In the 21st century, with climate change unleashed, the Arctic is the new geopolitical frontline, or is it the fault line? The arctic ocean is now navigable for months of the year, the more than 500 year search for a northern passage from Europe to Asia is over. This route cuts the time it takes to get goods from China to European markets in half. Who will control the Arctic ocean? In this podcast FRDH host talks to Humphrey Hawksley, who spent part of the summer in Greenland. He is a veteran of more than three decades reporting for the BBC many of them from China, and who spends a lot of time above the Arctic Circle researching and writing his Rake Ozenna thrillers set in the frozen world we will all have learn about in the 21st century.

Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar is one of the most prescient films of that superlative cinema decade the 1970s. It was a film that foresaw the coming of the Rust Belt, post-Civil Rights era racial animosity, and extraordinary wealth inequality. “They pit the lifers against the new boy and the young against the old. The black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place.” Schrader wrote that in 1978. In this FRDH podcast Paul Schrader talks about the film’s origins, the difficult genius of Richard Pryor and much else. Warning of racial language some will find offensive . Give us 39:23 to tell you all about it.

Resisting Hamas during the twenty years the group has governed Gaza has been a dangerous exercise and since Israel began its Vengeance War following the October 7th Hamas atrocity even fewer Gazan voices have been raised against them. Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib is one person willing to speak up. Now he has written a short book detailing how Hamas maintains its power through its own ruthlessness and with the help of international organizations set up in theory to help Gazans. Alkhatib is the rare Gazan voice in public life and in this wide ranging conversation with FRDH host Michael Goldfarb he talks about his boyhood in Gaza, his family — 30 of whom have been killed in the war — Palestinian agency and the way forward out of the catastrophe of Oct 7th and the utter destruction of what was his home. Give us 52:51 to tell you about it.

In June 2014, when ISIS swept into Iraq’s second city Mosul, historian Omar Mohammed immediately began documenting the terrorist occupation of his hometown as and act of Resistance and Defiance. Now Mohammed has written a book, Mosul Eye: A Scholar’s Clandestine War Against ISIS about his life and harrowing escape from ISIS. In this FRDH conversation he details the risks he took to get the story of daily atrocities out to the world. The city was shut off by the throat slitters of ISIS yet Mohammed successfully defied them with his dispatches. This is a compelling conversation about true resistance, as well as the implications for the United States in the future over its failed campaign in Iraq, a war most Americans would like to forget, but that people everywhere from Tehran to Beirut remember vividly. Give us 45:15 to tell you all about it.

Financial Times correspondent Sarah O’Connor talks about her new book We Are Not Machines: The Fight for the Future of Work which is about AI and the coming jobs apocalypse. In this wide ranging conversation with FRDH host Michael Goldfarb, O’Connor looks at ways machines have helped and hurt workers in the past and why people and their governments need to start planning now to avoid apocalyptic changes in society if AI’s potential to make many jobs obsolete is anywhere near fulfilled.

In “And the Cello Came Too” former BBC news presenter Robin Lustig tells the story of his family and how fate determined who survived and who didn’t the worst event of the twentieth century. But this conversation goes deeper, than just a family story of survival, we talk about how journalism inoculates those who practice it against the emotions we feel when observing and thinking about what history — or fate — can throw at us

The Anti-Vax movement is a morbid symptom of our time. Whoever writes the history of America’s unraveling will have to pay attention to anti-vax and refer to Kira Kieffer’s book Unvaccinated Under God a thorough study of its nearly 50 year history and its grounding in religion in the broadest sense of the word. In this FRDH podcast, Kieffer explains to anti-vax sceptic Michael Goldfarb how the movement went from legitimate concerns over flaws in a single vaccine to becoming a political cause exploited by Trump and Bobby Kennedy Jr. Give us 53 minutes to explain it all to you.

Howard Jacobson: Shattered Illusions and Anti-Semitism post-October 7th by FRDH Podcast with Michael Goldfarb

How does America look from the other side of the world? Nick Bryant, ex-BBC America correspondent who covered every president from Clinton to Trump joins FRDH podcast host Michaell Goldfarb from his home in Australia to talk about , well, everything: how Trump’s “special military operation” is effecting the economy, as well as his ideas about how and why Americans sent Trump to the White House twice — in spite of everything. Illustration ©David Rowe ABC Australia

Jan Morris was one of the best known travel writers since World War 2, yet despite her fame she is an engima. The reason is simple. At the height of her success in the early 1970s she transitioned from male to female. The reasons for her going through what was still a fairly primitive risky procedure were clear to her but not to the world at large and other than one book of memoir Morris rarely spoke about it again. Sara Wheeler is herself a successful travel writer and biographer and in this FRDH podcast she speaks with host Michael Goldfarb about her authorized biography of Morris and the complicated and stupendously productive life she led. Give us 54 minutes to tell you all about it.