Origin Story

Welcome to the first ever episode of Origin Story dedicated to a planet. We’re taking a long look at the place of Mars in the popular imagination, from ancient civilisations to fin de siècle Mars mania to the current techbro obsession with exploration and colonisation. Is there life on Mars? Let’s find out. The ancients associated the red planet with gods of war. With the invention of the telescope in the 17th century, astronomers began to understand Mars better and speculate about its inhabitants. Thanks to the amateur astronomer Percival Lowell, the romance of the red planet, and its alleged “canals”, became a craze in the 1890s. H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs imagined the Martians as colonisers and colonised respectively, while luminaries like Nikola Tesla and Francis Galton hatched outlandish schemes to contact them. Science played the killjoy. Even as a new wave of Mars mania swept the post-war world, NASA probes unveiled the reality of a cold, dusty, dead planet. But their findings allowed for a new breed of romance: the possibility of actually reaching and settling on Mars.  Ray Bradbury compared Mars to a mirror. What does humanity’s fascination with it say about our own dreams and fears over the centuries? How did the fictional Martian turn from a friendly pacifist into a ruthless killing machine? Why is there such a thin line between fact and fiction? Is Elon Musk’s obsession with settlement really possible or just another delusion? And why exactly do so many people want to travel to a planet that makes the least hospitable places on earth look like Center Parcs? It’s a mindboggling tale of scientific discovery and wild fantasy, with an all-star cast including Lord Tennyson, William Herschel, Thomas Edison, David Bowie and Arthur C. Clarke. Plus! Our first ever Origin Story playlist, with 23 songs about Mars. We have lift-off. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950) • Albert Burneko, ‘Neither Elon Musk nor Anybody Else Will Ever Colonize Mars’ (2025) • Stuart Clark (ed.), The Book of Mars: An Anthology of Fact and Fiction (2022) • Robert Crossley, Imagining Mars: A Literary History (2011) • Marc Hartzman, The Big Book of Mars (2020) • Robert Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) • Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk (2023) • Nicky Jenner, 4 th Rock from the Sun: The Story of Mars (2017) • Dorian Lynskey, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) • Lord Tennyson, ‘Locksley Hall Sixty Years After’ (1886) • Walter Tevis, The Man Who Fell to Earth (1963) • Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? (2023) • H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898) • Robert Zubrin, The Case for Mars: The Plan to Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must (1996) Audio and video • Alternative 3, written by David Ambrose and directed by Christopher Miles (1977) • The Bunker: Why Elon Musk’s plan for life on Mars is a terrible idea (2025) • The Martian, written by Drew Goddard and directed by Ridley Scott (2015) • A Trip to Mars, directed by Ashley Miller for the Edison Company (1910) • The War of the Worlds, written and directed by Orson Welles (1938) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Origin Story and join us as we wrap up the story of appeasement. It’s 1938. After the Anschluss, Hitler makes his bid for the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia and tests the moral and strategic arguments for appeasement to breaking point. While Chamberlain insists it would be madness to go to war over “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing,” opponents like Winston Churchill and Clement Attlee are equally convinced that selling out the Czechs will only encourage Hitler to go further. Desperate diplomacy culminates in the Munich Agreement but Chamberlain’s “triumph” is short-lived as opposition mounts across the country. The German invasion of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 destroys appeasement as a mainstream proposition, leaving only an uneasy alliance of fascists and pacifists. When Stalin chooses Germany over Britain and France, war is inevitable. We look at the people who still wanted to make a deal with Hitler even once the war had begun, the fall of Chamberlain and the revenge of Churchill. We debunk the revisionist case for appeasement, explore how the legacy of Munich has been used and abused to justify military intervention ever since, and ask whether history is repeating itself over Putin and Ukraine. Why did Munich’s popularity collapse so quickly? How did Chamberlain misread Hitler’s intentions so badly? What motivated the die-hard appeasers, and the historians who defend the policy even now? Are the lessons of appeasement a double-edged sword? And which of Chamberlain’s foes had the best zingers? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • Anonymous, ‘A New Dawn’, The Times (1 October 1938) • W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’ (1939) • Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich’, New York Times (16 August 1936) • Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (2019) • Cato (Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen), Guilty Men (1940) • Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, Fascism: The Story of an Idea (2024) • Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966) • Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (1980) • Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922) • Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘How the appeasement of Hitler played into his hands’, New Statesman (2019) • Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989) • Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004)• James Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain 1936-1939 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) • Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (1998) • Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (1940) • George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939, edited by Peter Davison (1998) • ‘Policy of His Majesty’s Government’, day three of House of Commons debate on Munich, Hansard (5 October 1938) • Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005) • Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1937) • Viscount Rothermere, Warnings and Predictions (1939) • A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961) • Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies (1936) • Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers (1971) • Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Origin Story. This week we turn to the story of the appeasement of Hitler’s Germany during the 1930s. With appeasement in the news again in relation to Ukraine, understanding the mistakes of 90 years ago is urgently necessary. How did noble impulses like optimism, fairness and the desire for peace lead to history’s most infamous foreign policy disaster? During the 15 years following the First World War, horror of conflict and a growing consensus that the Treaty of Versailles had immiserated Germany made appeasement a positive effort to ensure peace in Europe. Even Winston Churchill was on board. But the arrival of Hitler put paid to that. The question now became: how could a militarily weak Britain rein in an unpredictable dictator, not to mention Italy and Japan? And what did Hitler really want? We move from the desperate fudging of Ramsay MacDonald and Stanley Baldwin to the evangelical appeasement of Neville Chamberlain, and from crisis to crisis: Manchuria, Abyssinia, the Rhineland, the Anschluss. We meet the most fervent appeasers and their most furious opponents. As Chamberlain’s government begins to crack, Hitler sets his sights on Czechoslovakia… How did appeasement transform from a benign peace-making strategy into a moral and diplomatic disaster? Why is Chamberlain’s reputation as a weak, indecisive leader so misleading? How did Hitler manage to fool so many powerful people? When could Britain and France have stopped him in his tracks? And what combination of good intentions, bad judgements and apocalyptic delusions led to catastrophe? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • Anonymous, ‘A New Dawn’, The Times (1 October 1938) • W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’ (1939) • Frederick T. Birchall, ‘Olympics Leave Glow of Pride in the Reich’, New York Times (16 August 1936) • Tim Bouverie, Appeasing Hitler: Chamberlain, Churchill and the Road to War (2019) • Cato (Michael Foot, Peter Howard and Frank Owen), Guilty Men (1940) • Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey, Fascism: The Story of an Idea (2024) • Martin Gilbert, The Roots of Appeasement (1966) • Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9 (1980) • Cicely Hamilton, Theodore Savage: A Story of the Past or the Future (1922) • Lucy Hughes-Hallett, ‘How the appeasement of Hitler played into his hands’, New Statesman (2019) • Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (1989) • Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (2004)• James Levy, Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain 1936-1939 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006) • Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, Appeasement and the British Road to War (1998) • Malcolm Muggeridge, The Thirties: 1930-1940 in Great Britain (1940) • George Orwell, Facing Unpleasant Facts: 1937-1939, edited by Peter Davison (1998) • ‘Policy of His Majesty’s Government’, day three of House of Commons debate on Munich, Hansard (5 October 1938) • Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005) • Stephen H. Roberts, The House That Hitler Built (1937) • Viscount Rothermere, Warnings and Predictions (1939) • A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (1961) • Things to Come, written by H.G. Wells and directed by William Cameron Menzies (1936) • Neville Thompson, The Anti-Appeasers (1971) • Lord Vansittart, The Mist Procession (1958) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We had a very good time at Origin Story Live at 21 Soho on Wednesday night. Thanks to everyone who showed up or watched the livestream. The theme of the show is the American inferno and how to think about it. In part one, Normalisation, we use British responses to Hitler in the 1930s to explain how normality bias prevents much of the media from facing up to the crazed extremism of Donald Trump and rip into some of the spectacularly wrong predictions of the pundit class. In part two, Complicity, we take on the politicians, commentators and voters who actively enable Trump and ask what the residents of one German town can tell us about MAGA’s fascist groupthink. But it’s not all bad news. We explore how Trumpism might fail and how Europe might emerge stronger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Origin Story, where we’re concluding the story of the partition of India and Pakistan. We resume in March 1947 with the arrival of the last viceroy of the Raj, Lord Mountbatten, and his formidable wife Edwina. They find a country on the precipice of civil war, with the Punjab consumed by ethnic violence between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. Nehru, Jinnah, Gandhi and the British haggle over the details of partition as the deadline draws near and tensions rise. After independence is declared on 15 August, the leaders struggle to bring peace to the new nations of India and Pakistan and avert all-out war over Kashmir.   When did partition become truly inevitable? Was British incompetence to blame for the bloodshed? What, or who, brought an end to the violence? How does the legacy of partition continue to shape the subcontinent’s politics? And what can we learn about the dangers of identity-based politics today? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016) • William Dalrymple, ‘The Great Divide’, The New Yorker (2015) • Patrick French, ‘The Brutal “Great Migration” That Followed India’s Independence and Partition’, Life.com (2016) • Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume One: 1889-1947 (1975) • Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume Two: 1947-1965 (1979) • Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World 1915-1948 (2018) • Gandhi, written by John Briley and directed by Richard Attenborough (1982) • Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (2015) • Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985) • George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Partisan Review (1949) • Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) • Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007) Audio • Empire: Mahatma Gandhi (2022) • Empire: Muhammad Ali Jinnah (2022) • Empire: The Last Viceroy of India (2022) • Empire: Partition (2022) • Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence Day speech (1947) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome back to Origin Story. This week we begin the immense story of the partition of India and Pakistan at midnight on 14-15 August 1947. In a stroke, 340 million people gained independence from the British Empire but a day of celebration came in the midst of horrific ethnic violence which left between 1 and 2 million people dead and more than 15 million displaced in the largest ever movement of people. Historians have argued ever since about whether this traumatic bloodshed, and partition itself, could have been avoided if different politicians had made different decisions. We start by introducing the key players in India, all of them British-educated lawyers: Mahatma Gandhi, the spiritual leader who became an international icon through his use of nonviolent protest to demand independence; Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the Muslim leader who rebounded from numerous defeats to become the father of Pakistan; and Jawaharlal Nehru, who wanted nothing more than to hold India together as a secular, multicultural state. On the British side, Clement Attlee was determined to bring the Raj to a peaceful conclusion, Winston Churchill was equally obsessed with preserving it, and viceroys Lord Linlithgow and Archibald Wavell took very different approaches to Indian nationalism. The story takes us from late Victorian London to the Amritsar massacre, and from Gandhi’s triumphant Salt March to the disaster of the Quit India campaign during the Second World War. We see Pakistan go from a utopian fantasy to a plausible reality while believers in a united India do everything they can to prevent it. And as negotiations falter, riots and pogroms begin to inflame the country. We end on the cusp of 1947 as Lord Mountbatten becomes the last viceroy and partition looks almost inevitable. To what extent did the personalities of a handful of politicians in India and Britain dictate the course of world history? How did Jinnah bring Pakistan to life? Does Gandhi deserve his saintly reputation? And why don't we like to talk about it? • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • John Bew, Citizen Clem: A Biography of Attlee (2016) • William Dalrymple, ‘The Great Divide’, The New Yorker (2015) • Patrick French, ‘The Brutal “Great Migration” That Followed India’s Independence and Partition’, Life.com (2016) • Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume One: 1889-1947 (1975) • Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography: Volume Two: 1947-1965 (1979) • Ramachandra Guha, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World 1915-1948 (2018) • Gandhi, written by John Briley and directed by Richard Attenborough (1982) • Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (2015) • Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (1985) • George Orwell, ‘Reflections on Gandhi’, Partisan Review (1949) • Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (1981) • Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire (2007) Audio • Empire: Mahatma Gandhi (2022) • Empire: Muhammad Ali Jinnah (2022) • Empire: The Last Viceroy of India (2022) • Empire: Partition (2022) • Jawaharlal Nehru, Independence Day speech (1947) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In part two of Thatcherism, Margaret Thatcher has survived a grim first term and her political and economic bets have paid off. She’s ready to wage war on everything she considers socialism: trade unions, local councils, nationalised industries, the BBC, you name it. The Britain she leads is wealthier and more dynamic yet more divided and unequal — a land bisected into winners and losers, where her beloved free-market economics rips through the families and communities she claims to value. Success has turned Thatcher into a harsh, unbending autocrat, hated by half the country and increasingly alienated from her own ministers. Her stubborn belief in her own instincts leads to catastrophic hubris over Europe and the poll tax, turning allies into assassins. On 22 November 1990, she is forced to resign as prime minister. We wrap up by discussing Thatcher’s record and legacy, both of which are far messier than her acolytes claim. Where did Thatcher succeed and fail in fundamentally changing Britain? Why did her strengths become fatal flaws? How did she sow the seeds of Brexit and Tory civil war? And what were Thatcherism’s unacknowledged contradictions? Is it just another world for neoliberalism or a far more eccentric bundle of beliefs, prejudices and mannerisms? Are her disciples in today’s Tory Party learning all the wrong lessons? Join us as we explode some myths and tell the real story of Thatcherism. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (2002) • Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009) • Andy Beckett, Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980-82 Made Modern Britain (2015) • Brian and Maggie, written by James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears (2025) • Ronald Butt, Interview with Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Times (1981) • Conservative Central Office, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976) • Iain Dale (ed.), Memories of Margaret Thatcher (2013) • Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The lasting achievement of Thatcherism as a political project is that Britain now has three political parties of the right, instead of one’, LSE (2013) • Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (1992) • Ipsos polling on the Falklands War, Ipsos (1982) • John Harris, ‘Spare a thought for the late unlamented one nation Tory’, The Guardian (2013) • John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’ (1977) • Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech (1990) • Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (1994) • The Iron Lady, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (2011) • Sir Keith Joseph, ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Policy’, Conservative Research Department (1975) • Kwasi Kwarteng et al, Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Posterity (2012) • Kenneth Minogue and Michael Biddiss (eds.), Thatcherism: Personality and Politics (1987) • Charles Moore, Margaret Thatcher: The Authorized Biography: Volume One (2013) • Mollie Panter-Downes, ‘Letter from London’, New Yorker (1982) • Robert Saunders, Yes! To Europe: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain (2018) • Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Party Conference’ (1975) • Margaret Thatcher, ‘Speech to Conservative Rally in Bolton’ (1979) • Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (1993) • Margaret Thatcher, The Path to Power (1995) • Phil Tinline, The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of Political Nightmares (2022) • D.R. Valentine, ‘Margaret Thatcher on History, Economics & Political Consensus’, University of Oxford (2013) • Brian Walden, Interview with Margaret Thatcher after Nigel Lawson’s resignation (1989) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to season seven of Origin Story, where Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey continue to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. We hope you’ve enjoyed all the bonus episodes. We’re starting with a topic that’s been on our shortlist since the very beginning, and it’s a big one: Thatcherism. By that we mean Margaret Thatcher herself, born 100 years ago, and the evolution of the rather nebulous idea that bears her name. Is it a coherent ideology or the expression of a very unusual personality? In part one we follow Thatcher from her birth in Grantham in 1925 to her triumph in the Falklands War 57 years later. We investigate the influence of her father, the Methodist grocer and local celebrity Arthur Roberts; her entry into the reformist wing of the Conservative Party at Oxford University; and her journey to becoming MP for Finchley in 1959. It’s only in the 1970s that Thatcherism really takes shape. Scarred by her vilification as the “Milk Snatcher”, and repelled by Ted Heath and the post-war consensus, she follows the likes of Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph to the right, finding intellectual ideas to match her instinctive beliefs. The Thatcher who becomes Tory leader in 1975 and prime minister in 1979 is more “Cautious Margaret” than “Iron Lady”, not yet allergic to advice and compromise. She even has nice things to say about Europe. But before long, she’s the most unpopular prime minister since polling began. As her radical monetarist experiment leads to recession, mass unemployment and civil unrest, she appears doomed but once she’s defeated both the Tory “wets” and Argentina’s General Galtieri, Thatcherism is unchained. What were Thatcher’s formative influences? How did she grow to hate consensus politics and see herself as the antidote? Who were the other architects of Thatcherism? How close did she come to disaster and was it really the Falklands that saved her? And can Keir Starmer learn anything from her chaotic and unpopular first term? Next week the story continues with the 1983 election, the miners’ strike and the Thatcherite revolution, before it all goes horribly wrong for Maggie. If you’re a Patreon, you don’t have to wait: you can hear it right now. