The Conversation Weekly

🔁 Rerun: originally published 12/12/25. We're revisiting this episode as we take a quick break but we'll be back next week with a new instalment of The Conversation Weekly.

Oecusse, a rugged, remote district of Timor-Leste in south-east Asia, is usually a pretty sleepy place. But in August, Oecusse was rocked by a large police raid on a suspected scam centre, later linked by a UN report to organised crime networks running scamming operations across south-east Asia.

And then in early September, a Facebook post by one of Timor-Leste’s highest political officials made some explosive allegations about...

It's pretty grim when your main political opponent is a man with a bin for a head.

That's the situation that's faced Nigel Farage in the Clacton byelection in the UK.

Count Binface has pledged to nationalise the singer Adele, cap the price of ice creams and build at least one affordable house.

It might sound surreal, but the count isn’t the first satirical candidate in election history.

Historian Richard Toye argues we should take them seriously. You can read his analysis on our website.

This episode was wr...

Balázs Bödö's first interaction with a shadow library was when, as a young professor at university in Budapest, he was faced with a dilemma: what should he teach his students?

"Do I condemn my students to a second rate education and a second rate degree in the European Union? Or do I pirate the books and give them the education that they deserve?"

This episode was written and produced by Gemma Ware and Mend Mariwany. Sound mixing is by Michelle Macklem and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Ashlynne McGhee is our...

Timothy Piatkowki was scrolling when a targeted ad landed in his feed. Cheap peptides! Straight from the factory! Naturally, he started a chat with the dealer and found himself deep in the world of a thriving grey market.

The more he found out, the less he realised we know about what’s really in these tiny drug vials being shipped around the world.

You can see screen grabs of Tim’s exchanges with the peptide seller in a fascinating visual story he’s written for us about the experience. Read it here.

This episod...

With growing evidence about concussion, repetitive head impacts and long-term brain disease, have we underestimated the risks of sport all along? How did we get here, what do we really know about head injuries and given the risks, is it time to rethink children’s participation in sport?

In this episode, we chat to Alan Pearce, a neuroscientist and Adjunct Professor at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne who has been researching sports-related concussions for more than two decades.

This episode was written and produced by Isabella Podwinski. Mixing by Michelle Macklem and theme music by...

Three months ago, Andy Burnham’s desk was filled with the business of running Greater Manchester. Buses. Housing. Policing. This mayoral region in the north of England is home to 3 million people and Burnham, a former minister in the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, has been its mayor for nearly a decade.

But after a whirlwind ten weeks, Burnham travelled to Buckingham Palace on July 20 to meet King Charles, who appointed him as Britain’s new prime minister.

At the heart of Burnham’s plans for power lies Manchesterism, a political philosophy that c...

When Taylor Swift launched her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, in October 2025, she recorded two short clips to promote it. One for Amazon Music began with “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift”. Another, for Spotify with “Hey, it’s Taylor”.

These two phrases may sound a little mundane, but they’re now at the frontline of a legal fightback by celebrities like Swift against AI deepfakes. In April, Swift’s intellectual property company, TAS Right Management, applied to the US Patent and Trademark office to trademark them as registered sound marks, along with a photo of her, from her re...

El Niño has begun and forecasters predict a more than 60% chance that the naturally occurring phenomenon could become a very strong, or super El Niño later in 2026.

El Niño begins with warmer water in the Pacific Ocean near the equator and can have a cascade of dramatic effects on the world’s weather.

But what chain of events has to happen for high temperatures in the Pacific to translate into severe floods, droughts and storms around the world? And what role does climate change play in El Niño?

In this e...

A new youth protest movement in India that started as online satire is now staging an ongoing sit-in in New Delhi calling for the resignation of India’s education minister.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was launched in late May by Abhijeet Dipke, a graduate of Boston University, in response to alleged comments by India's chief justice, Surya Kant, comparing unemployed young Indians to cockroaches. Dipke launched a parody political party, calling on all cockroaches to unite, which led to street protests in cities including Delhi, Pune, Jaipur and Bengaluru.

The CJP latched onto mounting an...

When Australia banned under 16-year-olds from using social media in December 2025, it became a test case for a policy now being pursued by governments around the world. This week, the UK announced a similar social media ban from 2027.

So how’s it going in Australia? Have the teenagers emerged from a phone-lit glow to reengage in the real world? And what kind of difference is it having on their mental health?

In this episode, we speak to Susan Sawyer, a professor of adolescent mental health at the University of Melbourne, who is running a number of...

