The Audio Long Read
Three times a week, The Audio Long Read podcast brings you the Guardian’s exceptional longform journalism in audio form. Covering topics from politics and culture to philosophy and sport, as well as investigations and current affairs.
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Each time The Audio Long Read publishes, we email you a written briefing from the transcript — the topics, who appeared, and any specific claims, with the ad reads skipped.
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Episodes (375)
From the archive: The last humanist: how Paul Gilroy became the most vital guide...
The Audio Long Read
‘The English person with a Chinese stomach’: how Fuchsia Dunlop became a Sichuan...
The Audio Long Read
The dangerous rise of Buddhist extremism: ‘Attaining nirvana can wait’
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: Kudos, leaderboards, QOMs: how fitness app Strava became a rel...
The Audio Long Read
Hard to digest: we still live in Fast Food Nation
The Audio Long Read
‘I wish I could say I kept my cool’: my maddening experience with the NHS wheelc...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: The cartel, the journalist and the gangland killings that rock...
The Audio Long Read
Inside the rise and fall of Podemos: ‘We believed we had a stake in the future’
The Audio Long Read
Best of 2025: ‘A relentless, destructive energy’: inside the trial of Constance...
The Audio Long Read
Best of 2025: ‘What reconciliation? What forgiveness?’: Syria’s deadly reckoning
The Audio Long Read
Best of 2025: The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner l...
The Audio Long Read
Best of 2025: Life in a ‘sinking nation’: Tuvalu’s dreams of dry land
The Audio Long Read
Best of 2025: The real Scandi noir: how a filmmaker and a crooked lawyer shatter...
The Audio Long Read
Best of 2025: Don’t call it morning sickness: ‘At times in my pregnancy I wonder...
The Audio Long Read
The snail farm don: is this the most brazen tax avoidance scheme of all time?
The Audio Long Read
The Birth Keepers: I choose this – episode one
The Audio Long Read
‘DeepSeek is humane. Doctors are more like machines’: my mother’s worrying relia...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: is the IMF fit for purpose?
The Audio Long Read
‘The police weren’t interested’: what’s driving the rise in private prosecutions...
The Audio Long Read
When I met Craig he was 13 and homeless. I still thought his life might turn aro...
The Audio Long Read
Money talks: the deep ties between Twitter and Saudi Arabia
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the wor...
The Audio Long Read
‘They take the money and go’: why not everyone is mourning the end of USAID
The Audio Long Read
‘I knew in my head we were dying’: the last voyage of the Scandies Rose
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: ‘If you decide to cut staff, people die’: how Nottingham priso...
The Audio Long Read
‘Scamming became the new farming’: inside India’s cybercrime villages
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: how we lost our sensory connection with food – and how to rest...
The Audio Long Read
The Pushkin job: unmasking the thieves behind an international rare books heist
The Audio Long Read
‘The jobless should lead the attack’: a radical Jamaican journalist in 1920s Lon...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: ‘We are so divided now’: how China controls thought and speech...
The Audio Long Read
Special Edition: Behind the scenes at the Long Read
The Audio Long Read
Counting down to zero: the final warning from a climate diplomat
The Audio Long Read
Extremely offline: what happened when a Pacific island was cut off from the inte...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: A drowning world: Kenya’s quiet slide underwater
The Audio Long Read
‘Americans are democracy’s equivalent of second-generation wealth’: a Chinese jo...
The Audio Long Read
The human stain remover: what Britain’s greatest extreme cleaner learned from 25...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: The queen of crime-solving
The Audio Long Read
A critique of pure stupidity: understanding Trump 2.0
The Audio Long Read
‘Resistance is when I put an end to what I don’t like’: The rise and fall of the...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face
The Audio Long Read
The origins of today’s conflict between American Jews over Israel
The Audio Long Read
‘I have to do it’: why one of the world’s most brilliant AI scientists left the...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: ‘Infertility stung me’: Black motherhood and me
The Audio Long Read
‘What reconciliation? What forgiveness?’: Syria’s deadly reckoning
The Audio Long Read
Take away our language and we will forget who we are: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: The Blackstone rebellion: how one country took on the world’s...
The Audio Long Read
‘We’ve done it before’: how not to lose hope in the fight against ecological dis...
The Audio Long Read
From bank robber to scholar: the Knoxville dropout fighting to change how we see...
The Audio Long Read
From the archive: Divine comedy: the standup double act who turned to the priest...
The Audio Long Read
‘A climate of unparalleled malevolence’: are we on our way to the sixth major ma...
The Audio Long Read