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list • Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History (2002) • Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (2009) • Andy Beckett, Promised You a Miracle: Why 1980-82 Made Modern Britain (2015) • Brian and Maggie, written by James Graham and directed by Stephen Frears (2025) • Ronald Butt, Interview with Margaret Thatcher, Sunday Times (1981) • Conservative Central Office, ‘The Right Approach’ (1976) • Iain Dale (ed.), Memories of Margaret Thatcher (2013) • Patrick Dunleavy, ‘The lasting achievement of Thatcherism as a political project is that Britain now has three political parties of the right, instead of one’, LSE (2013) • Ian Gilmour, Dancing with Dogma: Britain Under Thatcherism (1992) • Ipsos polling on the Falklands War, Ipsos (1982) • John Harris, ‘Spare a thought for the late unlamented one nation Tory’, The Guardian (2013) • John Hoskyns and Norman Strauss, ‘Stepping Stones’ (1977) • Geoffrey Howe’s resignation speech (1990) • Geoffrey Howe, Conflict of Loyalty (1994) • The Iron Lady, written by Abi Morgan and directed by Phyllida Lloyd (2011) • Sir Keith Joseph, ‘Notes Towards the Definition of Policy’, Conservative Research Department (1975) • Kwasi Kwarteng et al, Britannia Unchained: Global Lessons for Growth and Posterity (2012) ... reading list continues on Patreon Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Season seven is almost upon us and we’ll be starting with an epic two-parter on Thatcherism, so consider this bonus episode a warm-up. We’re unravelling the unusual story of Kemi Badenoch and what her vexed leadership says about the state of the Conservative Party. As soon as Badenoch became an MP in 2017, she was tipped for big things: a black woman with a compelling backstory, a Thatcherite heart and a strong stomach for culture wars. But the messiness of her victory in last year’s leadership race illuminated MPs’ growing ambivalence about her, and her subsequent performance has only amplified those doubts. Even her allies admit that her weaknesses are more visible than her strengths. As she fights to win back right-wing voters from Reform while disdaining the moderates lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats, are her days numbered? We start by examining Badenoch’s upbringing under military dictatorship in Nigeria, and the confusing stories she tells about it. She moves to London at the age of 16 and, after a rocky start, becomes a computer engineer. At 25, she joins the Conservative Party. At 30, she’s fighting her first election (unsuccessfully). We follow her through Coutts bank, The Spectator and the London Assembly to Westminster, where she acquires a mixed reputation. Diligent and nuanced in some areas, stubborn and lazy in others. Willing to stand up to the Brexit hardliners yet increasingly radicalised on cultural issues. Some Tory MPs hail her as the future of the right while others mutter that she is arrogant, bullying and unfriendly. And she does say some very odd things. How did Nigeria shape Badenoch’s politics? When did she start talking like a right-wing podcast? Are her prejudices more powerful than her values? Can she really revive the Tory Party or simply drive it further down a hard right cul-de-sac? Why did Michael Gove lose faith in his protégé? And if Badenoch is trying to follow Margaret Thatcher’s playbook, does her copy have half the pages missing? The story is stranger than you think. • Origin Story is live at Soho21 on the 16th of April. Tickets here • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list Articles • Aubrey Allegretti and Nicola Woolcock, ‘Kemi Badenoch: “epidemic” of children being told they’re trans’ (2023) • Richard Assheton, ‘Nigeria roots for Kemi Badenoch’s fighting spirit’ (2022) • Kemi Badenoch, maiden speech in the House of Commons (2017) • Kemi Badenoch, ‘I want to set us free by telling people the truth’, The Times (2022) • Kemi Badenoch, ‘Gagging of the brave has let gender ideologues seize control’, Sunday Times (2024) • Katy Balls and Michael Gove, ‘“I will die protecting this country’: Kemi Badenoch on where she plans to take the Tories’, The Spectator (2024) • Conservative Home, ‘Speech of the year: Kemi Badenoch on critical race theory’, Conservative Home (2020) • Rachel Cunliffe, ‘How Kemi Badenoch became the Tory front runner’, The New Statesman (2024) • Annabelle Dickson, ‘Kemi Badenoch: The Conservative Party’s next leader but one?’, Politico (2022) • Joe Murphy, ‘Kemi Badenoch: New vice chairman of the Conservatives talks about her fight to recruit a more diverse range of MPs’, Evening Standard (2018) • Parliament Square, ‘Questioning “Kemi”’s Comments’, The Critic (2024) Radio and podcasts • Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Radio 4 (2020) • Kemi Badenoch’s Commons speech on Critical Race Theory (2020) • Profile, Radio 4 (2022) • Political Thinking with Nick Robinson, Radio 4 (2024) • Honestly with Bari Weiss: Is Kemi Badenoch the Next Margaret Thatcher? (2024) • Triggernometry with Kemi Badenoch (2025) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to another Origin Story bonus episode. This week we’re discussing the conspiracy theory of Cultural Marxism. In the 1990s, cultural conservatives in America began pinning everything they hated, from feminism and gender studies departments to pop music and horror movies, on the legacy of the Frankfurt School, a group of German intellectuals who came together at Frankfurt University in 1923 and resettled in New York in 1935. The theory claims that these Teutonic eggheads, most of whom were Jewish, used critical theory and social studies to infiltrate American life and undermine “Judeo-Christian culture” from within. Hence, allegedly, political correctness and much else besides. The delusion of Cultural Marxism was made famous by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik in 2011 but it is not confined to neo-Nazis. As a pseudo-intellectual justification for the anti-woke backlash, it has been cited by Jordan Peterson, Paul Dacre, Viktor Orbán, Ron DeSantis and Suella Braverman, making it perhaps the clearest bridge between the far right and “respectable” conservatism: a modern Red Scare for a cultural Cold War. Dorian takes Ian through the evolution of the theory, from post-war fascist Francis Parker Lockey via conspiracy theorist Lyndon LaRouche to the paranoid fringes of conservatism and ultimately the mainstream. Is Cultural Marxism just a rebranding of Hitler’s antisemitic obsession with “cultural bolshevism” or something more ornate? Who were the Frankfurt School and what were they really trying to do? Why do conservative politicians keep using a phrase popularised by a fascist terrorist? And what does this have to do with the Beatles or A Nightmare on Elm Street? Join us as we unravel one of the most perniciously influential conspiracy theories in the world. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list The History of Political Correctness (1999) Moses Apostaticus, ‘Cultural Marxism Is Destroying America’, The Daily Caller (2016) Hannah Barnes, ‘The Intolerant Age’, New Statesman (2024) Bill Berkowitz, ‘“Cultural Marxism” Catching On’, Southern Poverty Law Center (2003) Paul Gottfried, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade (2021) Martin Jay, ‘Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment: The Frankfurt School as Scapegoat of the Lunatic Fringe’, Salmagundi (2010) Stuart Jeffries, Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of the Frankfurt School (2016) Stuart Jeffries, ‘Why Theodor Adorno and the Frankfurt School failed to change the world’, New Statesman (2021) William S. Lind, ‘Understanding Oklahoma’, Washington Post (1995) William S. Lind, ‘What Is Cultural Marxism?’ (undated) William S. Lind, ‘The Origins of Political Correctness’ (2000) William S. Lind (ed.), ‘“Political Correctness”: A Short History of an Ideology’ (2004) Sarah Manavis, ‘What Is Cultural Marxism? The alt-right meme in Suella Braverman’s speech in Westminster’, New Statesman (2018) Matt McManus, ‘On Marxism, Post-Marxism, and “Cultural Marxism”’, Merion West (2018) Michael Minnicino, ‘The New Dark Age: The Frankfurt School and “Political Correctness”, Fidelio (1992) Samuel Moyn, ‘The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme Is 100 Years Old’, New York Times (2018) David Niewert, ‘The new age of chain terrorism: White far-right killers are inspiring each other sequentially’, Daily Kos (2019) Ari Paul, ‘“Cultural Marxism: The Mainstreaming of a Nazi Trope’ (2019) The Red Phoenix, ‘Debunking William S. Lind & “Cultural Marxism”’, The Red Phoenix (2011) Matthew Rose, ‘A World After Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right’ (2021) ... reading list continues – full list available on Patreon Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Travel into the furthest reaches of space and time as we investigate the history of Doctor Who. From its inception in 1963, as a longshot gamble to fill a hole in the teatime schedule, to its current status as British television’s biggest international drama, we track the story of the eccentric alien with two hearts and what the Doctor’s adventures have to say about modern Britain.  Doctor Who was the brainchild of a group of outsiders and it maintains that provocative sensibility today under Russell T. Davies, with an increasingly pointed and explicit political agenda. What are its core values and ideas? How does it balance consistency with change? And how does one programme get away with promoting such a radically progressive message inside the otherwise anxious BBC? This is the story of one of the weirdest and most beloved characters in popular fiction, in all its timey-wimey goodness. Find yourself a decent spot behind the sofa and we’ll begin… Reading list John Higgs – Exterminate/Regenerate (2025) Dorian Lynskey – ‘Once Upon a Time Lord’, Empire magazine (2013) An Adventure in Space and Time, written by Mark Gatiss and directed by Terry McDonough, BBC (2013) • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Happy new year, Origin Story listeners. We’ll be releasing regular bonus episodes between now and the launch of season seven in April and we’re kicking off with a sequel to the finale of season three: Elon Musk and the Death of Twitter. With jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes information from two recent books, Dorian explains how and why the richest man in the world wrecked its most influential social media platform. In October 2022 Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion and set about remaking it in his own image. He gutted the payroll, cluttered the timeline with crud, welcomed back trolls with open arms and rebranded the corpse as X. At the same time, his breakneck self-radicalisation made him the new lodestar of the international far right. In due course the “global town square” became a playground for conspiracy theorists, grifters and extremists. Musk used to agonise that the Twitter takeover was a ruinous mistake but he’s ended up with a seat in the Trump administration and more billions than ever. It’s everyone else who’s paying the price. Why was Musk so determined to own Twitter in defiance of all financial logic? What role did the platform’s eccentric founder Jack Dorsey play? Why does Musk’s professed love of free speech only cut in one direction? (Trick question.) How does all this play into his messianic delusion that he is the saviour of humanity? And can Bluesky redeem the failed experiment of social media? NOTE: This episode was recorded in December, before Musk escalated his attacks on the Labour government and his support for Germany’s AfD, but he was already dreadful beyond belief. • Support Origin Story on Patreon • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list Axios – How It Happened: Elon Musk vs. Twitter (2023) Kate Conger, Mike Isaac, Ryan Mac and Tiffany Hsu – ‘Two Weeks of Chaos: Inside Elon Musk’s Takeover of Twitter’, New York Times (2023) Kate Conger and Ryan Mac – Character Limit: How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter (2024) Sheon Han – ‘What We Lost When Twitter Became X’, New Yorker (2024) Katie Harbath – ‘Elon Musk’s Takeover’, Lawfare (2024) Walter Isaacson – Elon Musk (2024) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

•Fill in our listener survey for a chance to win an exclusive Origin Story t-shirt. Welcome to part two of the story of the Daily Mail. We pick things up with the disastrous reign of Esmond Harmsworth and his wife Ann, aka “the Monster”. The paper loses direction, readers and money until, in 1971, Esmond’s eccentric son Vere proves his doubters wrong by relaunching the Mail as a tabloid under editor David English. English is young, brilliant and unpredictable: a charming bully with a flexible relationship to the truth. He perfects the winning formula of gravitas, fun and permanent outrage while getting so close to Margaret Thatcher that the Mail effectively becomes an arm of the Conservative campaign machine. Enter Paul Dacre in 1992 — the Mail’s most long-lasting and divisive editor. Socially awkward and writhing with prejudice, he sees himself as the vessel for the aspirations and phobias of the middle classes — the voice of the ordinary man and woman despite his giant salary, multiple homes and Etonian sons. For 26 years, he terrorises staff, persecutes minorities, intimidates politicians and rails against institutions like the EU and the BBC. (Be warned: this episode contains a record number of beeped obscenities.) We close by talking about Dacre’s toxic legacy and how his peculiar ideas about Britain continue to shape the direction of the country even under his successors. But the Mail’s circulation is plummeting and even its cursed website has lost momentum. Almost 130 years after Alfred Harmsworth founded it, why does it remain the most venomously powerful newspaper in Britain? How did the Mail reverse its decline and become what it is today? Do the editors or the readers decide its preoccupations? How did it influence both James Bond and the Beatles? What do Paul Dacre’s shoes tell us about this self-proclaimed voice of the people? And is the Mail really as plugged in as it thinks it is? Join us for the dramatic story of the newspaper that reveals Britain’s dark heart. • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list Books Adrian Addison – Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail, the Paper That Divided and Conquered Britain (2017) Richard Bourne – Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty (1990) William E Carson – Northcliffe: Britain’s Man of Power (1918) Tom Clarke – My Northcliffe Diary (1931) James Curran and Jean Seaton - Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1998) Nick Davies – Flat Earth News (2008) Stephen Dorril – Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2006) Roy Greenslade – Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda (2003) Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth – Northcliffe (1960) Martin Pugh – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005) ... Full reading list can be found on Patreon Journalism Paul Dacre on Desert Island Discs (2004) Paul Dacre – Cudlipp Lecture (2007) Paul Dacre – Speech to the Society of Editors (2008) Lauren Collins – ‘The Mail Supremacy’, New Yorker (2012) ... Full reading list can be found on Patreon Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

•Fill in our listener survey for a chance to win an exclusive Origin Story t-shirt. Welcome to the season finale of Origin Story. We put it to the vote and Patreon supporters chose the Daily Mail — the newspaper that loves to hate, and be hated. We thought this would be just one episode but the story is so juicy that it ended up as two, so we’re releasing both parts on the same day as a festive bonus. In part one we chart the rise of the Harmsworth dynasty. Alfred ‘Sunny’ Harmsworth (aka Lord Northcliffe) is a dynamic visionary whose understanding of the British public enables him to build the world’s biggest magazine empire while still in his 20s. In 1896 he launches the Daily Mail to give the newly literate and enfranchised middle classes exactly what they want: gossip, jingoism, punchy headlines and making stuff up. Snapping up venerable institutions like the Times and the Observer, Northcliffe soon owns half the market and uses it to promote his own views on issues like rearmament (good) and women’s suffrage (bad).  By the First World War, he’s a formidable power-broker with the muscle to bring down a prime minister and bag himself a place in the war cabinet. But his mental health collapses and he dies in 1922, paranoid and lonely. Alfred’s brother Harold ‘Bunny’ Harmsworth is the money man who dreams of becoming the richest man in the land and almost gets there. He’s also a right-wing zealot who boasts of toppling the Labour government with the infamous Zinoviev letter and considers Stanley Baldwin’s Tories “semi-socialist”. Inevitably, he is drawn to fascism. It’s not just his support for Oswald Mosley and that notorious headline, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ Enthralled by Mussolini and Hitler, Rothermere becomes Britain’s loudest cheerleader for fascism and appeasement. Hitler, in return, declares that the Mail is “doing an immense amount of good”. We pause the story in 1940, with Rothermere dead, his unremarkable son Esmond taking the reins and Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express determined to steal the Mail’s thunder. How did Northcliffe revolutionise British newspapers? Was his hatred of Germany really one of the drivers of the First World War? Which politician denounced his “diseased vanity”? And what led Rothermere to turn the Mail into a vehicle for fascist propaganda? It’s a tale of power, money, madness and extremism. • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory  Reading list Books Adrian Addison – Mail Men: The Unauthorized Story of the Daily Mail, the Paper That Divided and Conquered Britain (2017) Richard Bourne – Lords of Fleet Street: The Harmsworth Dynasty (1990) William E Carson – Northcliffe: Britain’s Man of Power (1918) Tom Clarke – My Northcliffe Diary (1931) James Curran and Jean Seaton - Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain (1998) Nick Davies – Flat Earth News (2008) Stephen Dorril – Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (2006) Roy Greenslade – Press Gang: How Newspapers Make Profits from Propaganda (2003) Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth – Northcliffe (1960) Martin Pugh – ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (2005) ... Full reading list can be found on Patreon Journalism Paul Dacre on Desert Island Discs (2004) Paul Dacre – Cudlipp Lecture (2007) Paul Dacre – Speech to the Society of Editors (2008) Lauren Collins – ‘The Mail Supremacy’, New Yorker (2012) ... Full reading list can be found on Patreon Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to part two of the story of the BBC. The Second World War is over, radio is booming and television is back. The BBC is stronger than ever, with new talent, new formats and new opportunities. But there are new challenges too: stormy waters over the Suez crisis and a brash new competitor in the form of ITV. Under director general Hugh Carleton Greene, the BBC plugs into the revolutionary energy of the 1960s: Radio 1, Doctor Who, Cathy Come Home, That Was the Week That Was. Meanwhile, David Attenborough’s highbrow upstart BBC2 introduces the nation to colour TV and landmark documentaries. The 70s and 80s are a golden age for ratings, from Morecambe and Wise to Live Aid to EastEnders. Yet there’s also a looming existential crisis thanks to Margaret Thatcher, who loathes the corporation as the embodiment of the bloated state and centre-left groupthink. After the defenestration of DG Alasdair Milne, John Birt gives the BBC a Thatcherite makeover that fends off the Tory assault, but at what cost? In the 21st century, the BBC has lived under the shadow of scandals, cuts and relentless salvos from the right — every blunder, from