When Roberto Baggio missed a penalty in the 1994 Fifa World Cup final at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California, more than 94,000 people were there to watch Italian heartbreak and Brazilian ecstasy.

To this day, no other World Cup has been as well attended as the 1994 tournament. Tickets were cheap and abundant, and despite the relatively low profile of the game in the US compared to sports like baseball or basketball, people went along to see what it was all about.

Now, three decades later, as the 2026 World Cup returns to North America with games across...

As health workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) continue to battle an ongoing Ebola outbreak, scientists around the world are racing to develop a vaccine against the strain of the virus that’s causing it.

Two approved vaccines exist for Ebola, but they target the Zaire strain of the virus, not the Bundibugyo strain causing the 2026 outbreak, which has so far killed 61 people with 359 confirmed cases in the DRC and neighbouring Uganda.

In this episode, we speak to two scientists at the Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford, Teresa Lambe and Re...

Buried underground in caverns dug out of salt on the Gulf coast of the US are millions of barrels worth of crude oil. This is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, built up in the late 1970s.

Globally, at the end of 2025, global strategic oil stockpiles were estimated at 2.5 billion barrels, with China holding the most.

With the Strait of Hormuz now closed for more than two months, global oil supplies are being squeezed. In March, as part of a co-ordinated move by members of the International Energy Agency to release 400 million barrels of oil to prevent...

The month Javier Milei took over as president of Argentina in December 2023, monthly inflation was 25.5%. The annual rate for that year was 211%. Now, it’s plummeted to 32% – still very high, but more stable.

Milei, a right-wing populist famous for wielding a chainsaw on stage to make a point about fiscal conservatism, made cutting inflation a central part of his campaign.

And yet economists like Can Cinar from City St George's, University of London, warn that Milei’s battle against inflation is more of a mirage, than a miracle. In this episode, Cinar explains how Milei’s govern...

As the revelations from the Epstein files continue to reverberate around the globe, those conspiracy theorists who were among the first to call for the release of information about Jeffrey Epstein's legal cases are feeling vindicated.

Before his death, Epstein already featured in many fringe online forums, including those centred on the Qanon conspiracy narrative that the world is run by an elite cabal of child sex traffickers. Now, many in these communities are saying "We told you so."

In this episode, Art Jipson, a sociologist at the University of Dayton in Ohio, who researches...

As Xi Jinping prepares to host Donald Trump for a delayed summit in Beijing on May 14-15, a lot has changed since the US president's last visit to China in November 2017. Trump's first trade war with China began in earnest the following year, ushering in a new era of trade tensions between the world's two largest economies.

While Trump's second trade war raged in 2025, China reported a record trade surplus of US$1.2 trillion. Yes, direct trade with the US fell sharply, but China shifted its focus elsewhere, doubling down on an existing "great reallocation".

In...

After Donald Trump took to social media to lambast Pope Leo's criticism of the Iran war, the pontiff told journalists "I'm not afraid of the Trump administration". Part of the war of words between Trump and Leo is a question over whether the Iran war is a just one.

Just war theory, first articulated by St Augustine in the fifth century, outlines the church’s moral guidelines for political and military leaders to consider before choosing to go to war. But it’s not static, and the church’s own position has become more restrictive in recent years...

In around ten minutes on April 8, the Israeli military hit more than 100 targets across Lebanon. Israel called the attack Operation Eternal Darkness and said it struck Hezbollah command and control centres. The Lebanese government said at least 300 people were killed and 1,000 injured.

Israel has a powerful and lethal army, and it’s been defending itself against attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran. But why has it chosen such brutal military aggression?

One historian, Yaron Peleg, believes the answer to this question lies in the early days of Zionism in the 19th century, when many Jews wh...

For 16 years, Viktor Orbán built an illiberal democracy in Hungary. Orbán and his Fidesz party managed to take control of many of Hungary's levers of power, from the judiciary to state-owned media, and weakened the institutions that could keep them accountable. Now, his regime has been ended by a former Fidesz insider, Péter Magyar, who managed to unite Hungarians to secure a two-third majority in the country's parliament.

So how did Peter Magyar manage to beat his former boss? And what does Magyar's victory mean for the European Union, where Orbán was a bell...

If you have teenagers in your life, they’ll probably have heard of the PSL scale. Or at least the language associated with it. Chad. Stacy. Normie. Subhuman.

The PSL scale is a pseudoscientific attractiveness rating system used by looksmaxxers, men in a part of the manosphere who can go to extreme methods to change their appearance.

The roots of this rating system lie in misogynistic online forums used by incels or involuntarily celibates, but now it’s all over social media. So how did the language of incels, and this one way of quantifying attr...

