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The Audio Long Read — 300 episodes · page 1 of 3

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The rubbishscapes of Essex: why our buried trash is back to haunt us

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Democracy v the machine: the birth of the digital age and the warnings that were ignored
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The long shadow of Argentina’s dictatorship: she wasn’t who she thought she was. Neither was her father

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From the archive: Sudan’s outsider: how a paramilitary leader fell out with the army and plunged the country into war

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The great silence: why haven’t we found any aliens yet?
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Introducing Black Box: The Chatbots

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The body snatchers: how a young Nigerian man was lured to London in an organ-trafficking plot

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From the archive: ‘Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic’
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‘I can sense Sinatra enter my body and exit my lungs’: aboard the celebrity impersonators’ cruise
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Best of 2026…so far: ‘Any other child would have died’: the miraculous survival of Nada Itrab

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Best of 2026…so far: Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong

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‘The war leaked into every lesson’: learning Ukrainian in a country under siege
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Best of 2026 … so far: Where Duolingo falls down: how I learned to speak Welsh with my mother

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Best of 2026 … so far: Asian mothers, bad feelings: notes on an all-conquering stereotype

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Iraq’s impossible predicament: why the country is trapped between Iran and the US

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Best of 2026…so far: Endo dreams of sushi: a trip around Japan with one of the world’s greatest chefs

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Best of 2026…so far: 35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped?

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18

The Dacre dynasty: how Britain’s rightwing press was radicalised

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Best of 2026…so far: ‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK

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Best of 2026…so far: My maddening battle with chronic fatigue syndrome: ‘On my worst days, it feels almost demonic’

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21

‘This process has turned into a form of torture’: inside the trial of Erdoğan’s challenger
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‘It makes your heart sing’: can a pioneering project show that rewilding really works?

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From the archive: ‘A dizzying maze’: how the UK immigration system is geared to reject
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‘It is comforting to be haunted’: how attitudes to abortion have changed through the ages

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25

What training my chaotic dog taught me about power, control – and human beings

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26

Pinker’s progress: the celebrity scientist at the centre of the culture wars

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27

Saint Levant: the pop star from Gaza caught between passionate fandom and bitter disapproval

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‘There’s this deep mystery of what, actually, is this thing?’: the philosopher inside Google DeepMind AI
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From the archive: Battle of the botanic garden: the horticulture war roiling the Isle of Wight

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‘Navigating the unknown together’: me and my idiot AI boyfriend
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‘He liked that people were scared of him’: my year unpicking fantasy and reality with a veteran of Italy’s football ultras

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From the archive: Leave no trace: how a teenage hacker lost himself online

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How did Mexico’s president become the world’s most popular leftwing leader?
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I launched Cuba’s first independent magazine. And that’s when my troubles began

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From the archive: Flour power: meet the bread heads baking a better loaf
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‘They take you out of life, out of time’: a journey into Spain’s astonishing cave paintings

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Ping-pong sponges, ‘black smokers’ and floating somethings: the secrets of the deep sea
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From the archive: No coach, no agent, no ego: the incredible story of the ‘Lionel Messi of cliff diving’

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‘Seriously the best boss ever’: inside the world of Jeffrey Epstein’s assistant

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‘The devil’s child’: the rise and fall of the only female yakuza

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From the archive: Terrorists, cultists – or champions of Iranian democracy? The wild wild story of the MEK

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As a Ukrainian journalist, I’ve covered the US for 20 years. I find it increasingly shocking
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‘Should we leave them to die?’ The battle over how to save orangutans from the curse of palm oil
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From the archive: Sold to the Trump family: one of the last undeveloped islands in the Mediterranean

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Prisoner number 804: the plot to erase Imran Khan

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‘I couldn’t breathe’: the sinister spread of France’s killer seaweed
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From the archive: Three abandoned children, two missing parents and a 40-year mystery

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After a hard-fought victory to legalise medical cannabis in the UK, why is it still so hard to access?

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49

Asian mothers, bad feelings: notes on an all-conquering stereotype

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From the archive:‘I feel like I’m selling my soul’: inside the crisis at Juventus

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‘I had poked the bear right in the eye’: my fight to renounce my Russian citizenship

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On the trail with the hunters who believe shooting big game can save Africa’s wildlife
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From the archive: Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times

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54

How to survive the information crisis: ‘We once talked about fake news – now reality itself feels fake’

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Stateside with Kai and Carter: Stacey Abrams on why gutting of the US Voting Rights Act is ‘evil’
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‘Lawrence is karma’: the gangster who became an icon of Modi’s India

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From the archive: How western travel influencers got tangled up in Pakistan’s politics

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The impossible promise: are we witnessing the return of fascism?

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59

‘I see it as trafficking’: the brutal reality of life as a foreign student in the UK

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60

From the archive: No cults, no politics, no ghouls: how China censors the video game world

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Where Duolingo falls down: how I learned to speak Welsh with my mother
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‘Any other child would have died’: the miraculous survival of Nada Itrab

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From the archive: the impossible job: inside the world of Premier League referees

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Inside China’s robotics revolution
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Endo dreams of sushi: a trip around Japan with one of the world’s greatest chefs

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66

From the archive: The high cost of living in a disabling world

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Teacher v chatbot: my journey into the classroom in the age of AI
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35,000 pints of stolen Guinness, 950 wheels of pilfered cheese: can the UK’s cargo theft crisis be stopped?

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From the archive: Foreign mothers, foreign tongues: ‘In another universe, she could have been my friend’

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70

How the US far right bought into the myth of white South Africa’s persecution

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AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

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From the archive: Freedom without constraints: how the US squandered its cold war victory

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My maddening battle with chronic fatigue syndrome: ‘On my worst days, it feels almost demonic’
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Apocalypse no: how almost everything we thought we knew about the Maya is wrong
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From the archive: the butcher’s shop that lasted 300 years (give or take)

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‘I felt betrayed, naked’: did a prize-winning novelist steal a woman’s life story?

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What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government

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From the archive: Are we really prisoners of geography?

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Power without a throne: how Khalifa Haftar controls Libya

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80

Off Duty: The Crime

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‘The children are not safe here’: the Nigerian couple fighting infanticide
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From the archive: ‘Parents are frightened for themselves and for their children’: an inspirational school in impossible times

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Access denied: why Muslims worldwide are being ‘debanked’

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Shock, awe, death, joy and looting: how the Guardian covered the outbreak of the Iraq war

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From the archive: ‘Iran was our Hogwarts’: my childhood between Tehran and Essex
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‘Pretty birds and silly moos’: the women behind the Sex Discrimination Act
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‘What I see in clinic is never a set of labels’: are we in danger of overdiagnosing mental illness? -podcast
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From the archive: China’s troll king: how a tabloid editor became the voice of Chinese nationalism

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I used to report from the West Bank. Twenty years after my last visit, I was shocked by how much worse it is today
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Out of the ruins: will Aleppo ever be rebuilt?
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From the archive: Why can’t we agree on what’s true any more?
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A century in the Siberian wilderness: the Old Believers who time forgot
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Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?
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From the archive: ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today

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What technology takes from us – and how to take it back
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The crisis whisperer: how Adam Tooze makes sense of our bewildering age

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97

From the archive: Do we need a new theory of evolution?

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Walking into disaster: the narcotrafficking scandal that blew up the BVI

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Trump’s assault on the Smithsonian: ‘The goal is to reframe the entire culture of the US’

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From the archive: the free speech panic: how the right concocted a crisis

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