the Iraq War to Jimmy Savile, becomes another cudgel for its enemies to beat it with. Too successful and it’s accused of stifling competition. Not successful enough and it’s not worth the license fee. The crisis never ends. Yet more than nine in ten of us use it every week and would be devastated to lose it. How has the BBC lived up to the Reithian imperative to inform, educate and entertain, and why did Reith himself end up hating it? How can an organisation so powerful be so vulnerable? Is its unruly pluralism a blessing or a curse? Is it really politically biased — and if so, in which direction? And who did Mary Whitehouse personally blame for Britain’s “moral collapse”? Tune in. Reading list Patrick Barwise and Peter York – The War Against the BBC (2020) John Birt – The Harder Path: The Autobiography (2002) Bill Cotton – Double Bill: 80 Years of Entertainment (2000) Desert Island Discs with Sir Hugh Greene (1983) Simon Elmes – And Now on Radio 4: A Celebration of the World’s Best Radio Station (2007) Lionel Fielden – The Natural Bent (1960) Grace Wyndham Goldie – Facing the Nation: Television and Politics 1936-1976 (1977) David Hendy – The BBC: A People’s History (2022) Charlotte Higgins – This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (2015) Sam Knight – ‘Can the BBC Survive the British Government?’, New Yorker (2022) Ian McIntyre – The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (1993) Eric Maschwitz – No Chip on My Shoulder (1957) Hilda Matheson – Broadcasting (1933) Joe Moran – Armchair Nation: An Intimate History of Britain in Front of the TV (2014) JCW Reith – Broadcast Over Britain (1924) JCW Reith – Into the Wind (1949) Jean Seaton – Pinkoes and Traitors: The BBC and the Nation 1974-1987 (2015) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So far this season we’ve had to deal with Russell Brand and Benjamin Netanyahu, and we’ve got the Daily Mail coming up, so we all deserve a more uplifting tale. This week we commence the epic story of the British Broadcasting Corporation — the BBC. “Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling. 2LO calling. This is the British Broadcasting Company. Stand by for one minute please!” With those words, at 6pm on Tuesday 14 November 1922, the amiable wireless wizard Arthur Burrows introduced just tens of thousands of listeners to Britain’s first national broadcaster. Its founding director general, John Reith, defined its mission in three words: “Inform, educate, entertain.” When Reith and his team set up shop in Savoy Hill in 1923, the BBC’s staff numbered just 31, including the cleaner. A century later, the BBC is the world’s most popular public broadcaster and most trusted news source. It is the heart of the UK’s soft power and one of our most beloved national institutions. It is the mirror of our tastes and concerns and the background to our lives. Yet it has always been a battleground, too, tormented by newspaper barons, rival broadcasters, suspicious politicians and its own internal tensions. As 1960s director general Hugh Carleton Greene observed, it is “the universal Aunt Sally of our day”. The story begins with the utopian dreams of the wireless pioneers, and Reith’s own paternalistic idealism about the power of radio to elevate the nation. We meet such gamechanging talents as Hilda Matheson and Cecil Lewis as they develop the art of broadcasting — including one, inevitably, who becomes a fascist. In 1926, the BBC faced its first major crisis, the General Strike, and made its first sworn enemy, Winston Churchill. By 1939, the BBC had 34 million radio listeners and was pioneering the new medium of television. During the Second World War, it proved its worth as a morale-boosting, unifying force at home and an advertisement for democratic British values abroad. One French broadcaster called it “a torch in the darkness.” We end part one with the BBC preparing to enter the radically transformed post-war world and the age of television. What are the origins of the BBC’s values and structures? Who were the shellshocked misfits who got it off the ground and why did they think it would change the world? Why did the General Strike almost bring it to its knees? How did it help win the war? Oh, and what did Reith have against television? It’s a saga of bohemians, bureaucrats and bust-ups, with walk-on parts for George Orwell, HG Wells, the Bloomsbury set, JB Priestley, Ewan MacColl, Lord Haw-Haw and Mickey Mouse. And at the centre of it all is the prickly, domineering, inspirational figure of John Reith. Stand by for one minute please! Reading list Patrick Barwise and Peter York – The War Against the BBC (2020) John Birt – The Harder Path: The Autobiography (2002) Bill Cotton – Double Bill: 80 Years of Entertainment (2000) Desert Island Discs with Sir Hugh Greene (1983) Simon Elmes – And Now on Radio 4: A Celebration of the World’s Best Radio Station (2007) Lionel Fielden – The Natural Bent (1960) Grace Wyndham Goldie – Facing the Nation: Television and Politics 1936-1976 (1977) David Hendy – The BBC: A People’s History (2022) Charlotte Higgins – This New Noise: The Extraordinary Birth and Troubled Life of the BBC (2015) Sam Knight – ‘Can the BBC Survive the British Government?’, New Yorker (2022) Ian McIntyre – The Expense of Glory: A Life of John Reith (1993) ... Full reading list available on Patreon Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we complete the story of Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s most politically successful prime minister — and its most divisive.  We pick up the story in 1996, with Netanyahu’s first term in office, clashing with both President Clinton and his hard-right coalition partners over the future of the Oslo peace process. We follow his subsequent decade in opposition, as the dwindling of hope and the misfortunes of his rivals enabled him to make yet another unlikely comeback in 2009. Apart from 18 months of political chaos, he has been in power ever since, growing more hostile towards the Palestinians and Iran and more authoritarian at home — some say Netanyahu was Trump before Trump. The Israel that suffered the blow of October 7 was outwardly strong and prosperous yet more divided, corrupt and unpopular than ever. Its conduct of the subsequent wars demonstrates the costs of Netanyahu’s self-serving machinations, his embrace of the far right and his unforgivingly bleak worldview. Even as a majority of voters want him to step down, he hangs on. Is Netanyahu just an extraordinarily canny operator or the true representative of a new Israel, a long way from its founders’ intentions? How did peace with the Palestinians go from a real possibility to a broken dream? Why does everyone from foreign leaders to members of his own cabinet have such contempt for Netanyahu? And how can Israel recover from his ruinous leadership? To understand where the country is now, you need to understand the man. • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory • Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Books Neill Lochery - The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu (Bloomsbury, 2016) Benjamin Netanyahu - A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993) Benjamin Netanyahu - Bibi: My Story (2022) Anshel Pfeffer - Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu (2020) Ari Shavit - My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel: Updated edition (2015) Avi Shlaim - The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000) Articles David Margolick - ‘Star of Zion’, Vanity Fair (1996) David Remnick - ‘The Outsider’, New Yorker (1998) Joshua Leifer - ‘The Netanyahu doctrine’, Guardian (2023) David Remnick - ‘The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition’, New Yorker (2024) Donald McIntyre - ‘How Netanyahu gambled with the Fate of Israel’, Tortoise (2024) John Jenkins - ‘Netanyahu’s all-out war’, New Statesman (2024) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we commence the story of Benjamin Netanyahu. The 75-year-old has become Israel’s longest serving prime minister despite never winning the love of his people, his international allies or even his political colleagues. Now he is accused of prolonging Israel’s horrific wars in Gaza and Lebanon to preserve his own power and save himself from prosecution for corruption. How did the man known even to his foes as Bibi rebound from so many scandals and defeats to become the dominant force in Israeli politics, and what does that say about the country Israel has become? If you haven’t heard our two-parter on Zionism, now is a good time – Apple / Spotify – because these episodes are a kind of sequel. We begin with the influence of Bibi’s father and grandfather and the flinty, paranoid doctrine of revisionist Zionism. Netanyahu’s aggressive, ultra-conservative worldview was also shaped by his studies in the US, his combat experience in Israel’s wars of survival, and the dramatic loss of his beloved older brother Yoni during the 1976 raid on Entebbe Airport. After the revisionist party Likud ended Labor’s three-decade hegemony, he found his calling as a great communicator, bullishly promoting Israel’s interests, from television to the United Nations, throughout the 1980s. Netanyahu’s first eight years in the Knesset coincided with the First Intifada and the Oslo peace process. In a time of hope for a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians, he offered cynicism and fear. When peacemaking prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Netanyahu was blamed for stoking the far right and he seemed finished politically. Yet within a few months, he was Israel’s youngest ever prime minister. What has influenced Netanyahu’s bleak and spiky understanding of Jewish history and his role in it? How did such a widely disliked character achieve such surprising success? And how did Israel itself change during those tumultuous decades of frequent wars and elusive peace? To understand where the country is now, you need to understand the man. • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory • Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Books Neill Lochery - The Resistible Rise of Benjamin Netanyahu (Bloomsbury, 2016) Benjamin Netanyahu - A Place Among the Nations: Israel and the World (1993) Benjamin Netanyahu - Bibi: My Story (2022) Anshel Pfeffer - Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu (2020) Ari Shavit - My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel: Updated edition (2015) Avi Shlaim - The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (2000) Articles David Margolick - ‘Star of Zion’, Vanity Fair (1996) David Remnick - ‘The Outsider’, New Yorker (1998) Joshua Leifer - ‘The Netanyahu doctrine’, Guardian (2023) David Remnick - ‘The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition’, New Yorker (2024) Donald McIntyre - ‘How Netanyahu gambled with the Fate of Israel’, Tortoise (2024) John Jenkins - ‘Netanyahu’s all-out war’, New Statesman (2024) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Part two of Ian and Dorian’s post-Presidential Election show at the Tabernacle in West London, recorded on the 7th of November. After signing books (have we mentioned there are Origin Story books out?) Dorian and Ian returned to continue the analysis of what the hell just happened. They also considered what a Trump win means for the UK and answered some excellent audience questions. • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory • Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams and Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Part one of Ian and Dorian’s post-Presidential Election show at the Tabernacle in West London, recorded on the 7th of November. The show turned into a group therapy session, after Trump won to become the first convicted felon to be elected to the highest office in America. Listen back to Dorian and Ian beginning the process of coming to terms with this world-changing outcome and its implications for global politics. • Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory • Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams and Chris Jones. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The final episode of our two-part story of Artificial Intelligence. Having looked at the emergence and development of AI in part one we now turn to the future and assess the dangers and possibilities it raises. We weigh up two arguments concerning existential risk. Some AI theorists believe the technology has the possibility of becoming sentient and then behaving against humanity's interests. Others worry that it will simply deliver disastrous outcomes on the basis of badly established requests. For instance, if you ask a highly advanced machine to create paperclips, with no additional restrictions, it might end up killing everyone in its relentless pursuit of its task. Are either of these ideas remotely believable? Are they remotely likely? Then we look at the possible repercussions of more modest outcomes. What happens when everyone on earth is equipped with their own genius machine, which can assess global corporate law in seconds, or make millions on Amazon Marketplace? Will we use it for good or ill? (Spoilers: It'll be bad)  How confidently can we accept the predictions of AI theorists? Are they really right that this is all inevitable? Or is history, and technological development, far more chaotic and unpredictable than their models allow? Finally, we look at the impact on humanity as we are all suddenly enveloped in AI art. Will an AI song ever move us to tears? And if so, what does that say about who we are and what we look for in the world? Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Books Susie Alegre - Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being human in the age of AI (2024) Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) Daniel Crevier – AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993) Pedro Domingos - The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake the world (2015) Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (2022) Walter Isaacson – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014) Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) John Markoff - Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015) David G. Stork (ed.) – HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997) Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar – The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future (2023) Michael Woolridge – The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI (2021) Articles Alan Turing – ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind (1950) Brad Darrach – ‘Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person’, Life (1970) Jeremy Bernstein – ‘A.I.’, New Yorker (1981) Raffi Khatchadourian – ‘The Doomsday Invention’, New Yorker (2015) For the full reading list join our Patreon. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It can seem like conspiracy theories have travelled at warp speed from the eccentric margins to the heart of modern politics. But in fact conspiracism has always been one of history’s darkest forces, from the witch hunts to the Holocaust. In this exclusive audiobook extract from the prologue to Conspiracy Theory: The Story of an Idea, Ian explains how conspiracy theories exploit the human brain’s craving for simple explanations in a chaotic and unpredictable world to spin bogus narratives of evil cliques, shadowy plots and do-or-die conflicts between Us and Them.  Why are conspiracy theories so alluring, how have they shaped history and how can liberal democracy survive if its citizens no longer inhabit a shared reality? Featuring JFK, David Icke, Princess Diana and the Wu-Tang Clan, this is our introduction to a weird and wild story. You can listen to Ian and Dorian read Conspiracy Theory: The Story of an Idea, along with its sister Origin Story publications Fascism and Centrism, on Audible, Spotify or your favourite audiobook platform. Or buy the physical books  on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory. Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we begin the story of Artificial Intelligence. Since the launch of Chat-GPT in late 2022, we have been more excited, and anxious, about AI than ever before. It’s become a daily obsession. But the key question we are grappling with is the same as ever: can machines really ever develop human-style intelligence or merely imitate it? And what is human intelligence anyway? In part two we’ll be exploring the possible ramifications of AI, from the utopian to the dystopian and all points in between. But first, we explain how humanity’s long, ambivalent fascination with artificial life has brought us here. We start with premonitions of AI, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, and Ada Lovelace, the original AI sceptic, to Alan Turing and his famous test. Artificial Intelligence itself — the term and the field of study — began in 1956, at a summer school at Dartmouth University. While most computer scientists were working on ways for machines to partner with human intelligence — the personal computer, the internet — AI researchers dreamt of replacing it. For decades, AI development was a cycle of boom and bust. Extravagant claims attracted funding, talent and media attention, then their failure to materialise caused all three to collapse. AI became tarnished by its broken promises. But in the 21st century, the availability of vast troves of data and powerful new processors finally solved such stubborn challenges as image recognition and automatic translation, leading to the current AI gold rush. Along the way, we meet gamechanging scientists like Marvin Minsky and Geoffrey Hinton as well as landmark machines like ELIZA, the first chatbot, Shakey the robot and AlexNet, deep learning’s great leap forward. Why does the prospect of machine intelligence enthral and unnerve us? Why has AI proved so much more difficult than its pioneers imagined? How have fictional AIs like HAL and Skynet shaped the mythology of AI? And are Large Language Models like Chat-GPT just glorified autocomplete or a historic turning point in our relationship with machines? Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Books Susie Alegre - Human Rights, Robot Wrongs: Being human in the age of AI (2024) Nick Bostrom – Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) Daniel Crevier – AI: The Tumultuous History of the Search for Artificial Intelligence (1993) Pedro Domingos - The Master Algorithm: How the quest for the ultimate learning machine will remake the world (2015) Max Fisher - The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World (2022) Walter Isaacson – The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014) Dorian Lynskey – Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World (2024) John Markoff - Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots (2015) David G. Stork (ed.) – HAL’s Legacy: 2001’s Computer as Dream and Reality (1997) Mustafa Suleyman with Michael Bhaskar – The Coming Wave: AI, Power and Our Future (2023) Michael Woolridge – The Road to Conscious Machines: The Story of AI (2021) Articles Alan Turing – ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, Mind (1950) Brad Darrach – ‘Meet Shaky, the First Electronic Person’, Life (1970) Jeremy Bernstein – ‘A.I.’, New Yorker (1981) For the full reading list join our Patreon. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we finish the story of the suffragettes. We pick up the narrative in 1912, when parliament’s failure to deliver women’s suffrage triggered a new phase of violent escalation. No suffragette was more extreme than Emily Wilding Davison, whose death at the hooves of the King’s horse turned a liability into a martyr. Meanwhile, the whole country was convulsed by arson and bomb plots and the Pankhursts’ autocratic leadership was alienating some of their closest allies, including members of their own family. It took the First World War to stop the “reign of terror” and ultimately give women the vote. Was violence morally justified when peaceful solutions failed? Did it hasten suffrage or threaten to derail it? What might have happened if the war had not intervened? What do the strange and divergent afterlives of the suffragettes tell us about the movement? And what can modern activists like Just Stop Oil learn from the suffragettes? Behind the sanitised, sentimentalised version of the story lies a thorny tale of the validity and efficacy of violence in a just cause, taking Edwardian Britain to the edge of chaos. Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here. Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018) Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020) Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015) Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995) Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924) Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959) Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911) Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931) Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953) Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week we begin the tumultuous story of the suffragettes. In 1903, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. Sick of waiting in vain for women’s suffrage, they decided to secure it by hook or by crook. By 1906, the so-called suffragettes were the most exciting, audacious activists in the land, with their banners of purple, white and green. They then took on the might of the British state with ingenious protests and hunger strikes before agreeing to an uneasy two-year ceasefire while parliament wrestled over whether to give women the vote. We conclude part one at the end of 1911, with political failure and the dawn of a new phase of militancy. Who were the Pankhursts and their inner circle? How did they interact with Millicent Fawcett’s moderate suffragists? Why were Liberal politicians so determined to deny women the vote? And could it all have worked out very differently?  It’s a fiery story of courage, conflict and missed chances, as British women found their political voice for the first time. Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here. Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Diane Atkinson – Rise Up Women!: The Remarkable Lives of the Suffragettes (2018) Helen Lewis – Difficult Women: A History of Feminism in 11 Fights (2020) Joyce Marlow (editor) – Suffragettes: The Fight for Votes for Women (2015) Glenda Norquay (editor) – Voices and Votes: A Literary Anthology of the Women’s Suffrage Campaign (1995) Christabel Pankhurst – Pressing Problems of the Coming Age (1924) Christabel Pankhurst – Unshackled: The Story of How We Won the Vote (1959) Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette: The History of the Women’s Militant Suffrage Movement 1905-10 (1911) Sylvia Pankhurst – The Suffragette Movement: An Intimate Account of Persons and Ideals (1931) Mary R. Richardson – Laugh a Defiance (1953) Fern Riddell – ‘Sanitising the Suffragettes’ (2018) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What the hell happened to Russell Brand? Ten years ago, the comedian and actor was the loudest voice on the British left as his florid calls for spiritual and political revolution won him the support of politicians and journalists. Now he is a full-time conspiracy theorist and disgraced exile from mainstream culture, conducting prayer meetings with Jordan Peterson and flirting with Donald Trump. The fall of a celebrity is not usually Origin Story material but Brand’s transformation epitomises the political chaos of the last decade: how populism and paranoia scramble conventional notions of right and left to create a volatile third category. In the first episode of season six, Dorian and Ian reassess Brand’s extraordinary rise to fame in the 2000s in light of recent allegations of sexual misconduct and explore how British culture gave him a free pass. In 2013 Brand swapped sex and fame for a new compulsion, reinventing himself as a flamboyant agitator to great acclaim. In the void between Occupy and Corbynism, his verbose mishmash of self-help and socialism briefly made him a lion of the left. During the pandemic Brand embraced a darker shade of politics, promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19, Ukraine and much more besides. After the allegations broke last year he went full crank, aligning himself with Robert F Kennedy Jr, Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones in the paranoid space. What does Brand’s journey to the fringes tell us about the shifting political landscape? Did he really switch sides or were the red flags flying all along? What can the left learn from its haste to turn a motormouth comedian into a radical icon? Is Brand’s latest incarnation sincere or opportunistic, and does it really matter? And which of his tomes makes for the most painful reading today: Revolution or My Booky Wook? This is a bizarre story of celebrity and conspiracy, addiction and attention, which says a great deal about where we are now. Get the Origin Story books on Fascism, Centrism and Conspiracy Theory – out 17th Oct Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here. Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Books Russell Brand - My Booky Wook (2007) Russell Brand - Revolution (2014) Anna Merlan - Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2019) Naomi Klein - Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World (2023) Video and audio Russell Brand at parliamentary select committee on drug addiction (2012) Newsnight debate on drug addiction with Peter Hitchens (2012) Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman (2013) Newsnight interview with Evan Davis (2014) Brand: A Second Coming, directed by Ondi Timoner (2015) Russell Brand: In Plain Sight: Dispatches (2023) Russell Brand podcast archive   Articles Michael Kelly, ‘The Road to Paranoia’, New Yorker (1995)  Piers Morgan, ‘Russell Brand’, GQ (2006) Miranda Sawyer, Brand on the run, The Guardian (2008) Russell Brand on Margaret Thatcher: “I always felt sorry for her children”, The Guardian (2013) Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition”, New Statesman (2013)   Brian Logan, ‘Messiah Complex – review’, Guardian (2013) Mark Fisher, ‘Exiting the Vampire Castle’, Open Democracy (2013) Justin Gray, ‘The Sneaky Smarts of Russell Brand’, Vulture (2013) David Runciman, ‘Revolution by Russell Brand review’, Guardian (2014) For complete article list see Patreon Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sex! Violence! Censorship! These days the British Board of Film Classification rarely makes headlines but it was on the cultural frontlines throughout the 20 th century, from Herbert Asquith and the dawn of British cinema to Mary Whitehouse and “video nasties”. Through the turbulent life of one institution, Ian takes Dorian through a century of moral panics, censorship and furious debates about cinema’s influence on the life of the nation. This (literally) cinematic tale ranges from The Birth of a Nation and Nosferatu to Cannibal Holocaust and The Life of Brian, and has an unusually uplifting ending. Won’t somebody think of the children?! Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here. Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List The Miracle Of The Movies by Leslie Wood, Burke Publishing 1915 Obscenity and Film Censorship: An Abridgement of the Williams Report edited by Bernard Williams The British Board of Film Censors: film censorship in Britain, 1896-1950 by James Robertson, Dover, N.H. 1985 Censoring the moving image by Phillip French Seagull Books, 2007 See no evil: Banned films and video controversy by David Kerekes, Headpress 2000 Ban The Sadist Videos: 2005 Documentary  ScreenOnline: Duval, Robin Mark Kermode interview with Robin Duval: Guardian 2004 Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emmanuel Macron is one of the most fascinating and infuriating figures in 21st century politics. Seven years ago, the philosopher-statesman shredded France’s status quo by seizing the presidency at the helm of a brand new centrist party. But his achievements, at home and abroad, have not lived up to his grand visions and his summer election gamble has left him weaker than ever. Ian tells Dorian a dramatic story of idealism, ambition and hubris, explaining what Macron’s strengths and flaws reveal about the changing face of centrism, the battle with the far right and what makes French politics so very French. Sacre bleu! Origin Story will be live at the Tabernacle in London on the 7th of November for a special post-US election show. Tickets here. Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Reading List Revolution by Emmanuel Macron, Scribe 2017 Emmanuel Macron: Revolution Francais by Sophie Pedder, Bloomsbury 2018 Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Produced by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Over the past eight years, the word “gaslighting” has transformed from an obscure term in psychiatric literature into a ubiquitous buzzword to describe the kind of deceit that makes you feel like you’re losing your mind. But are we using it correctly? What explains its sudden popularity? And is it entirely wise to import a psychological term into the world of politics? Dorian tells Ian how the title of Patrick Hamilton’s hit 1938 play Gaslight gradually became a verb and eventually went viral during Trump’s first presidential campaign in 2016. The story ranges from Ingrid Bergman and I Love Lucy to George Orwell and the Stasi before landing amid the current election dust-up between Trump and Kamala Harris. Strictly facts, no gaslighting, we promise. Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions when you back Origin Story on Patreon. Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Battle of Cable Street on 4 October 1936 has been described as “the greatest anti-fascist victory on British soil”. It is certainly the most mythologised, most recently inspiring massive anti-fascist protests in British cities. But what actually happened that day? Who exactly was doing the battling? And did this display of working-class solidarity in London’s East End really stop Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in its tracks?  Dorian tells Ian the story of that landmark Sunday and its aftermath, from the points of view of protesters, police and politicians, and finds some surprising answers.  Get exclusive extras like supporter-only Q&A editions (first one coming next week) when you back Origin Story on Patreon.   Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Racist violence has inflamed several British cities this past week. Should we call the events protests, riots or pogroms? Are the participants actual fascists or ordinary citizens with “legitimate concerns”? And how did the fiction of “two-tier policing” go from extremists to broadcasters in a couple of days? Ian and Dorian analyse how the language of the far right and its mainstream enablers obscures what is really going on and ask if Britain’s worst street violence since 2011 will change anything.   https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod   Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Produced by Jade Bailey. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Couldn’t make it to the Origin Story live show in London on Monday 15 July? Don’t worry, we’ve got audio for you. Listen up as Dorian and Ian take one last wallow in the glory of Election Night ’24… think about what might be in store for some of our favourite bad losers… see how the events of the campaign relate to the subjects of our past series… and of course answer your questions.   Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio and video by Simon Williams, Chris Jones and Kieron Leslie. Live events co-ordinator Jill Pearson. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The final episode of season five covers the Rushdie Affair. On 14 February 1989, the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie made The Satanic Verses the most famous novel in the world — for all the wrong reasons. The controversy had far-reaching implications for free speech, international relations and the political identity of British Muslims. Although the issue seemed to have been resolved in 1998, the attempted murder of Rushdie in 2022 showed that it was far from over. Dorian and Ian tell the whole story from all angles: Rushdie’s decade in hiding, Iran’s rivalry with Saudi Arabia, community relations in Britain, divisions in the literary scene, and the conflicted responses of politicians around the world. What exactly did The Satanic Verses say that made people so angry? Which public figures were on Rushdie’s side and which ones thought he had it coming? How did Rushdie get his life back, only to almost lose it decades later? And what is the cultural and political legacy of the affair today? It is a tale of artistic freedom colliding with religious dogma and political calculations to turn a work of fiction into an international incident for the first time. Reading list Abdulrazak Gurnah, ed. – The Cambridge Companion to Salman Rushdie (2007) Christopher Hitchens – Hitch-22: A Memoir (2010) Daniel Pipes – The Rushdie Affair: The Novel, the Ayatollah, and the West (1990) Salman Rushdie – The Satanic Verses (1988) Salman Rushdie – Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991 (1991) Salman Rushdie – Joseph Anton (2012)  Salman Rushdie – Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (2024) Articles John Cunningham – ‘Sentenced to the prison of the word’, The Guardian (1990) Will Lloyd – How We Gave Up on Salman Rushdie, UnHerd (2022) Dorian Lynskey – Salman Rushdie on Quichotte: “The world as I knew it seems to be coming to an end” the i (2019) Sean O’Grady – The Satanic Verses 30 Years On review, The Independent (2019) David Remnick – The Defiance of Salman Rushdie, New Yorker (2023) Salman Rushdie – The Disappeared, New Yorker (2012) Words for Salman Rushdie – New York Times (1989) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The season five finale coincides with the general election, so we’ve decided to get very topical indeed with the story of Labour leader and likely prime minister Keir Starmer. To his admirers, he’s the master strategist who took Labour from doom to Downing Street in a single term. To his foes, he’s a ruthless liar who will stop at nothing to crush the left. To the average voter, he remains a bit of a blank slate. What kind of prime minister will he be? Ian and Dorian trace Starmer’s youthful journey from working-class Surrey socialist to indie-loving, centrist-bashing law student, explaining the legacy of a difficult childhood. He was the star human rights lawyer, at the heart of 1990s controversies from the McLibel case to policing in Northern Ireland, who became the country’s top prosecutor and then a knight of the realm. At the age of 52, he entered politics and soon found himself on the frontline of the Brexit wars, butting heads with Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn. We end with his leadership of the party and the price of victory. Why is Starmer such a closed book in public? How did he go from radical socialist to centrist dad? What went down between him and Corbyn? Was he really an arch-remainer? When did he almost throw in the towel? And what are the core values that might define his premiership? Discover all this and more in the story of our next prime minister. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.  • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list Tom Baldwin - Keir Starmer: The Biography (2024) Oliver Eagleton – The Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right (2022) Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire – Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn (2020) Tim Shipman – Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem (2017) Articles and podcasts Emily Ashton, ‘Keir Starmer Is Not Who You Think He Is’, Buzzfeed (2020) Elliott Chappell, ‘Interview with Keir Starmer’, Labour List (2020) Desert Island Discs: Sir Keir Starmer (2020) George Eaton, ‘What Is Starmerism?’, The New Statesman (2024) Charlotte Edwardes, ‘“You asked me questions I’ve never asked myself”: Keir Starmer’s most personal interview yet’ The Guardian, ‘In Praise of… Keir Starmer’, The Guardian (2009) Billy Kenber, ‘Keir Starmer: Radical who attacked Kinnock in Marxist journal’, The Times (2020) Keir Starmer, ‘Sorry, Mr Blair, but 1441 does not authorise force’, The Guardian (2003) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode tells the tale of the anti-vaxxers. The word has only been around since 2001 but inoculation has inspired opposition for as long as it has existed in the West. Dorian and Ian chart the life of vaccines and their opponents from the fight against smallpox in the eighteenth century to the vaccine scandals of the post-war decades. Find out why someone threw a bomb through Cotton Mather’s window, why Gandhi changed his mind, and why Leicester became the anti-vaccine capital of the world. The drama accelerates with Dr Andrew Wakefield and the MMR panic of the 2000s, which swept up everyone for Oprah Winfrey to Private Eye, caused a public health disaster and set the stage for the full-blown mania of the backlash against Covid-19 vaccines. How did a rogue British gastroenterologist launch a global movement? How did vaccine scepticism mutate into a giant conspiracy theory? Is Bill Gates really implanting 5G trackers in our blood? (No.) And what’s the best way to get an anti-vaxxer to think again? It’s a gripping story of science, journalism, paranoia, superstition and people who should know better. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.  • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list • David Aaronovitch – Voodoo Histories: How Conspiracy Theory Has Shaped Modern History (2010) • Jonathan M. Berman – Anti-Vaxxers: How to Challenge a Misinformed Movement (2020) • Steve Brotherton – Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories (2016) • Brian Deer – The Doctor Who Fooled the World: Andrew Wakefield’s War on Vaccines (2020) • Peter Furtado - Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic: Voices from History (2021) • Naomi Klein – Doppelganger (2023) • Anna Merlan – Republic of Lies: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power (2020) • Seth Mnookin – The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy (2011) • Tom Phillips and Jonn Elledge - Conspiracy: A History of Bxllocks Theories and How Not to Fall for Them (2022) • Frank M. Snowden - Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present (2019) Podcasts and articles • You’re Wrong About: The Anti-Vaccine Movement (2021) • Maintenance Phase: RFK Jr. and the Rise of the Anti-Vaxx Movement (2023) • Isaac Chotiner, ‘The Influence of the Anti-Vaccine Movement’, The New Yorker (2020) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust. In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime? In part two, Ian and Dorian tell the story of Lemkin’s invention of genocide and his efforts to make it an international crime. They explain how legal wrangling during the Nuremberg trials led to the 1948 Genocide Convention, and why it took so long for anybody to be charged with the crime, let alone brought to justice. Why do so many of the twentieth century’s most horrendous offences not qualify as genocide? Why did international condemnation fail to prevent genocides in Rwanda, Darfur and the former Yugoslavia? And why is the case against Israel so contentious? It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the limits of international law, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder. • See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.  • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list • Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2013 • Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 1998 • Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, 2007 • Norman N. Naimark – Genocide: A World History, 2016 • Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002 • Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016 Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The war in Gaza has led to accusations of genocide but that word operates on two levels. It’s both a strict legal term that has to be adjudicated by the International Criminal Court and an informal expression of moral outrage. The definition has been contested ever since the word was invented by the lawyer Raphael Lemkin in 1944, in the furnace of the Holocaust. In this two-part episode Dorian and Ian tell the story of genocide as a legal and political category. What exactly does it mean? How is it different from crimes against humanity or ethnic cleansing? Why is it so hard to prove? And how did it become seen as the ultimate crime? In part one, Ian and Dorian chart the prehistory of genocide — the ancient desire of groups to utterly eradicate their enemies. They go from the vengeful massacres of the Old Testament and Greek myth to the destruction of Carthage and the Holy War of the Crusades. Then they enter the age of empire, from the crimes of the Conquistadors to the elimination of the Tasmanians. Modern genocide began with the slaughter of the Herero in East Africa and the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, setting the stage for the Nazis. It’s a disturbing story but a fascinating one, raising essential questions about the rights of the individual versus the rights of the group, the difference between reckless violence and targeted destruction, and humankind’s capacity for justifying mass murder. • See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.  • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list • Donald Bloxham and A. Dirk Moses (eds.) - The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies, 2013 • Philip Gourevitch – We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, 1998 • Ben Kiernan – Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, 2007 • Norman N. Naimark - Genocide: A World History, 2016 • Samantha Power – A Problem from Hell, 2002 • Philippe Sands – East West Street, 2016 Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history. In part two, Ian and Dorian talk about the single most important liberal book ever written, track the ups and downs of the couple's tumultuous affair, and show how Mill became a woke warrior in his old age, fighting against racism and sexism and destroying his carefully-built Victorian reputation in the process. • See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.  • Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list Ian Dunt – How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?) Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) – The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998) John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – On Liberty (1859) John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) – The Subjection of Women (1869) John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham – Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987) Richard Reeves – John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this two-parter Ian gets seriously into the research by mining his own book for episode ideas and comes up smiling with this tale of love, bravery and feminism. John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor are the mother and father of liberalism, a joint writing team who produced the most seminal books about freedom in the modern era. But while he was worshipped by those who came afterwards, she was mocked, lambasted and then erased from history. In part one, Ian explains Mill's devastating childhood, Taylor's cutting social commentary, their love affairs which rocked Victorian London, the evidence for her co-authorship of several key liberal books, and how they delivered some of the earliest works of British feminism. • See Origin Story live at the King’s Head Theatre, London on Mon 15 July. Tickets here. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.  • Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list Ian Dunt - How to be a Liberal (2020) (Has anyone heard of this book? Is it any good?) Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed) - The Complete Works of Harriet taylor Mill (1998) John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - On Liberty (1859) John Stuart Mill (and Harriet Taylor Mill) - The Subjection of Women (1869) John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham - Utilitarianism and Other Essays (1987) Richard Reeves - John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (2007) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Producer: Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In part two of George Orwell, Dorian picks up the story in 1941, with Orwell taking a job at the BBC. The war grinds on, and so does George, until his anti-Stalinist fairy tale Animal Farm changes everything. We’re on the road to Nineteen Eighty-Four but it is littered with obstacles: grief, madness, bombs, tuberculosis. After the war, Orwell is writing his finest essays but his life is mayhem so he escapes to the Scottish island of Jura with his baby son to write the novel that, little does he know, will make him a legend. It's the story of a writer reaching the height of his powers while everything around him seems to be falling to bits. How did a sick man on a lonely island write perhaps the most influential novel of the twentieth century? Why is his strange masterpiece so widely misunderstood? What were Orwell’s blindspots? Would he have been a good hang? And are taking the right lessons from his life and work? All this, plus Nye Bevan, HG Wells, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley and the atomic bomb. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast. • Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Image: Peter Cushing (Winston Smith) with Yvonne Mitchell (Julia) and André Morrell (O’Brien) in the 1954 BBC production of George Orwell’s 1984. (Getty) Reading list Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984) Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982) Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002) Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006) Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971) Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019 Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975) John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989) William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975) DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003) DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023) Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Back for season five, Origin Story continues to explore the misunderstood ideas and people that shape our politics today. With Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. In this opening two-parter Dorian bows to the inevitable and tells the story of the subject of his book, The Ministry of Truth. When George Orwell died on 21 January 1950, at the age of 46, the phenomenal success of his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four made it international news. The obituaries hailed him as a beacon of decency, sanity and wisdom during the darkest years of the twentieth century — “the wintry conscience of a generation” in VS Pritchett’s ringing phrase. To this day, his moral authority is claimed by people across the political spectrum. Behind the myth, Orwell was a complicated man, full of flaws and contradictions. His road to success was long, painful and ridiculously eventful. In part one, Dorian explains how Eric Blair became George Orwell, from Eton to Burma to Paris to Wigan. We then follow Orwell to the Spanish Civil War, where he is shot by fascists and hounded by Stalinists, and finally to Blitz-torn London. It’s the story of a man working out who he is, as a writer and a moral agent, in a world tumbling towards catastrophe. How did Orwell become a socialist? Why did he wind up the other socialists? Why was Spain the great turning point in his life? Are his early novels any good? And was his wife Eileen the queen of deadpan one-liners? All this and more in the return of Origin Story. • Pre-order the forthcoming Origin Stories books on Centrism, Fascism and Conspiracy Theory and get 20% off using the special discount code revealed in the podcast.  • Buy The Ministry of Truth through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. • Support Origin Story on Patreon Reading list Audrey Coppard and Bernard Crick (eds.) — Orwell Remembered (1984) Bernard Crick – George Orwell: A Life (1982) Peter Davison (ed.) — The Complete Works of George Orwell (1997-2002) Peter Davison (ed.) — The Lost Orwell (2006) Miriam Gross (ed.) — The World of George Orwell (1971) Dorian Lynskey — The Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (2019 Jeffrey Meyers (ed.) — George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (1975) John Rodden — George Orwell: The Politics of Literary Reputation (1989) William Steinhoff — George Orwell and the Origins of 1984 (1975) DJ Taylor – Orwell: The Life (2003) DJ Taylor – Orwell: The New Life (2023) Sylvia Topp – Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020) Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Music by Jade Bailey. Art by Jim Parrett. Logo by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We’ve covered ideas, phrases, people and historical events. Now Origin Story profiles its first building: Number 10 Downing Street.  Following Dorian’s bonus episode about the birth of end of the world fiction, based on his new book Everything Must Go, Ian goes deep on a topic from his bestselling book How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t. He explains how a house built on marshland by a 17th century scoundrel gradually became the prime minister’s official residence, and how its cramped, chaotic floorplan still influences how vital decisions are made. Why does tradition trump efficient governance? How do wily advisers exploit the layout to increase their influence over the PM? Is the door more important than the rest of the house put together? And is it finally time to say goodbye to Number 10? Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• Join Ian and Dorian for Origin Story Live in London on Tue 7 May. They’ll be looking at how the Conservative Party got addicted to conspiracy theory, and more. This time: The Illuminati were a group of Enlightenment idealists who existed for just a few years in 1780s Bavaria. Or were they? The Illuminati have since been blamed for everything from the French Revolution to communism to 9/11. How did a powerless club of intellectuals become reimagined as the secret rulers of the world? And how did the myth of the Illuminati become the template for every megaconspiracy theory about plots to put humanity under the heel of a one-world government? Dorian and Ian unravel this amazing yarn, which takes in America’s Founding Fathers, British fascists, the Knights Templar, David Icke, Jay-Z and the Playboy letters page. The truth is in here. Written and presented by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For 1800 years, Western conceptions of the end of the world were dominated by the Book of Revelation: Armageddon, the Millennium, Judgement Day. But in 1816, political upheaval, Enlightenment science and the Romantic imagination converged to give birth to a radical idea: the end of the world without God. When Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley came together beside Lake Geneva that summer, a volcanic eruption was producing endless rain and apocalyptic prophecies. Drawing on his new book Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, Dorian explains how that season of confusion and gloom led to not just Frankenstein but Byron’s revolutionary poem Darkness. And how the deaths of her companions led Mary to write The Last Man, the first ever novel about a world-destroying pandemic. It’s a story of personal tragedy, temporary climate change, shocking new ideas about the past, present and future of life on earth, and the summer that kicked off two centuries (and counting) of apocalyptic fiction. Buy Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World through our affiliate bookshop and you’ll help fund Origin Story by earning us a small commission for every sale. Bookshop.org’s fees help support independent bookshops too. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the last episode of season four, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey discuss effective altruism. Last month the US entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted on multiple counts of fraud and conspiracy related to the dramatic collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX. Bankman-Fried was also a prominent advocate of effective altruism, a philanthropic movement based on utilitarian philosophy, and the scandal has thrown the EA community into crisis. Dorian and Ian explain how two maverick young Oxford philosophers ended up creating a multi-billion-dollar movement, explore the ideas behind it, and track its journey towards long termism: the philosophy of safeguarding the future of the human race from threats such as hostile AI. Are the principles of EA sound? Did the influx of billionaires and the obsession with existential risk knock it off course? Was Bankman-Fried a true believer who blew it or just a grifter who took the idealists for a ride? And can EA survive one of the biggest financial scandals of this century? When big ideas collide with big money and big tech, things get messy. Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  Reading list Books: Carol J.Adams, Alice Crary, Lori Gruen, (eds.) — The Good it Promises, the Harm it Does: Critical Essays on Effective Alturism, (2023) Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Ćirković (eds.) — Global Catastrophic Risks (2008) Nick Bostrom — Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014) Zeke Faux — Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall (2023) John Leslie — The End of the World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction (1996) Michael Lewis — Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (2023) William MacAskill — Doing Good Better: Effective Altruism and How You Can Make a Difference (2015) William MacAskill — What We Owe the Future (2022) Toby Ord — The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity (2020) Online: Core EA Principles, Centre for Effective Altruism Peter Singer — Famine, Affluence and Morality, 1971 Peter Singer — TED talk, 2013 William MacAskill — The history of the term ‘effective altruism’, Effective Altruism Forum, 2014 Raffi Khatchadourian — The Doomsday Invention, New Yorker, 2015 Gideon-Lewis Krauss — The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism, New Yorker, 2022 Charlotte Alter — Effective Altruist Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Years Before FTX Collapsed, Time, 2023 Sophie McBain — Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruism delusion, New Statesman, 2023 Podcasts: 80,000 Hours: Sam Bankman-Fried, 2022 80,000 Hours: Toby Ord, 2023 Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In part two of the history of eugenics, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey explain how the pseudo-science of “racial hygiene” seduced everyone from feminist birth-control pioneers and social democrats to the ardent white supremacists whose screeds shaped US immigration laws and influenced Hitler. Then they turn to the rise of eugenics in Germany and how it enabled the Nazis to introduce massive programs of sterilisation and extermination. After the Second World War, the name of eugenics was discredited but many of its leading thinkers and institutions kept going under the more acceptable guise of genetics. How was eugenics quietly rehabilitated by IQ fetishists and population-control advocates? Why has it become so popular in Silicon Valley? And does it even make scientific sense or is it really a pseudo-science designed to formalise bigotry? Despite its association with historic atrocities, the belief that biology is destiny and procreation is political has not gone away. Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits including an extended version of the podcast. www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  Reading list: Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) - The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010) Edwin Black — War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003) Elof Axel Carlson — The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001) GK Chesterton — Eugenics and Other Evils (1922) Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man (1871) Lyndsay Andrew Farrall — The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (1969) Francis Galton – Hereditary Genius (1869) Henry H Goddard – The Kallikak Family (1912) Stephen Jay Gould — The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1996) Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race (1916) Philippa Levine — Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017) Gina Maranto — Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996) Adam Rutherford — Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022) Lothrop Stoddard – The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920) HG Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)  Online: Quinn Slobodian — ‘The rise of the new tech right’, The New Statesman (2023) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey get started on the history of eugenics, the idea of finding biological solutions to social problems. Say the word now and it calls to mind skull-measuring cranks or Nazi death camps but for decades it was a mainstream project in many parts of the world, attracting not just white supremacists and elitist snobs but liberals, socialists and feminists. Winston Churchill, HG Wells, Nikola Tesla and John Maynard Keynes all expressed an interest. How did bad science and dangerous politics become so popular? Dorian and Ian explore how Francis Galton and Herbert Spencer’s fascination with inherited characteristics was supercharged by Victorian science, from Darwin’s theory of evolution to early breakthroughs in genetics. They talk about how Galton’s voluntary “positive eugenics” led to the authoritarian “negative eugenics” of compulsory sterilisation, and how hardcore American eugenicists drew up a blueprint for Hitler. Also: the birth of scientific racism, the sinister history of IQ tests, how GK Chesterton helped save Britain from eugenics laws, and, yes, the people who thought you could identify criminals by the shape of their skulls. It’s a disturbing and complicated story which mangles your political preconceptions. Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits. Reading list Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds) - The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics (2010) Edwin Black — War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003) Elof Axel Carlson — The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001) GK Chesterton — Eugenics and Other Evils (1922) Charles Darwin — The Descent of Man (1871) Lyndsay Andrew Farrall — The Origins and Growth of the English Eugenics Movement 1865-1925 (1969) Francis Galton – Hereditary Genius (1869) Henry H Goddard – The Kallikak Family (1912) Stephen Jay Gould — The Mismeasure of Man (1981/1996) Madison Grant – The Passing of the Great Race (1916) Philippa Levine — Eugenics: A Very Short Introduction (2017) Gina Maranto — Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings (1996) Adam Rutherford — Control: The Dark History and Troubling Present of Eugenics (2022) Lothrop Stoddard – The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1920) HG Wells – Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (1901)  Online: Quinn Slobodian — ‘The rise of the new tech right’, The New Statesman (2023) Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Follow Origin Story on X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Born in Haitian folklore and inadvertently reinvented by director George A. Romero, the zombie is the most flexible metaphor in horror fiction, if not all of popular culture. It can represent a war, a virus, a natural disaster, terrorism, capitalism, climate change and much more. In fact, it’s hard to tell a zombie story that isn’t political in one way or another. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey follow the trail of the walking dead from the Caribbean to Night of the Living Dead and the global outbreak of zombiemania in the 21st century. What does the zombie tell us about life, death and civilisation? How can it contain so many different meanings? And why do the living dead remain uniquely disturbing after all these years? Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits including bonus chat about how Ian and Dorian make each episode: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  Resources: Books Kyle William Bishop — American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture, 2012 Kyle William Bishop — How Zombies Conquered Popular Culture: The Multifarious Walking Dead in the 21st Century, 2015 Max Brooks — World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, 2006 Greg Garrett — Living with the Living Dead: The Wisdom of the Zombie Apocalypse, 2017 Zachary Graves — Zombies: The Complete Guide to the World of the Living Dead, 2011 Peter Haining, ed. — Zombie!: Stories of the Walking Dead, 1985 Richard Matheson – I Am Legend, 1954 Kim Paffenroth — Gospel of the Living Dead: George Romero’s Visions of Hell on Earth, 2006 George Romero & Susanna Sparrow — Dawn of the Dead, 1979 Jamie Russell — Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema, 2014 Colson Whitehead — Zone One, 2012 Tony Williams — The Cinema of George A. Romero: Knight of the Living Dead, 2015 Films, TV and games White Zombie, 1932 I Walked with a Zombie, 1943 The Last Man on Earth, 1964 Night of the Living Dead, 1968 Dawn of the Dead, 1978 Day of the Dead, 1985 Resident Evil, 1996 28 Days Later, 2002 Shaun of the Dead, 2004 28 Weeks Later, 2007 I Am Legend, 2007 Dead Set, 2008 The Walking Dead, 2010-22 The Last of Us, 2022 Online Doug Gross, Why we love those rotting, hungry, putrid zombies, CNN, 2009 https://edition.