As we come to the end of Pumpkin Spice Latte season (formerly known as autumn) and enter Mariah Carey season (formerly known as winter), I’m doing my best not to panic about the months of impending cold and darkness. Like many elder millennials, I turn to social media-approved self-help techniques to manage my feelings of panic and distress. But in the event that I am unable to “manifest” my dream winter through daily gratitude journaling and affirmations, I will cheer myself up with the seasonal glut of films, books and TV series.
Top of my list is rewatching Kneecap. A sharp, sweary and hilarious film about the eponymous Irish-language rap trio from Belfast, it is an ode to the power of hip hop. Michael Fassbender’s star turn as a fugitive dissident republican-turned-yoga teacher is just the right amount of ridiculous. I’m even tempted to leave my sofa and catch the real Kneecap (who star in the film) in November.
Also providing a welcome distraction from the cold is Fundamentally by Nussaibah Younis. Set in Iraq in 2019, the novel follows Nadia, a naive and idealistic academic, as she attempts to run a deradicalisation programme for Islamic State brides. Like Kneecap, the book explores how nationality, class and gender shape our experience of the world, while being laugh-out-loud funny as Nadia navigates UN bureaucracy and fundamentalist Islam. Younis is drawing from personal experience as someone with Iraqi heritage and years of expertise working in post-war Iraq. It’s in bookshops at the start of 2025.
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For us political nerds, 2024 has provided a historic number of elections to follow, with an estimated 1.5bn people casting votes in more than 50 democracies. As I write this, we are days away from knowing who the next president of the United States will be, and around a month from discovering the identity of Ghana’s next president (just as important in my family).
One thing we are likely to be ignorant about for some time is the role social media platforms played in the results of this year’s elections. I tend to think the scaremongering headlines about AI and deep fakes are overblown, but I am nervous about the state of online political advertising and the lack of transparency around the algorithms that shape what content we see online. Years on from the Cambridge Analytica scandal, some platforms (such as Meta) now have “archives” of the advertising on their platforms to enable users to see who is paying to promote content. Unfortunately, most ad archives are piecemeal at best, allowing very little insight into how and where people are being targeted online.
Different challenges are presented by the approach of companies like TikTok to paid political content. The social media company “banned” political advertising on its platform in 2019. Banning a type of content is incredibly hard in practice and pushes the onus onto TikTok users to police themselves. Unsurprisingly, paid political content remains on the platform and it takes investigations from journalists and academics to uncover evidence of it. Without a universal standard that applies to all social media, it will take years for us to learn the full impact of digital platforms on our democracies.
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One trend I would not have predicted at the start of the year has been the rising power of podcasts in politics. The Trump campaign swapped TV debates and mainstream media interviews for a tour of “bro podcasts” hosted by the likes of Logan Paul, Theo Von and Lex Fridman. Kamala Harris’s team adopted a similar approach, targeting young women and African American men by appearing on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy and on All the Smoke with Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson, respectively.
Trying to appeal to a target audience through non-political or lifestyle media isn’t new. Tony Blair was fixated on appearing in Take a Break magazine when he was prime minister, while daytime TV shows like This Morning and, in the US, The View, regularly host politicians of all parties. But I think there is something new and unique about the podcast format, which is why it has begun to appeal to political campaigns. The long-form nature of a good podcast conversation is completely different to the snappy style of a radio or TV interview. And for political interviewees, it offers the chance to get beyond parroting key messages and talking points, and to sound a bit more human. At this point, it would be rude not to mention that I co-host a current affairs podcast—Over the Top Under the Radar—with the author and academic Gary Younge. In addition to a weekly news digest, we interview the odd politician.
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Perhaps it was this format that led Donald Trump to speak so openly on Theo Von’s show about his brother’s struggle with alcoholism. There is an intimacy to the way we listen to podcasts, which often play on our phones while we do something else such as tidying. We give this media our almost undivided attention. I’m guilty of feeling like the hosts of my favourite podcasts are friends of mine—people I listen to for hours while on long walks or train journeys, or before I fall asleep at night. These range from American comedians whom I’ve listened to for years and will probably never meet (The Read, The Dollop) to people who talk and sound like my actual friends and are probably only a few degrees removed from me (as with the addictive Miss Me, hosted by Lily Allen and Miquita Oliver).
