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The Audio Long Read — 300 episodes · page 2 of 3

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101

‘We hate it. It’s desecration’: the real cost of HS2

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102

Death on the inside: as a prison officer, I saw how the system perpetuates violence

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103

From the archive: The King of Kowloon: my search for the cult graffiti prophet of Hong Kong

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104

We published explosive stories about the president of El Salvador. Now we can’t go home

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105

‘We were forced to burn bodies’: will survivors of the Tadamon massacres see justice?

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106

From the archive: The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide to our age of crisis

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107

‘The English person with a Chinese stomach’: how Fuchsia Dunlop became a Sichuan food hero
108

The dangerous rise of Buddhist extremism: ‘Attaining nirvana can wait’

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109

From the archive: Kudos, leaderboards, QOMs: how fitness app Strava became a religion

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110

Hard to digest: we still live in Fast Food Nation

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111

‘I wish I could say I kept my cool’: my maddening experience with the NHS wheelchair service

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112

From the archive: The cartel, the journalist and the gangland killings that rocked the Netherlands

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113

Inside the rise and fall of Podemos: ‘We believed we had a stake in the future’

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114

Best of 2025: ‘A relentless, destructive energy’: inside the trial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon

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115

Best of 2025: ‘What reconciliation? What forgiveness?’: Syria’s deadly reckoning

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116

Best of 2025: The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job

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117

Best of 2025: Life in a ‘sinking nation’: Tuvalu’s dreams of dry land

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118

Best of 2025: The real Scandi noir: how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shattered Denmark’s self-image

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119

Best of 2025: Don’t call it morning sickness: ‘At times in my pregnancy I wondered if this was death coming for me’

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120

The snail farm don: is this the most brazen tax avoidance scheme of all time?

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121

The Birth Keepers: I choose this – episode one

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122

‘DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines’: my mother’s worrying reliance on AI for health advice

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123

From the archive: is the IMF fit for purpose?

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124

‘The police weren’t interested’: what’s driving the rise in private prosecutions?

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125

When I met Craig he was 13 and homeless. I still thought his life might turn around. I was tragically wrong

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126

Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia

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127

From the archive: A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world

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128

‘They take the money and go’: why not everyone is mourning the end of USAID

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129

‘I knew in my head we were dying’: the last voyage of the Scandies Rose

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130

From the archive: ‘If you decide to cut staff, people die’: how Nottingham prison descended into chaos

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131

‘Scamming became the new farming’: inside India’s cybercrime villages

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132

From the archive: how we lost our sensory connection with food – and how to restore it
133

The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist

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134

‘The jobless should lead the attack’: a radical Jamaican journalist in 1920s London

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135

From the archive: ‘We are so divided now’: how China controls thought and speech beyond its borders

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136

Special Edition: Behind the scenes at the Long Read
137

Counting down to zero: the final warning from a climate diplomat

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138

Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the internet

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139

From the archive: A drowning world: Kenya’s quiet slide underwater
140

‘Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth’: a Chinese journalist on the US under Trump

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141

The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25 years on the job

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142

From the archive: The queen of crime-solving

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143

A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0

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144

‘Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like’: The rise and fall of the Baader-Meinhof gang

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145

From the archive: Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face

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146

The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel

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147

‘I have to do it’: why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the US for China

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148

From the archive: ‘Infertility stung me’: Black motherhood and me

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149

‘What reconciliation? What forgiveness?’: Syria’s deadly reckoning

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150

Take away our language and we will forget who we are: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the language of conquest

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151

From the archive: The Blackstone rebellion: how one country took on the world’s biggest commercial landlord

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152

‘We’ve done it before’: how not to lose hope in the fight against ecological disaster

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153

From bank robber to scholar: the Knoxville dropout fighting to change how we see addiction

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154

From the archive: Divine comedy: the standup double act who turned to the priesthood

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155

‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major mass extinction?
156

Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything: what has the Netflix algorithm done to our films?

