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David Runciman

Past Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future. Brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
New episodes every Thursday and Sunday.

Past Present Future

To finish this series of bad ideas, David tries to persuade Gary Gerstle of the futility of televised leadership debates. From Nixon vs Kennedy to Harris vs Trump, do the voters really learn anything from these supposed exchanges of ideas? Are they ever much more than a competition to avoid gaffes? And what did British politics gain when it introduced prime ministerial election debates (apart from a brief attack of Cleggmania)?
A new bonus bad idea is available to accompany this series: David talks to Lucia Rubinelli about what’s wrong with the idea of sovereignty. To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
To find out about our gift offerings for Christmas and beyond visit the gift page on our website https://www.ppfideas.com/gifts
The latest edition of the PPF newsletter is out now - sign up to get it every fortnight https://www.ppfideas.com/newsletters 
Next time: The Great Political Films resumes with Z (1969)
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
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The History of Bad Ideas: Televised Leadership Debates

We resume our series on the great political films with Costa-Gavras’s Z (1969), the quintessential late 60s movie about assassination, conspiracy, street politics and police brutality. How could a film shot in Algeria and starring French actors so faithfully reconstruct a recent Greek political killing? How did it capture the spirit of the times? And what does it say about the relationship between politics as violence and politics as story-telling?
To find out about our gift offerings for Christmas and beyond visit the gift page on our website https://www.ppfideas.com/gifts
Next time: The Candidate (1972) w/Chris Smith
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Political Films: Z

Today’s episode is a conversation between David and the former politician Chris Smith (long-time MP and Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport in Tony Blair’s first government) about The Candidate (1972), the first great political film of the 1970s. How does its portrayal of the compromises of running for office hold up today? Is it a cynical film or an inspiring one? And what lessons does it have for politics in the age of Trump?
To find out about gifting a PPF+ subscription for Christmas and beyond just click on the link https://ppf.supportingcast.fm/gifts
Next time: Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound critics’ poll) 
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Political Films: The Candidate w/Chris Smith

Today’s great political film is Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), voted the greatest film of all time in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. A classic of feminist cinema it is also a film about the meaning of time and the illusions of choice. How can a movie which shows a woman peeling potatoes in real time have you on the edge of your seat? If the personal is the political, what do three days in the life of a Belgian housewife tell us about the true nature of power?
Coming this weekend on PPF+: two new bonus episodes to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time in our regular slot: Kagemusha (1980)
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Political Films: Jeanne Dielman

Today’s great political film is Akira Kurosawa’s epic of war and deception Kagemusha (1980). Set in late sixteenth-century Japan it tells the story of a thief tasked with impersonating a warlord. Can physical resemblance translate into political authority? How far does the conspiracy need to go? And who in the end is the real criminal?
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Political Films: Kagemusha

Our political films season has reached the late 1980s with Do The Right Thing (1989), Spike Lee’s searing take on racial tension on a Brooklyn block on a boiling hot summer’s day. How does a fight over pizza turn into a full-blown riot? With everyone feeling exploited, who is really to blame? And where do Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcom X – not to mention Jesse Jackson Jr. – fit in?
Out now: two new bonus episodes on PPF+ to accompany this series: Shoah part one and Shoah part two, exploring Claude Lanzmann’s path-breaking, harrowing, unforgettable 9-hour documentary about the Holocaust. Sign up to PPF+ to get all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus
Next time: Fight Club w/ Helen Lewis
Past Present Future is part of the Airwave Podcast Network
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Great Political Films: Do The Right Thing

Past Present Future is a new weekly podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter. 
Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future. 
Brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
New episodes every Thursday.
 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing Past Present Future

David talks to Ian McEwan about Italo Calvino’s The Watcher (1963), one of the greatest of all works of political fiction. Challenging, disturbing, redemptive: this is a book about who gets to count and who doesn’t, and what identity politics really means. David and Ian also discuss how political fiction works - and why the climate change novel is so hard to write. Plus they argue about whether children should be allowed to vote. 
Next week: Helen Thompson on Dallas and the end of oil.
Ian McEwan’s latest novel is Lessons, available now.
To read more about Calvino, here is a recent appreciation of his later writings in the New Yorker.
On the children’s focus groups, here is the report. 
For more links and info about future episodes, follow Past Present Future on Twitter @PPFIdeas
Past Present Future is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
Sign up to LRB Close Readings:
Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm
 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Novel that Unravels Democracy

This week David talks to Helen Thompson about Dallas and the end of oil. How did the world’s most popular soap opera come to explain the energy crisis and the future of a world hooked on fossil fuels? Is the fate of the Ewing family – fire and ruin – going to be the fate of America? And did J.R. Ewing really pave the way for President Donald Trump? Plus David and Helen discuss ‘oil fictions’, from Isaac Asimov to Italo Calvino.
Watch the moment when ‘Miss Ellie Saves the Day’.
Helen Thompson on ’the cosmic stakes of the age of oil’.
Isaac Asimov’s imaginary report on a world without oil.
Italo Calvino’s short story, ’The Petrol Pump’.
Past Present Future is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.
Sign up to LRB Close Readings:
Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm
 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How Dallas Saw the Future

This week David talks to Katja Hoyer and Lea Ypi about life under communism. East Germany was the most successful of the communist states of Eastern Europe, measured by economic prosperity and sporting success. Did the GDR ever really offer a model of how Soviet-style communism could give people what they wanted, including social mobility and consumerism? Why did it fall apart in the end? And how did the GDR experiment look from inside Albania, where Lea grew up? A conversation about freedom, dissent, paranoia and blue jeans.
Katja Hoyer’s latest book is Beyond the Wall: East Germany 1949-1990.
Lea Ypi’s prize-winning Free: Coming of Age at the End of History is available in paperback now.
To hear more about Rosa Luxemburg, this is from Season 2 of History of Ideas.
Sign up to LRB Close Readings:
Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm
 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Living Behind the Iron Curtain

This week David talks to science writer Meehan Crist about Thomas Malthus and the perennial question of overpopulation. Malthus wrote 225 years ago and was wrong about almost everything, yet his ideas still have a powerful hold on our imaginations and our fears. How many people is too many? What are the limits of population in the age of climate change? And why does Elon Musk think we should all be having more children?
Thomas Malthus, ‘An Essay on the Principle of Overpopulation’ (1798) 
Meehan Crist’s 2020 LRB lecture, ‘Is it OK to Have a Child?’
Sign up to LRB Close Readings:
Directly in Apple: https://apple.co/3pJoFPq
In other podcast apps: lrb.supportingcast.fm
 Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Are There Too Many People?

Are There Too Many People?

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