From a fish and chip shop in regional Queensland to the heart of Australian politics: this is the unlikely story of One Nation, Australia's most controversial minor party.

For thirty years, One Nation and Pauline Hanson have been ridiculed, dismissed and shut out. Now, no one is laughing. This week we're running the first episode of The Making of One Nation, a new series from The Conversation hosted by Ashlynne McGhee. She explores how a party built on fear and grievance thrived, died and rose again to upend Australian politics.

Hanson's infamous 1996 maiden speech to...

Final preparations are underway for NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed mission around the Moon for more than 50 years. Four astronauts, three men and one woman, will spend 10 days aboard the Orion spacecraft, going further into space than any other humans as they orbit the Moon and return to Earth.

The mission is the next step of the Artemis programme, which plans to land astronauts back to the Moon by 2028. China has its own programme targeting a full crewed mission to the lunar surface by 2030.

In this episode, we speak to Scott Pace, di...

The day after the US began bombing Iran, US Central Command confirmed it had used a new, cheap type of kamikaze drone called a Lucas for the first time in a combat operation. These drones were made in America, but their roots actually lie in Iran – they are reverse engineered copies of an Iranian drone called a Shahed that the Russians have also been using to bomb Ukraine.

In this episode, PhD researcher and military expert Arun Dawson at King's College London explains how the Iranians developed the Shaheds, why the US decided to copy them, and wh...

Six years ago, as countries around the world went into COVID lockdowns, the air got cleaner. Factories slowed down, roads emptied and aeroplanes were grounded. As people stayed home, the world burned fewer fossil fuels and so carbon dioxide emissions dropped.

But something else was also happening in the atmosphere. Levels of methane, an extremely potent greenhouse gas that warms the planet even faster than CO2, rose faster in 2020 than at any point since records began in the 1980s. And methane levels kept on rising during 2021 and 2022.

Ever since, scientists have been trying to piece...

As Israel and the US continued to bomb Iran after killing the country's supreme leader Ali Khamenei, Iran lashed out at its neighbours with multiple drone strikes, including against the US embassy in Riyadh.

Saudi Arabia and Iran have a long and bitter rivalry. Yet, in recent years, the Saudis had begun building new diplomatic relationship with Iran, even as they and other Gulf states continued to host American military bases, and court American investment.

Now the Gulf states find themselves in the middle of the very regional conflict many of its leaders hoped to...

South Korea’s very low birth rate and ageing population have long served as a cautionary tale for other governments worried that they’ll see similar demographic challenges.

But now, for the second year running, more people in South Korea are having children. The 6.8% rise in births in 2025 is the largest rise since 2007, and has taken the country’s total fertility rate to 0.80, up from 0.75 in 2024. The news is being cautiously celebrated, but with South Korea’s overall population still shrinking, it is yet to reverse its demographic fortunes.

In this episode, we speak to Stuart G...

As the 21st century dawned, a newly-elected Vladmir Putin was making friends on the world stage. He smiled for photo ops at G8 meetings, and was the first foreign leader to call George W. Bush after the attacks of 9/11, offering his support against terrorism.

So what changed? To understand Russia's view of the world now – and its continued aggression towards Ukraine – it helps to know more about the psyche of the country and its leader.

In today's episode, we talk to James Rodgers, a reader in international journalism at City St George's, University of London, abou...

Whenever federal immigration agents pull up to a location in Minneapolis, people take their whistles out, start blowing them and start filming.

In December, US government sent more than 2,000 Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents into Minnesota in December as part of Operation Metro Surge. The residents of the metropolitan area known as the Twin Cities – Minneapolis and St. Paul – quickly came together to protect and support their neighbours at risk of being caught up in ICE raids.

In this episode, we speak to Daniel Cueto-Villalobos, a doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota, who...

Super Bowl Sunday is the biggest night in American sports. A popular destination to watch – and bet – on the Super Bowl is Las Vegas, Nevada.

And it was in Las Vegas, ahead of the 1986 Super Bowl between the Chicago Bears and the New England Patriots, that one enterprising casino would kickstart a new direction in American sports gambling: prop betting. It offered odds not just on the result of the game, but on the outcome of an individual event within it – whether one defensive player called William Perry, nicknamed The Refrigerator, would score a touchdown.

Today...

On January 8, as thousands of Iranians took to the streets in nationwide protests, the government cut off the internet. Under cover of digital darkness, the Iranian regime launched a brutal and deadly crackdown against anti-government protesters.

After three weeks of internet blackout, reports from web traffic monitor Netblocks suggest that the internet is slowly coming back online but predominantly for government-approved users.

Yet for most of the shutdown, banks and some local government websites and apps still worked. And that’s because Iran is developing its own, national internet, cut off from the rest of th...

In the summer of 1959, a group of American soldiers began carving trenches in the Greenland ice sheet. Those trenches would become the snow covered tunnels of Camp Century, a secret Arctic research base powered by a nuclear reactor.

Camp Century operated for six years, during which time the scientists based there managed to drilling a mile down to collect a unique set of ice cores. But by 1966, it had been abandoned, deemed too expensive and difficult to maintain.

Today, Donald Trump’s territorial ambitions for Greenland continue to cause concern and confusion in Europe, particularly fo...

In a moment being celebrated by global marine conservationists, a new UN high seas treaty comes into force on January 17 providing a new way to govern the world's oceans.

The UN high seas treaty will allow for the creation of protected areas in international waters, like national parks. But the treaty has some grey areas – notably its powers to regulating fishing in international waters, and mining of the seabed.

In this episode we speak to Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of Exeter in the UK, about how the treaty came to be...

In November, six Democratic lawmakers recorded a video directed at members of the US military and intelligence agencies. In it, they issued a blunt reminder:

"The laws are clear: you can refuse illegal orders. […] You must refuse illegal orders."

The lawmakers were issuing the warning against the backdrop of US airstrikes on boats off the coast of Latin America the Trump administration claims are suspected drug runners. Many Democrats and legal experts, however, argue these strikes are illegal.

Since returning to office, Trump has successfully expanded his power over his own party, the co...

The list of people Donald Trump has punished or threatened to punish since returning to office is long. It includes the likes of James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, as well as members of the opposition, such as Adam Schiff, Mark Kelly and Kamala Harris.

In fact, he has gone so far as to call Democrats “the enemy from within”, saying they are more dangerous than US adversaries like Russia and China.

According to Lucan Way, a professor of democracy at the University of Toronto, when a leader attacks the opposition like this, it’s a clea...

In democratic systems, the courts are a vital check on a leader’s power. They have the ability to overturn laws and, in Donald Trump’s case, the executive orders he has relied on to achieve his goals.

Since taking office, Trump has targeted the judiciary with a vengeance. He has attacked what he has called “radical left judges” and is accused of ignoring or evading court orders.

The Supreme Court has already handed the Trump administration some key wins in his second term. But several cases now before the court will be pivotal in determin...

Donald Trump has sounded the alarm, over and over again, that the United States is facing an “invasion” by dangerous gang members. He blames immigrants for the country’s economic problems and claims protesters are destroying US cities.

Trump is not the first would-be autocrat to manufacture a crisis to seize extraordinary powers.

As Natasha Lindstaedt, an expert in authoritarian regimes at the University of Essex, says in episode 3 of The Making of an Autocrat, a strongman “loves a crisis”.

"A crisis is the way that they mobilise their base, the way that they can d...

Every autocrat needs a clan of loyalists, strategists, masterminds – these are the figures behind the scenes pulling the strings.

They’re unelected and unaccountable, yet they wield a huge amount of power.

This is the role Stephen Miller has played for Donald Trump – he is the architect in chief for the second Trump administration. He has so much power, in fact, he’s reportedly referred to as the "prime minister."

So who is Stephen Miller? And why are architects so important in helping a would-be autocrat amass power?

As Emma Shortis, a Trump...

We used to have a pretty clear idea of what an autocrat was. History is full of examples: Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, along with Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping today. The list goes on.

So, where does Donald Trump fit in?

In this six-part podcast series, The Making of an Autocrat, we are asking six experts on authoritarianism and US politics to explain how exactly an autocrat is made – and whether Trump is on his way to becoming one.

This episode was written by Justin Bergman and produced and edited by Is...

Is America watching its democracy unravel in real time? In The Making of an Autocrat from The Conversation, six of the world’s pre-eminant scholars reveal the recipe for authoritarian rule. From capturing a party, to controlling the military, Donald Trump is borrowing from the playbook of strongmen thoughout history. This is the story of how democracies falter — and what might happen next.

In the latest escalation of tensions between the US and Venezuela, the US President Donald Trump ordered a "complete blockade" of sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela. His Venezuelan counterpart, Nicolás Maduro, called the move "warmongering threats", and accused the US of trying to steal its resources.

In this episode we speak to Pablo Uchoa, a PhD candidate researching Venezuela's military, on how Venezuela has long been preparing for this moment, ever since a failed coup attempt on Maduro's predecessor, Hugo Chávez.

This episode was written and produced by Mend Ma...