70 avsnitt • Längd: 65 min • Månadsvis
What are the real stories behind the most misunderstood and abused ideas in politics? From Conspiracy Theory to Woke to Centrism and beyond, Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey dig into the astonishing secret histories of concepts you thought you knew.
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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
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•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
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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
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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
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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
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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)
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
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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
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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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
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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
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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
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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
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• 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
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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
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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
William MacAskill — The history of the term ‘effective altruism’, Effective
Raffi Khatchadourian — The Doomsday Invention, New Yorker, 2015
Gideon-Lewis Krauss — The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism, New
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,
Podcasts:
80,000 Hours: Sam Bankman-Fried, 2022
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.
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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.
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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
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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
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
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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
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
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
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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
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
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
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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
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
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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
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
Bernard Schiff — ‘I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous’, Toronto Star, 2018
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
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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
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
Bernard Schiff — ‘I was Jordan Peterson’s strongest supporter. Now I think he’s dangerous’, Toronto Star, 2018
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
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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
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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
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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
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
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
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
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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
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
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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
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
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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
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
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
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
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
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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
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
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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
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
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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
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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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“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
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
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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.
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
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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
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
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“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.
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
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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
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
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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
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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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“Even by thinking about superheroes, you’re thinking about politics. What is politics about but power and how you use it?” — Dorian
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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
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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
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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
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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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Origin Story - out May 23rd May
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En liten tjänst av I'm With Friends. Finns även på engelska.