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/10/02/zombie.love/index.html Torie Bosch, First Eat All the Lawyers, Slate, 2011 https://slate.com/culture/2011/10/zombies-the-zombie-boom-is-inspired-by-the-economy.html Thomas Jones, Les zombies, c’est vous, London Review of Books, 2012 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n02/thomas-jones/les-zombies-c-est-vous Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Max Brooks Is Not Kidding About the Zombie Apocalypse, New York Times, 2013 https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/23/magazine/max-brooks-is-not-kidding-about-the-zombie-apocalypse.html Interview with Alex Garland, 2015 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/interview-director-alex-g_b_7038618 Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In Part Two of John Maynard Keynes, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt reconnect with Keynes in the 1930s, as he slowly pulls together his magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. This book changed everything for Keynes, and the rest of us, by establishing Keynesianism as a new way to understand both the economy and society. Ian and Dorian discuss the last decade of Keynes’ life, from the New Deal to the Second World War to the Bretton Woods conference which established the post-war order. When Keynes died suddenly in 1946, his ardent disciples had just begun remaking the world. Did Keynes save capitalism from itself? “We are all Keynesians now,” declared Time magazine in 1965, but 10 years later a global economic crisis was opening the door to the neoliberal counter-revolution, led by Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Were the Keynesians more Keynesian than Keynes himself? Should he be credited with the post-war boom and blamed for its dramatic implosion? Is the relationship between Keynesian and neoliberal visions more complex than it appears? And are Joe Biden and Keir Starmer taking us into a new age of Keynes? Reading list for both episodes Books Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman — Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes, 2011 Bradley W. Bateman, Toshiaki Hirai and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, eds. — The Return to Keynes, 2010 Zach Carter — The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, 2020 Peter Clarke — Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, 2010 Roy Harrod — The Life of John Maynard Keynes, 1951 John Maynard Keynes — The Essential Keynes, 2015 Robert Skidelsky — John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, 2004 Nicholas Wapshott — Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, 2011 Online: John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, 1930 https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Economic_Possibilities_for_our_Grandchildren.htm We Are All Keynesians Now, Time, 1965 https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,842353,00.html Tides of History podcast with Zach Carter https://podcasts.apple.com/bg/podcast/john-maynard-keynes-and-his-legacies-interview-with/id1257202425?i=1000476041925 Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey discuss perhaps the most extraordinary individual they have encountered so far: John Maynard Keynes. The most significant economist since Adam Smith rewrote our understanding of the relationship between the state and the market. But Keynes was also a philosopher, a statesman, an aesthete and a hell of a writer: a one-man advertisement for the virtues of refusing to stay in your lane. In part one Dorian and Ian track Keynes’ remarkable life in the fifty years leading up to his game changing “general theory” in the 1930s. They talk about his gilded youth at Eton and Cambridge, his complicated friendship with the Bloomsbury Group, his sensational journalism, his rivalries with classical economists, and his rise to wealth and influence. But for all his achievements, his policy prescriptions were usually ignored, from the Treaty of Versailles to the Great Depression. His failures made him Mister Told-you-so. Why was Keynes such a remarkable figure and why wouldn’t politicians listen to him? Was he an arch-centrist in an age of extremes? Along the way we meet Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Bertrand Russell, Oswald Mosley and zingers galore. Next week: the rise and fall (and rise again) of Keynesianism. Reading list for both episodes Books: Roger E. Backhouse and Bradley W. Bateman — Capitalist Revolutionary: John Maynard Keynes, 2011 Bradley W. Bateman, Toshiaki Hirai and Maria Cristina Marcuzzo, eds. — The Return to Keynes, 2010 Zach Carter — The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes, 2020 Peter Clarke — Keynes: The Twentieth Century’s Most Influential Economist, 2010 Roy Harrod — The Life of John Maynard Keynes, 1951 John Maynard Keynes — The Essential Keynes, 2015 Robert Skidelsky — John Maynard Keynes 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman, 2004 Nicholas Wapshott — Keynes Hayek: The Clash That Defined Modern Economics, 2011 Online: John Maynard Keynes, ‘Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren’, 1930 https://www.economicsnetwork.ac.uk/archive/keynes_persuasion/Economic_Possibilities_for_our_Grandchildren.htm We Are All Keynesians Now, Time, 1965 https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,842353,00.html Tides of History podcast with Zach Carter https://podcasts.apple.com/bg/podcast/john-maynard-keynes-and-his-legacies-interview-with/id1257202425?i=1000476041925 Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt look at the most powerful and divisive generational cohort of them all: boomers. The people born between 1946 and 1964 have been credited, and blamed, for creating the world we live in. They’re the 60s generation, the Me generation, the Reagan generation and the Third Way generation. Where they lead, the world follows. Now that most of them have passed the age of 60, they are allegedly at war with millennials over their legacy: OK, boomer. But does it really make sense to generalise about a cohort which extends from Dolly Parton to Donald Trump, and Theresa May to Prince? And what is a generation anyway? Ian (early millennial) and Dorian (late Gen X) discuss the roots of generation theory, track the boomers’ rise to power and assess the charges that boomers and millennials throw at each other across the divide. Is the generation gap bigger than ever or a phoney war cooked up by politicians and the media? Reading list Books: Helen Andrews — Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster, 2020 Jennie Bristow — Baby Boomers and Generational Conflict, 2015 Bobby Duffy — The Generation Divide: Why We Can’t Agree and Why We Should, 2021 Jill Filipovic — OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind, 2020 Bruce Cannon Gibney — A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America, 2017 Landon Y Jones — Great Expectations: America and the Baby Boom Generation, 1980 Joseph Sternberg — Theft of a Decade: Baby Boomers, Millennials, and the Distortion of Our Economy, 2019 William Strauss and Neil Howe — Generations: The History of America’s Future 1584 to 2069, 1991 Jean M Twenge — Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silent — and What They Mean for the Future, 2023 David Willetts — The Pinch: How the Baby Boomers Took Their Children's Future — And Why They Should Give It Back, 2010 Online: Karl Mannheim — ‘The Problem of Generations’, 1928 https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwjln8-IiteBAxU2XUEAHcSICu4QFnoECA4QAw&url=https%3A%2F%2Fmarcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu%2Fclasses%2F201%2Farticles%2F27MannheimGenerations.pdf&usg=AOvVaw37Wl_dRsSZ_rDdODQ0fMbd&opi=89978449 Richard Lorber and Ernest Fladell — ‘The Generation Gap’, Life, 1968 https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=BVUEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA81&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false Neil Howe and William Strauss, ‘The New Generation Gap’, The Atlantic, 1992 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1992/12/the-new-generation-gap/536934/ Louis Menand — ‘It’s Time to Stop Talking about “Generations”’, The New Yorker, 2021 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/10/18/its-time-to-stop-talking-about-generations Justin E Smith — ‘My Generation’, Harper’s, 2023 https://harpers.org/archive/2023/09/my-generation/ Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week, it’s part two of the riddle of Jordan B Peterson, the bestselling author and culture warrior. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey dig into his two megasellers, 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, and try to understand why these very strange cocktails of self-help advice, comparative mythology and biological essentialism resonated with millions of readers, especially men and boys.  Do his ideas add up to a coherent view of how to live? How does he reconcile mythology with zoology? What on earth is “postmodern neo-Marxism”? And what is it with Peterson and Pinocchio?  Dorian and Ian discuss how the man with so many rules for life wound up at the end of his tether in a Russian hospital, and how to reconcile his books with his increasingly eccentric and extreme social media presence. Is he really an intellectual at all? Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod Reading list for both episodes: Books: Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus and Marion Trejo — Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, 2020 Jordan B Peterson — Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 1999 Jordan B Peterson — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018 Jordan B Peterson — Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, 2021 Sandra Woien, ed. — Critical Responses to Jordan Peterson, 2022 Online: Jason McBride — ‘The Pronoun Warrior’, Toronto Life, 2017 https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked-vicious-battle-gender-neutral-pronouns/ David Brooks — ‘The Jordan Peterson Moment’, The New York Times, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html Dorian Lynskey — ‘How dangerous is Jordan Peterson, the rightwing professor who “hit a hornets’ nest”?’, The Guardian, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest Kelefa Sanneh — ‘Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity’, The New Yorker, 2018 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity Pankaj Mishra — ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, The New York Review of Books, 2018 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/ Nellie Bowles — ‘Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy’, The New York Times, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html Vinay Menon — ‘Jordan Peterson is trying to make sense of the world — including his own strange journey’, Toronto Star, 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20191219104703/https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2018/03/16/jordan-peterson-is-trying-to-make-sense-of-the-world-including-his-own-strange-journey.html Bernard Schiff — ‘I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous’, Toronto Star, 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20200115120600/https:/www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html Johanna Thomas-Corr — ‘Jordan Peterson, Agent of Chaos’, The New Statesman, 2021 https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/02/jordan-peterson-agent-chaos-psychology James Marriott — ‘Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson review’, The Times, 2021 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/beyond-order-by-jordan-b-peterson-review-qnhtgs2zj Helen Lewis — ‘What Happened to Jordan Peterson?’, The Atlantic, 2021 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/what-happened-to-jordan-peterson/618082/ Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Origin Story is back. The critically-acclaimed podcast uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew.  To kick off Series 4 Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey turn their sights on Jordan B Peterson, the bestselling author, diehard culture warrior and, allegedly, the most influential intellectual in the western world. In part one they discuss Peterson’s life up to the publication of 12 Rules for Life in 2018, from his childhood in rural Canada to his first book, Maps of Meaning, his role as a star professor at the University of Toronto and his first taste of public controversy.  How did an obscure academic come to the brink of global celebrity? Why did a young left-leaning activist grow into a ferocious conservative? And what ideas led him to his multi-million-dollar 12 rules? Featuring Nietzsche, Karl Jung, the absence of God and nightmares about the end of the world. Buckle up, bucko. Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  Reading list: Books: Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus and Marion Trejo — Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Peterson, 2020 Jordan B Peterson — Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, 1999 Jordan B Peterson — 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, 2018 Jordan B Peterson — Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, 2021 Sandra Woien, ed. — Critical Responses to Jordan Peterson, 2022 Online: Jason McBride — ‘The Pronoun Warrior’, Toronto Life, 2017 https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked-vicious-battle-gender-neutral-pronouns/ David Brooks — ‘The Jordan Peterson Moment’, The New York Times, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/25/opinion/jordan-peterson-moment.html Dorian Lynskey — ‘How dangerous is Jordan Peterson, the rightwing professor who “hit a hornets’ nest”?’, The Guardian, 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/feb/07/how-dangerous-is-jordan-b-peterson-the-rightwing-professor-who-hit-a-hornets-nest Kelefa Sanneh — ‘Jordan Peterson’s Gospel of Masculinity’, The New Yorker, 2018 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/05/jordan-petersons-gospel-of-masculinity Pankaj Mishra — ‘Jordan Peterson & Fascist Mysticism’, The New York Review of Books, 2018 https://www.nybooks.com/online/2018/03/19/jordan-peterson-and-fascist-mysticism/ Nellie Bowles — ‘Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy’, The New York Times, 2018 https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-life.html Vinay Menon — ‘Jordan Peterson is trying to make sense of the world — including his own strange journey’, Toronto Star, 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20191219104703/https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2018/03/16/jordan-peterson-is-trying-to-make-sense-of-the-world-including-his-own-strange-journey.html Bernard Schiff — ‘I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous’, Toronto Star, 2018 https://web.archive.org/web/20200115120600/https:/www.thestar.com/opinion/2018/05/25/i-was-jordan-petersons-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-hes-dangerous.html Johanna Thomas-Corr — ‘Jordan Peterson, Agent of Chaos’, The New Statesman, 2021 https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2023/02/jordan-peterson-agent-chaos-psychology James Marriott — ‘Beyond Order by Jordan Peterson review’, The Times, 2021 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/beyond-order-by-jordan-b-peterson-review-qnhtgs2zj Helen Lewis — ‘What Happened to Jordan Peterson?’, The Atlantic, 2021 https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/what-happened-to-jordan-peterson/618082/ Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Simon Williams. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Christopher Nolan has been generous enough to put together a full-on Origin Story film, combining key elements from the Nuclear War and McCarthyism episodes. So Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt put on their Oppenheimer cosplay outfits including suit trousers waisted up to the chest, and set off to the cinema to watch it.  Here's what they had to say… Support Origin Story on Patreon for more bonus episodes: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  Reading List:  Luis Alvarez – Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist  Martin Amis – Einstein’s Monsters  Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer  David C. Cassidy – J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century  Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn  Herman Kahn – On Thermonuclear War  William Lanouette – Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard  William L. Laurence – Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb  Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk - Indefensible Weapons  Ronald Reagan – An American Life  Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth  P.D. Smith – Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon  H.G. Wells – The World Set Free  The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, by Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Alex Rees, music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey host an evening of storytelling, debate, gallows humour and intense irritation recorded with an audience on a balmy evening in Soho, London. They look at the idea of The Elite. What the hell does it mean? Where did it come from? How has it changed over the years? And why does it always seem to refer to whoever you happen to disagree with?  For their sins Dorian and Ian read Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics by Matthew Goodwin and pick apart the case against the so-called “new elite". Reading list: Matthew Goodwin - Values, Voice and Virtue: The New British Politics Charles Wright Mills - The Power Elite Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew.  In a first for Origin Story, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt focus on a living figure: the ubiquitous and divisive richest man in the world, Elon Musk. In the past two years the public perception of Musk has changed dramatically, from Time's Man of the Year and “real-life Iron Man" to radicalised right-wing troll and destroyer of Twitter. Ian and Dorian trace his journey from sci-fi obsessed child prodigy in Apartheid-era South Africa to dotcom entrepreneur to the self-appointed techno-messiah at the helm of SpaceX and Tesla, and ask what happened to the man who said he wanted to save the world. They discuss what his career says about the arc of Silicon Valley and 21st-century capitalism, the cult of technocracy and the dangers of believing your own hype. Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  “He doesn’t seem that interested in money. The choices he’s made have not been your regular ‘rich guy’ choices.” – Dorian Lynskey “On Twitter some of the disinformation has been morally abysmal. You think, how could you be a person who would even write these words?” – Ian Dunt "He said it was the duty of the educated to reproduce so ‘we don’t devolve into a not very literate, theocratic and unenlightened future.’ It’s low-level eugenics.” — Dorian Lynskey Reading list: Eric Berger – Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX Agustin Ferrari Braun – The Elon Musk Experience: Celebrity Management in Financialised Capitalism David S. Kidder – The Startup Playbook Hamish McKenzie – Insane Mode: How Elon Musk’s Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil Ashlee Vance – Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Is Shaping Our Future Douglas Coupland, ‘The smartest person in any room anywhere:’ in defence of Elon Musk, The Observer, 2021 Tad Friend, Plugged In, The New Yorker, 2009 Jordan Liles – What We Know About Elon Musk and the Emerald Mine Rumor, Snopes, 2022 Linette Lopez, Elon Musk Doesn’t Care About You, Business Insider, 2018 David J Roth, Burning Down the House, Defector, 2023 Neil Strauss – Elon Musk: The Architect of Tomorrow, Rolling Stone, 2017 Matthew Sweet, Why Jeff Bezos and Elon’s Musk real business inspiration is science-fiction, The Times, 2021 The Elon Musk Show, BBC documentary, 2022 I Do Not like Elon Musk Very Much, Behind the Bastards podcast Elon Musk: The Techno Shaman, Decoding the Gurus podcast Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long, THORNY history of Zionism. In part two, the horror of the Holocaust persuades the international community to mandate a Jewish state in Palestine, with the surprising endorsement of Stalin, but Zionism remains divided.  In the year of Israel’s 75th anniversary, Ian and Dorian discuss how successive governments lost the left and courted the right, what happened to Theodor Herzl’s utopian vision, and what people really mean when they say they are anti-Zionist. Hear the next episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  "In 1948 Israel is one of the most popular countries in the world, perhaps the only country supported by both sides of the Cold War." – Dorian Lynskey "Ultimately if you restrict Zionism to the oldest idea of a homeland for Jews for safety and identity, that is a really provocative, radical and interesting idea.” – Ian Dunt Reading list: Steven Beller – Herzl Lenni Brenner – Zionism in the Age of Dictators Walter Laqueur – A History of Zionism Alex Ryvchin – Zionism: The Concise History Avi Shlaim – The Iron Wall Michael Stanislawski – Zionism: A Very Short Introduction Melvin J. Urofsky – American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust Jeff Walker – The Revisionists and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism Geoffrey Wheatcroft – Churchill’s Shadow Paul Bogdanor’s critique of Lenni Brenner https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/ The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, by Shlomo Avineri Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics. In another two-parter, Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt break down the long thorny history of Zionism.  