% in the 1990s. Supporters on the left say nuclear is a necessity if we stand a […]

Everyone rails against the elite, but who are they? The left would say it’s the billionaires, the media barons, the oil tycoons, and the 1% – those who control our economy, our housing, and basic necessities. However, the right increasingly insists on the existence of a “new elite” of woke corporations, “social justice warrior” celebrities, […]

What if Das Kapital was made into a Marvel movie, with a team of workers fighting the supervillain ‘Capital’? Or if Silvia Federici’s Wages Against Housework had been a kitchen sink drama? That’s roughly the proposition of How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a slick new action movie based on Andreas Malm’s 2021 polemic. Heeding […]

What’s it going to take to save the planet? After another year of extreme temperatures and limp promises, climate activists are at a strategic crossroads. Extinction Rebellion has declared a shift away from disruptive tactics. Splinter groups like Just Stop Oil remain committed to direct action, even at huge personal cost. And in Germany, the […]

In The UK, the last few decades have shown the steepest decline in trust in the media globally, second only to Egypt. How did we get here? Is it as simple as Rupert Murdoch wielding his malice more fervently here then elsewhere? Or are there insidious cultural factors that meant our newspapers, and increasingly our […]

If we don’t believe that race is a scientific fact, why can’t we shake it off? The answer, according to Sita Balani, a lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, has to do with how race is made through sexuality, and sexuality through race – like the two sides of a Möbius strip. Drawing on […]