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157

From the archive: Forgetting the apocalypse: why our nuclear fears faded – and why that’s dangerous

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158

‘The forest had gone’: the storm that moved a mountain

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159

Life in a ‘sinking nation’: Tuvalu’s dreams of dry land

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160

From the archive: Sewage sleuths: the men who revealed the slow, dirty death of Welsh and English rivers

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161

Very British bribery: the whistleblower who exposed the UK’s dodgy arms deals with Saudi Arabia

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162

‘People pay to be told lies’: the rise and fall of the world’s first ayahuasca multinational

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163

From the archive: ‘We were all wrong’: how Germany got hooked on Russian energy

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164

Dancing with Putin: how Austria’s former foreign minister found a new home in Russia

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165

Don’t call it morning sickness: ‘At times in my pregnancy I wondered if this was death coming for me’

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166

From the archive: ‘We need to break the junk food cycle’: how to fix Britain’s failing food system

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167

The rise and fall of the British cult that hid in plain sight

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168

Best of 2025 … so far: ‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star

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169

Best of 2025 … so far: ‘Look, they’re getting skin!’: are we right to strive to save the world’s tiniest babies?

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170

The go-between: how Qatar became the global capital of diplomacy

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171

Best of 2025 … so far: an English gentleman, a crooked lawyer: the secrets of Stephen David Jones

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172

Best of 2025 … so far: Kahane’s ghost: how a long-dead extremist rabbi continues to haunt Israel’s politics

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173

Starmer v Starmer: why is the former human rights lawyer so cautious about defending human rights?

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174

Best of 2025 … so far: The savage suburbia of Helen Garner: ‘I wanted to dong Martin Amis with a bat’

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175

Best of 2025 … so far: ‘I am not who you think I am’: how a deep-cover KGB spy recruited his own son

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176

How Pakistan fell in love with sushi

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177

Best of 2025 … so far: ‘The ghosts are everywhere’: can the British Museum survive its omni-crisis?

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178

Best of 2025 … so far: the great abandonment: what happens to the natural world when people disappear?

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179

The Shining: my trip to the G7 horror show with Emmanuel Macron

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180

Are we witnessing the death of international law?

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181

From the archive: Bicycle graveyards: why do so many bikes end up underwater?

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182

Poison in the water: the town with the world’s worst case of forever chemicals contamination
183

‘A relentless, destructive energy’: inside the trial of Constance Marten and Mark Gordon

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184

From the archive: how two BBC journalists risked their jobs to reveal the truth about Jimmy Savile

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185

The curse of Toumaï: an ancient skull, a disputed femur and a bitter feud over humanity’s origins

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186

Horse racing and erotica: how I survived the fickle world of freelance writing

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187

From the archive: The sludge king: how one man turned an industrial wasteland into his own El Dorado

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188

Sold to the Trump family: one of the last undeveloped islands in the Mediterranean

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189

How does woke start winning again?

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190

From the archive: The death of the department store
191

‘Do you have a family?’: midlife with no kids, ageing parents – and no crisis
192

Why does Switzerland have more nuclear bunkers than any other country?

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193

From the archive: ‘You can’t be the player’s friend’: inside the secret world of tennis umpires

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194

My husband and son suffered strokes, 30 years apart. Shockingly little had changed
195

‘The Mozart of the attention economy’: why MrBeast is the world’s biggest YouTube star

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196

From the archive: ‘A nursery of the Commons’: how the Oxford Union created today’s ruling political class

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197

‘Outdated and unjust’: can we reform global capitalism?

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198

Extremely loud and incredibly scouse: how Jamie Carragher conquered football punditry

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199

From the archive: Burying Leni Riefenstahl: one woman’s lifelong crusade against Hitler’s favourite film-maker

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200

‘You can let go now’: inside the hospital where staff treat fear of death as well as physical pain

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