In part one, covering the 1890s to the 1930s, they explain how Theodor Herzl single handedly created a movement for a Jewish nation, Chaim Weizmann won over Churchill and Balfour, and Ze’ev Jabotinsky sowed the seeds of Likud. Utopian dreams wrestle with hard-nosed pragmatism as the Zionists clash with the world’s great powers, and each other, about what a Jewish nation should be.  Hear Part Two right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  “Herzl didn’t see the Holocaust coming but he was a realist about the durability of antisemitism.” — Dorian Lynskey It’s a very communistic, very socialistic, very politically radical community that ends up in Palestine.” — Ian Dunt “At the time of Herzl’s death, only about one per cent of the world’s Jews were Zionists.” — Dorian Lynskey Reading list: Steven Beller – Herzl Lenni Brenner – Zionism in the Age of Dictators Walter Laqueur – A History of Zionism Alex Ryvchin – Zionism: The Concise History Avi Shlaim – The Iron Wall Michael Stanislawski – Zionism: A Very Short Introduction Melvin J. Urofsky – American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust Jeff Walker – The Revisionists and the Rise of Right-Wing Zionism Geoffrey Wheatcroft – Churchill’s Shadow Paul Bogdanor’s critique of Lenni Brenner: https://fathomjournal.org/an-antisemitic-hoax-lenni-brenner-on-zionist-collaboration-with-the-nazis/ The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State, by Shlomo Avineri Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew. In part two of the story of climate change denial Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey take a closer look at the techniques of the “merchants of doubt" who took the denial of man made global warming into the mainstream. Ian tells the real story behind 2009’s phoney scandal “Climategate”, while Dorian reads Michael Crichton’s crank thriller State of Fear and watches the controversial Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle to explain how denial became a kind of conspiracy theory. A tale of wild claims, false balance, scientists under siege and the giant mess that the deniers have left behind. Hear the next episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  “It’s the most malicious, cynical, unrepresentative assault on good science that you can imagine” – Ian Dunt "It’s apparently a conspiracy between corrupt scientists, hippies, neo-Marxists and Margaret Thatcher. I would love to have been at the meetings." – Dorian Lynskey “Science operates within doubt, that’s how it moves forward” – Ian Dunt Reading List:  Michael Crichton – State of Fear Ross Gelbspan – The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate Clive Hamilton – Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change Bjorn Lomborg – The Skeptical Environmentalist Chris Mooney – The Republican War on Science Thomas Gale Moore – Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway – Merchants of Doubt Nathaniel Rich – Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change Peter Stott – Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts, people and events you thought you knew.  This time: Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey try to cool their tempers as they take on climate change denial. They trace denial’s journey from fossil-fuel lobbyists and neoliberal think tanks into the heart of the mainstream media and lay out the dire consequences. In this first part Ian and Dorian discuss how global warming grew from a minor nineteenth-century hypothesis into the consensus scientific position by the eco-conscious 1970s. Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House and even Margaret Thatcher was worried about carbon emissions. Starting in 1988, though, contrarian scientists, lobbyists and right-wing politicians weaponised scepticism to ensure that nothing was done about it. Also: how discredited panics about overpopulation and a new ice age helped to fuel the politics of denial. Conspiracy theories, culture wars, pseudo-science and media credulity come together in the story of one of the greatest scandals of modern times. Hear Part Two right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  Tickets for the Origin Story live show are available now: https://www.tickettext.co.uk/ZwCihZbENZ “It is extraordinary how far back this goes…there’s cross-party recognition of man-made climate change in the 1960’s.” – Ian Dunt “It’s incredible that the Clean Air Act actually makes global warming worse.” – Dorian Lynskey “It’s the same technique as McCarthy, used again and again.” – Ian Dunt Reading List:  Michael Crichton – State of Fear Ross Gelbspan – The Heat Is On: The High Stakes Battle Over Earth’s Threatened Climate Clive Hamilton – Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change Bjorn Lomborg – The Skeptical Environmentalist Chris Mooney – The Republican War on Science Thomas Gale Moore – Climate of Fear: Why We Shouldn’t Worry About Global Warming Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway – Merchants of Doubt Nathaniel Rich – Losing Earth: The Decade We Could Have Stopped Climate Change Peter Stott – Hot Air: The Inside Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial The Great Global Warming Swindle (Channel 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYhCQv5tNsQ Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts you thought you knew. Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey pick up the story of nuclear war in the 1950s with the arrival of the H-bomb, and travel from the deadly face-off the Cuban Missile Crisis to the theory of nuclear winter and the place of nuclear weapons in a post-Cold War world. Kennedy and Khrushchev contemplate the abyss, Ronald Reagan frets about Armageddon, and Dr Strangelove brings the twisted psychology of nuclear deterrence to the screen. Plus the dark allure of the Cobalt Bomb, the Doomsday Machine that never existed. It’s a story of threats, war games and hair-raising close shaves. Did the strategists get it right in the end or were we just very lucky? Listen to next week’s episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod “In the US there was a recognition over and over by presidents stating…we know that if we fire, we get fired back on.” – Ian Dunt “(the Cuban Missile Crisis) brought the world to the abyss of destruction and the end of mankind.” – Robert Kennedy “Distrust almost destroyed the world” – Dorian Lynskey Reading List:  Luis Alvarez – Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist  Martin Amis – Einstein’s Monsters  Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer  David C. Cassidy – J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century  Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn  Herman Kahn – On Thermonuclear War  William Lanouette – Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard  William L. Laurence – Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb  Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk - Indefensible Weapons  Ronald Reagan – An American Life  Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth  P.D. Smith – Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon  H.G. Wells – The World Set Free  The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, by Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Uncovering the hidden histories of concepts you thought you knew.  This time: the ‘genocide machine’ – nuclear war. With Christopher Nolan’s biopic of the father of the atomic bomb J. Robert Oppenheimer on its way and anxieties about Putin’s nuclear arsenal in the air, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey take us through how the human race learned to live with the first weapon that could potentially spell global annihilation. From the invention of the atomic bomb in a novel by HG Wells to the triumph of the Manhattan Project and the horror of Hiroshima, a modern Pandora’s Box opens. Einstein calls his role in the story his “one great mistake”, Oppenheimer says he has blood on his hands, and an anxious world wonders if it will be blown up tomorrow. This one has the lot: fear, guilt, paranoia and a glimpse of the end of the world. Listen to Part 2 right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  “It wasn’t just a weapon. It’s an angry god. It’s Godzilla.” – Dorian Lynskey “The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish… The atomic bomb has spelled [these words] out for all to understand.” – J Robert Oppenheimer    “There should be a statue of Vasili Arkhipov in every town in the world. His refusal to fire stopped a nuclear war.” – Ian Dunt Reading List:  Luis Alvarez – Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist  Martin Amis – Einstein’s Monsters  Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin – American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer  David C. Cassidy – J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century  Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi – The Worlds of Herman Kahn  Herman Kahn – On Thermonuclear War  William Lanouette – Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard  William L. Laurence – Dawn Over Zero: The Story of the Atomic Bomb  Robert Jay Lifton and Richard Falk - Indefensible Weapons  Ronald Reagan – An American Life  Jonathan Schell – The Fate of the Earth  P.D. Smith – Doomsday Men: The Real Dr Strangelove and the Dream of the Superweapon  H.G. Wells – The World Set Free  The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy, by Lawrence Freedman and Jeffrey Michaels The Ascent of Man by Jacob Bronowski Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This time: the tumultuous history of Atheism. The concept has been around since the ancient world but for centuries it was demonised and suppressed. Who could believe such a thing? Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey track the ultimate heresy from the earliest days of western civilisation to the freethinkers of the Enlightenment and the bare-knuckle oratory of the New Atheists. What’s the difference between atheism, agnosticism, secularism and deism? What does it stand for? Can it explain the world while also satisfying the need for meaning and community? Was totalitarianism the monstrous zenith of atheism or just a substitute religion? Thomas Paine, Bertrand Russell, Percy Shelley, Albert Camus, Richard Dawkins and more feature in the story of the fight for the right not to believe in God. Listen to next week’s episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  “Every day around the world it is incalculable the amount of damage done by religions saying; you can’t go there, you can’t marry them, you can’t say that.” – Ian Dunt “Declaring oneself an atheist is still a bold claim.” – Dorian Lynskey “It’s quite a humbling experience to think it’s taken us 1,500 years to get back to the position we were in in 300AD.” – Ian Dunt Reading List:   Julian Baggini – Atheism: A Very Short Introduction  David Berman – A History of Atheism in Britain: From Hobbes to Russell  Albert Camus – The Myth of Sisyphus  John Gray – Seven Types of Atheism  Christopher Hitchens – God Is Not Great  Christopher Hitchens (ed.) – The Portable Atheist  Susan Jacoby – Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism  Percy Bysshe Shelley – The Necessity of Atheism  James Thrower – A Short History of Western Atheism  Tim Whitmarsh – Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World Richard Dawkins – The God Delusion Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Episode art by James Parrett. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt explain the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics. This time: part 2 of their Winston Churchill deconstruction. The pair chronicle the turbulent decade that defined Churchill's political legacy. From Munich and his unexpected elevation to power, from the Bengal Famine to victory over Hitler, his surprise defeat in the 1945 election and his long, gloomy decline, they look at a life which still casts a shadow over Britain. And they even read Boris Johnson’s Churchill book, so you don’t have to. Churchill craved greatness. Did he live up to his ideal? There’s only one way to find out… Listen to next week’s episode right now when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  “I think what he did was primarily journalism, rather than being a prime minister.” – Ian Dunt “People think they can look at Churchill like a lifestyle guru they can replicate without the nuance.” – Dorian Lynskey  “Churchill personifies the European confusion that has lasted in this country to the present day” – Ian Dunt Reading List: Churchill by Roy Jenkins The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson Churchill: Military Genius or Menace? By Stephen Napier Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks Churchill: Walking with Destiny by Andrew Roberts Oblivion or Glory: 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill by David Stafford Churchill’s Shadow by Geoffrey Wheatcroft Free Thinking: Churchill's Reputation – BBC Radio 3 Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. https://twitter.com/OriginStorycast  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New Series! Explaining the most misunderstood ideas and people in politics. This time: Winston Churchill is caricatured as either a bigoted villain or a stainless hero. Is he neither… or both? Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt take on a Churchillian task: to avoid reducing the legacy of Britain’s war leader into a simple binary.  In part one they look at Churchill’s complicated childhood, his military adventures, his surprisingly progressive time as Home Secretary, his role in the Gallipoli disaster and his journey from the Tories to the Liberals and back again, leaving him on the brink of the 1930s. And they weigh up the allegations against him, from racism to sending troops to fire on striking miners at Tonypandy. Between the myths and the countermyths there’s a fascinating mess of a man. Get Part Two of our Churchill exploration right now – and all of our episodes a week early – when you support Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod  “Yes, he is a racist imperialist warmonger. He’s also the most important antifascist of human history.” – Ian Dunt “He had no followers. No ‘Churchillites’. Nobody in politics would sacrifice a thing for him.” – Dorian Lynskey  “At this point he’s Woke Winston. He's a liberal, supports votes for women, nationalising the railways and restrictions on monopolies.” – Dorian Lynskey  Reading List: Churchill by Roy Jenkins Walking With Destiny by Andrew Roberts The Churchill Factor by Boris Johnson Churchill: Military Genius or Menace? By Stephen Napier Churchill and Orwell: The Fight for Freedom by Thomas E. Ricks  Oblivion or Glory: 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill by David Stafford Churchill’s Shadow by Geoffrey Wheatcroft Free Thinking: Churchill's Reputation – BBC Radio 3 Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Lead Producer is Anne-Marie Luff. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A between-seasons special: The Lineker Affair didn’t just expose the BBC’s fear of the Government. It triggered a flood of bad takes on whether it’s ever permissible to compare contemporary politics to 1930s Germany; BBC employees’ rights to speak their minds; the limits of Twitter; and even whether the Nazis were in fact left-wing. Spoiler: they weren’t. Seasoned spotters of bad faith arguments Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt examine a gala week of political nonsense, obfuscation, straw-manning and plain old bullshit. Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

New series preview: How much do we really know about the people who make the headlines? In a provocative new series the acclaimed journalist Michael Crick, formerly of BBC, C4 and Newsnight, delves into the backgrounds of the powerful and the influential. In this first episode: Few newspaper editors wield as much power as the Daily Mail’s Paul Dacre. Feared and courted by politicians, he’s imposed his singular vision of Britain on successive governments – while sometimes stretching the law in pursuit of justice. But what makes Dacre tick? What does he want? And how might this epic career end? Like this excerpt? Hear the complete episode on all platforms right now here. And subscribe for new episodes every Monday. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A taster of our new series. Search for Jam Tomorrow in your favourite podcast app or visit https://kite.link/JTS1 Episode One: Every Day Is Like D-Day. How did Britain’s dreams of a new postwar world go unfulfilled? And what does that mean for us today? In the first of a new documentary series from the makers of Oh God, What Now?, Ros Taylor looks at the legacy of the War itself. Ιdeals of the Blitz Spirit and dreams of wartime heroism still shape everything from pop culture and entertainment to the Brexit debate. But the truth of the War is more complex and less comforting. What will it take for us to see the Second World War – and ourselves – clearly? •  “If you’re going to have a foundation myth it might as well be one where you destroy Nazism.” – Al Murray •  “If the response to air raid wasn’t stoicism there was a fear that morale would break down.” – Lucy Noakes •  “The Keep Calm And Carry On poster was designed for a type of war that never arrived.” – Henry Irvine •  “Britain went into the war not alone but at the head of the world’s biggest empire… When Britain went to war, so did vast part of the world.” – Lucy Noakes   Written and presented by Ros Taylor. Produced by Jade Bailey. Voiceovers by Imogen Robertson. Original music by Dubstar. Lead producer: Jacob Jarvis. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Jam Tomorrow is a Podmasters production. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“We surely live in the stupidest possible era of debate about free speech,” says Ian Dunt. When a key arbiter of free expression is the smirking tech bro who owns Twitter, he might be right. How did the right to express yourself freely get hijacked by reactionaries? Are progressives really a threat to freedom of speech? Dorian Lynskey and Ian delve back in time from the printing press and its early “paper bullets” via the surprisingly racy life of John Stuart Mill right up to the First Amendment of the US Constitution and our current panics over woke, hate speech and cancel culture. How did shouting “free speech” become an instant way to shut down debate? Support Origin Story to get extra episodes and more at https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod “If somebody tries to make their point about freedom of speech by using a cartoon on the internet, they’ve probably simplified it a bit.” – Dorian Lynskey “There is a choice not between order and liberty, it is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.” – Justice Robert H Jackson “The whole story of free speech is the story of doubt.” – Ian Dunt Reading List From Ian Jacob Mchangama – Free Speech: A Global History From Socrates To Social Media John Rees – The Leveller Revolution John Stuart Milll – On Liberty The Complete Works Of Harriet Taylor Mill – Editor Jo Ellen Jacobs Richard Reeve – John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand From Dorian Anthony Lewis — Freedom for the Thought That We Hate: A Biography of the First Amendment Suzanne Nossel — Dare to Speak: Defending Free Speech for All Nat Hentoff – Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other Stanley Fish — There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech Samuel P Nelson — Beyond the First Amendment: The Politics of Free Speech and Pluralism Karl Popper — The Open Society and Its Enemies Flemming Rose — Tyranny of Silence PE Moskowitz — The Case Against Free Speech Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic — Must We Defend Nazis?: Why the First Amendment Should Not Protect Hate Speech and White Supremacy Henry Louis Gates Jr — Let Them Talk George Orwell — Freedom of the Park Herbert Marcuse — Repressive Tolerance Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Drugs won the War on Drugs decades ago, so why are governments still squandering billions on this unwinnable battle? Where did the idea come from? Can we even agree on what drugs are? Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt delve into the tortuous evolution of the futile battle against narcotics. From morphine users Jules Verne and Bismarck and cocaine fan Sigmund Freud to the Opium Wars, the Red Scares, the Jazz Panic, Richard Nixon’s declaration of war on narcotics in 1971 up to Nancy Reagan’s “Just say no”, the War on Drugs becomes a justification for racism, a proxy assault on the ’60s – and an immovable block on evidence-based policy. Support Origin Story to get extra episodes and more at https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod Thank you to drugs expert Steve Rolles for his assistance with this episode. “This is about as profound a policy failure as any you can find anywhere on Earth.” – Ian Dunt “If the hideous monster Frankenstein came face-to-face with the monster Marijuana he would drop dead of fright.” – Harry J Anslinger, Federal Bureau of Narcotics director “When they say ‘war on drugs’ what they mean is, war on some things we don’t like.” – Ian Dunt “By accident or design, the drugs war had evolved into a race war.” – Mike Gray, author of Drug Crazy “Drugs function like pornography or the military do with technology. They drive forward rapid change.” – Ian Dunt Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Few terms are thrown about as freely now as “Fascist” but what does the ultimate political condemnation really mean? Where did Fascism come from? Are all Fascists Nazis, and were the Nazis even Fascists themselves? From Mussolini and Nietszche to Adolf Hitler, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey delve into fascism’s primordial stew of violence, racism, antisemitism, mysticism, anti-intellectualism and bizarrely modern aesthetics. They discover a brutal, anti-rational creed that is equally obsessed with futurist technology and ancient myth – and which inevitably drives itself towards war. Get next week’s episode right now when you back us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/originstorypod “Fascists are inferior people who believe it when told they are superior.” – Kurt Vonnegut “Except in struggle there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a masterpiece.” – Filippo Tomasso Marinetti “The fist is the synthesis of our theory.” – Italian fascist, 1920 “Germans would even dream of the state interfering in their lives. The Nazis had infiltrated even their sleep.” – Ian “You can’t have a violent rebirth without the sense that you’ve been oppressed and put upon.” – Dorian Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“But it’s satire!” says every Twitter lout, demagogue or disinformationist to justify their abuse, pile-ons or straight-up lies. But what IS satire? How does it work? What distinguishes it from bullying? Does it even have to be funny? Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey go in search of the truth of satire on a journey that takes in The Thick Of It, Basil Fawlty, Jonathan Swift, Succession, Lenny Bruce, trickster gods, Boris Johnson, Peter Cook and Beyond The Fringe, Spitting Image and more… all the way back to the origin 1.4 million years ago of laughter itself. Help Ian and Dorian develop Origin Story by backing us on Patreon. You’ll get the show early and without ads, plus extra good stuff too. “Wait… this word that I’ve been using all of my life, nobody knows what it means?” – Dorian Lynskey “Satire is a sort of glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own” – Jonathan Swift “Satire tells you more about its era than any other literature.” – John R Clarke “Laughter is a response to frustration, just as tears are. And it solves nothing, as tears do.” – Kurt Vonnegut “Audiences like to think satire is doing something but mostly it’s making them satisfied – rather than angry, which is what they should be.” – Tom Lehrer Picture: The Thick Of It, BBC Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Culture war: it’s been around way longer than Fox News raging against drag queens or The Last Jedi. Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt trace the history of the hatreds that split societies from Bismarck’s original German kulturkampf up to climate denial, gun fetishism, the demonisation of liberal Hollywood, and our modern hellscape of permanent outrage. The secret weapon of culture warriors? Permanent grievance in a battle they can never win. Get next week’s episode right now, and help Ian and Dorian develop the series, when you back Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod “Culture war is not about victory. It’s about perpetual rolling grievance.” “The rhetoric of culture war is absolutist. Your opponents are the absolute worst. They are morally evil and must be stopped.” “The Republicans manage to unhook class conflict from economics and took it to culture. Which was genius.” Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new series of the podcast that explains the most misused ideas in politics. This time: In a rage against her impoverished Soviet childhood, writer Ayn Rand evangelised for radical selfishness and the glories of unfettered capitalism. Is the most influential political novelist of the 20th Century just the darling of the “neoliberal theatre of cruelty”, a benzedrine-addled monster whose books licence toxic egoism, a creator of thick-skinned heroes for a cult of thin-skinned losers… or is there more to her? Will Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey be won over to Rand’s theory of Objectivism by her surprisingly strong writing? Who enjoyed The Fountainhead? Is Rand a fascist? Think for yourself. No-one can make up your mind except YOU. Get next week’s episode right now and help moochers Ian and Dorian develop the series when you back Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod “When you look at the ruins of Rand’s life, it’s a moral parable of the danger of believing in complete systems.” – Ian Dunt “You can see why millionaires like her, but there’s also a huge appeal to losers… to people who want to be Howard Roarke and never will.” – Dorian Lynskey “Her version of capitalism is exactly what you’d expect from a young old girl trapped in Communist Russia, watching Hollywood movies.” – Ian Dunt “For Rand the idea that the world is complex is a scam that the second-handers pull on you.” – Dorian Lynskey “Atlas Shrugged reads like the novel Lex Luthor would have written.” – Ian Dunt Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Neoliberalism has become an all-purpose insult, but what does it actually mean? In the final episode of Series 1, Dorian and Ian tell the extraordinary story of how a friendless group of outsider economists started a decades-long campaign to turn their fringe ideas into mainstream orthodoxy – and succeeded.  –––––––– Neoliberalism: A Reading List From Ian: Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiment by Adam Smith. Both of these can be read in their own right, they're not as tough-going as you think History of Economic Thought by Lionel Robbins. One of the greatest economics books ever written. Or spoken rather, given that they're basically transcripts of Robbins’ lectures at the LSE. Masterful.  The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek. Quite completely insane. Rather fun. Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crisis Changed the World by Adam Tooze. Arguably the best single account of the financial crash. Can be tough going, but it’s worth it. From Dorian: Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics by Daniel Stedman Jones. It gets a little dry towards the end but it’s still a valuable attempt to ground an intellectual history of a movement in the combative personalities of the people who created it. A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey. Does what it says on the tin from a left-wing perspective. He’s not a fan. The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Her thesis might be overstated but Klein shows how the economists of the Chicago School teamed up with authoritarian leaders such as Pinochet to turn entire countries into experimental laboratories for neoliberalism. A reading list and whistle-stop history from the academic and author of The Limits of Neoliberalism, William Davies.  –––––––– “What you see here is the fetishisation of economics above all other concerns. An anatomised view of humanity as economic agents and very little else.” – Ian  “One of the big problems with the term neoliberalism is that it gets applied equally to Barack Obama and General Pinochet.” – Dorian  “Friedman didn’t even believe in certificates for doctors. He thought the market would protect everyone. So this guy chopped up your auntie? That’s OK, the market realises he should no longer practice…” – Ian  “These guys embarked on a 20 year process of legitimising these ideas. They trained people so that when things start to go wrong in the late 60s, they were ready.” – Dorian  “Sometimes Hayek sounds like he’s having a religious experience. The market is unknowable. It’s almost like it really is the hand of God.” – Ian  –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production and music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Who turned Woke from a badge of African-American pride into a hammer to beat liberals with? How does it relate to PC? And what are Erykah Badu, Piers Morgan, the weaponisation of African-American slang against black people, Julie Burchill and Google’s salad emoji doing in the eye of the Culture War storm?  Ian and Dorian investigate another world-changing concept you thought you knew.  –––––––– Woke: A Reading List From Dorian: The War of the Words by Sarah Dunant. Fascinating 90s collection of essays about political correctness from writers across the political spectrum. We are still having many of the same arguments. Debating PC by Paul Berman. As above but American. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture by Geoffrey Hughes. A serious attempt at a history of PC. The Culture of Complaint by Robert Hughes. Extremely opinionated and entertaining 1994 polemic against censors and heresy-hunters on both left and right. The Myth of Political Correctness by John Wilson. This forensic examination of the original anti-PC backlash reveals how many of the key case studies were exaggerated or invented, and the role that right wing think tanks played in drumming them up. Sounds familiar. The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. Of historical interest only. The cranky jeremiad that became a colossal bestseller and kickstarted America’s obsession with political correctness. And from Ian: Wake Up by Piers Morgan. Don’t read this. Welcome To The Woke Trials: How Identity Killed Progressive Politics by Julie Burchill. Don’t read this. The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Jonathan Heidt and Greg Lukianoff. Don’t read this, but if you’re really going to insist on reading one of these, I guess make it this one. –––––––– “Even racists seem to want to appropriate MLK. Maybe if you’re woke and dead you’re OK?” – Dorian Lynskey –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey and Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It had to happen! Superheroes have shaped our shared culture – both popular and political – but where did the idea of the “good superman” come from? How did idealism, power fantasy and radicalism merge so that an outsider generation of young (often Jewish) Americans could transform America?  Join Dorian and Ian on a senses-shattering odyssey that takes in socialist Superman, juvenile delinquents, the polyamorist roots of Wonder Woman, the Nazis (again), the great lost horror comics of the 50s, Stan Lee, how Churchill and FDR inspired Spider-Man… and which one of the X-Men was based on Menachem Begin.  –––––––– Superheroes: A Reading List From Ian: American Comics by Jeremy Dauber. Really comprehensive and full of love for the genre. But maybe a bit too comprehensive. Dauber covers absolute everything, so it can feel a bit too thinly spread. The Ten Cent Plague: The great comic book scare and how it changed America, by David Hajdu. Absolutely masterful retelling of the 50s moral outrage against comics. Impeccably researched, brilliantly written, and full of striking insights. Watchmen by Alan Moore, Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller and All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison. If you were to read these three together, even as a non-comics fan, you would get a really good crash course in the different approaches taken to the genre since the 80s. From Dorian: Supergods by Grant Morrison. One of the all-time great comic-book writers has also the written the most entertaining and provocative history of the superhero. Marvel Comics: The Untold Story by Sean Howe. Essential reading for anyone interested in the people who built the Marvel universe. Howe has all the stories. I’ve given this book as a gift more than once. All Of The Marvels by Douglas Wolk. The Marvel Universe as explained by somebody who has read all 27,000 comic books. While Howe covers the creators, Wolk digs into the evolution of the characters and ideas. True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee by Abraham Riesman. Juicy and unflinching biography of Mr Marvel. The Comic Book Heroes by Will Jacobs and Gerard Jones. Dated but interesting 1985 encyclopaedia of superheroes. The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore. New Yorker writer’s eye-opening history of the love triangle that gave us Wonder Woman. –––––––– “Even by thinking about superheroes, you’re thinking about politics. What is politics about but power and how you use it?” — Dorian –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Centrism has become an all-purpose term of abuse but what does it actually mean? And what does Centrism want? Dorian and Ian journey to the centre of the middle, dropping in on Tony Benn, William Rees-Mogg, the crises of the 70s, Trotsky, fascism, communism, Clinton, Blair, and the guillotine.… Help Ian and Dorian move NOT LEFT, NOT RIGHT, BUT FORWARD by supporting their Origin Story research on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod –––––––– Centrism: A Reading List From Ian: The Oxford History of the French Revolution by William Doyle. The single best all-in-one history of the French revolution. And one of my favourite history books of all time – a rare instance in which the author combines pace, thoroughness and impeccable research. John Stuart Mill, Victorian Firebrand by Richard Reeves. Decent, if slightly pedestrian biography of the great liberal philosopher. John Maynard Keynes trilogy by Robert Skidelsky. The best work on Keynes. The Third Way by Anthony Giddens. Nowhere near as good as it should be, nor as I expected it to be. Surprisingly vacuous. From Dorian: The Vital Centre by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Fascinating post-war argument for the importance of the radical centre Trotsky on centrism  Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics by John Avlon. Solid history of those who sought to occupy the centre of American politics. Toward a Radical Middle by Renata Adler. New Yorker writer’s 1969 manifesto for radical centrism in a fractious time. Life in the Centre by Roy Jenkins. The arch-centrist’s juicy memoir. Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann. A first-draft history of New Labour from 1997. Blair and Brown: The New Labour Revolution. Satisfying BBC documentary series on iPlayer, with contributions from all the key players. –––––––– “When centrism is so hard to define, like nailing jelly to the wall, you have to ask does it even deserve to be called an ism at all?” – Ian “Trotsky says Centrism is parasitic, opportunistic, vain, uninterested in theory, and harder on the left than the right… and those criticisms are still levelled at centrists today.” – Dorian “The thing is, Centrism is often popular with voters but unpopular with people who are very interested in politics. Because it’s not passionate.” – Ian  “I myself am an ideologue, an ideologue for liberalism, so it’s possible I feel threatened by something which essentially isn’t ideological.” – Ian  –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did conspiracy theory grow from a fringe belief to a quasi-religious movement capable of toppling democracies? Ian and Dorian chart the rise of the tinfoil mindset in a wild historical ride that takes in the Illuminati, 9/11, Karl Popper, Watergate, Hitler, QAnon, Oliver Stone’s JFK, and Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn’s secret society. And chillingly, they explain why the tinfoil fringe isn’t just on the fringe any more.  Help Ian and Dorian DO THEIR RESEARCH by supporting Origin Story on Patreon: www.Patreon.com/originstorypod –––––––– Conspiracy Theory: A Reading List From Dorian: Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch. Sharp and readable overview of the history and psychology of conspiracy theories. The United States of Paranoia by Jesse Walker. A provocative history which argues that paranoia permeates mainstream American politics, not just the fringes. Among the Truthers by Jonathan Kay. A reporter’s journey through contemporary conspiracy theories. The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter. This brilliant diagnosis of the conspiracist mentality still holds up. The Hitler Conspiracies by Richard J Evans. Evans uses case studies including the Reichstag fire and the stab-in-the-back myth to illustrate the importance of conspiracy theories to the Nazi era. Very good on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the difference between event theories and systemic theories. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon. The classic novel of American paranoia and the only Pynchon novel you can read in less than a week. The Coming Storm. Superbly reported BBC podcast series, presented by Gabriel Gatehouse, explores the 90s roots of QAnon. On JFK the movie: JFK: The Book of the Film by Oliver Stone and Zachary Sklar. The heavily annotated screenplay plus reams of press coverage of Stone’s movie, much of it hostile. Reclaiming History by Vincent Bugliosi. Elephantine takedown of every single JFK conspiracy theory. There are no survivors. Christopher Hitchens on JFK and conspiracy theories in general. And from Ian: Conspiracy Theories by Quassim Cassam. The case for a political analysis. Worthwhile, but flawed. The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories by Jan-Willem van Prooijen. Decent little overview of the psychological work into the area. Also worthwhile, also flawed. –––––––– “The very fact that it’s not proper scholarship makes conspiracy theory so much more exciting to read — and satisfying to write.” – Dorian “JFK is the most powerful argument I’ve seen yet that you should be able to sue for libel after you’re dead.” – Ian “According to Hitler, the fact that the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion had been called fake proved they were true…” – Dorian “Certain people believe that the CIA invented conspiracy theory in order to discredit people who criticised the Warren Commission. So that means that conspiracy theory is a conspiracy theory…” – Dorian –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey and Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. . Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What are the real stories behind the most misunderstood ideas in politics? Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey explore the histories of concepts you thought you knew. In this first episode: McCarthyism. Was it really a crusade against communists or just a grifter’s opportunity that got out of hand? How did a witch-hunt morph into a way to denounce any critic, no matter who? And did Joe McCarthy really write the rulebook for Trumpism? Help Dorian and Ian dig deeper into other criminally misrepresented ideas by supporting Origin Story on Patreon at patreon.com/originstorypod  Or if you're listening via Apple Podcasts, you can access a premium subscription in the app: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/origin-story/id1624704966 –––––––– McCarthyism: A Reading List From Ian: Demagogue: The Life and Long Shadow of Senator Joe McCarthy by Larry Tye. Dense, but readable and very thorough account of McCarthy's life. Tye is perhaps a little too fair to his subject, but he paints a full portrait. High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic by Glenn Frankel. Beautiful biography of the film, in which the subject matter and the background oppression go hand-in-hand. Film criticism as political science. A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy by David A Oshinsky. The classic McCarthy biography, full of anecdotes and ideas. Fun fact: this is one of the books that inspired REM’s ‘Exhuming McCarthy’. From Dorian: Reds by Ted Morgan. An exhaustive account of various Red Scares and what McCarthyism meant beyond McCarthy himself. Particularly good on the importance of the Venona intercepts. Trumbo by Bruce Cook. Terrifically vivid biography of Dalton Trumbo with much to say about the Hollywood blacklist in general. Much better than the movie. The Crucible by Arthur Miller. The essential contemporary allegory. –––––––– “In a way, McCarthyism is actually the origin story of Donald Trump.” – Ian Dunt "If you say it loudly and aggressively enough, it becomes the truth.” – Peter Fraser “The victims were the people who are always victims in moments of national paranoia: gay people, Jews, free thinkers and liberals.” – Ian Dunt “McCarthy hacked the media… It was as if a restaurant served poisoned food and it was up to the diner to refuse it.” – Dorian Lynskey –––––––– Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Audio production by Jade Bailey and Alex Rees. Music by Jade Bailey. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Origin Story - out May 23rd May Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices