It often feels like the news cycle never stops at the moment, with the eyes of the world darting from one hotspot to another and seismic elections seeming to take place almost weekly. Podcasts can act as a way to spend time in the company of knowledgeable people who are excellent communicators, which makes them a great medium to try and make sense of our current moment. Here's some of the best.
The World with Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim
To give you a flavour of this show, its first episode was interrupted by a number of loud explosions going off nearby one of its hosts, Yalda Hakim, as she was recording in Beirut.
As the global affairs leads for their respective news organisations, NBC and Sky News. Richard Engel and Yalda Hakim are busy people who are always on the move. In the show’s short existence its hosts have found themselves almost everywhere between Washington and Jerusalem covering geopolitics from Kyiv to Pyongyang via Tehran. They’ve discussed the implications following assassinations of people they’ve interviewed as recently as this year.
If you’re after a podcast that gets up close and personal with its subject matter, you can’t do much better than this.
The BBC’s Global News Podcast does exactly what it says on the tin. A slightly broader remit than The World means that while it covers the big ticket items of war and democracy, recent episodes also focus on Valencia’s flash flooding and Commonwealth leaders pressuring Keir Starmer on the issue of slavery reparations.
It’s unrivalled in terms of frequency. Releasing two episodes per day on weekdays enables the show to come as close to being able to break news as any podcast. This makes it a different prospect to most of its competitors who tend to focus on a deeper dive into just a couple of topics once or twice a week.
A spin-off of the popular Pod Save America, Pod Save the World offers the same unashamedly partisan expert analysis from political insiders on a more global scale.
Still not deadly-serious, Pod Save the World strikes a more sober, incisive tone than its joke-and-rant-laden older sibling. Hosted by Pod Save America’s Tommy Vietor and a fellow Obama administration speechwriter in Ben Rhodes, the show tackles foreign policy from a US perspective, dissecting what international events mean for the American public and the Democratic Party they once worked for.
This is a podcast with a hypothesis; that we are living through a unique moment in history of “Global Enduring Disorder”.
Hosts Jason Pack, NATO Foundation Senior Analyst, and former British Ambassador Alexandra Hall Hall seek to make sense of our planet’s interconnected issues, from climate change to tax havens, armed conflicts and the challenges of new technology.
