The Exchange | Long-form interviews from the New Statesman

In Japan, couples can rent a grandchild in order to make them feel less bereft on special occasions. In South Korea, dog stroller sales have overtaken pram sales. And in France, deaths outnumbered births for the first time since the Second World War in 2025. So what's actually going on?

Award winning journalist Camilla Cavendish joins Oli Dugmore to discuss her new book, Generation Maybe: Why We're Having Fewer Children, and What It Means for Us All.
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Owen Jones burst onto the scene in 2011 with his bestselling book Chavs: the demonisation of the working class. Since then his activism and journalism has followed the ebbs and flows of the left in UK politics, his own push and pull relationship with the Labour Party - which he ultimately left in 2024.

Now he wants to cast his analysis beyond Britain. He joins Oli Dugmore in this episode to discuss his new book The Fall of the West: how they really lost it.
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Fuchsia Dunlop has dedicated much of her life to eating Chinese food.

If you’re interested in Chinese cuisine and culture, you may have come across her through television programmes, heard her on the radio, or cooked one of her recipes.

And if you haven’t, stick around and you’ll be tempted to dive a little deeper into this extraordinary world.

Fuchsia joined Oli Dugmore on the day her latest book, Five Tastes, was published, to talk about the flavours that define Chinese food, what they reveal about an ancient culture, and the political and economic factors changing Chinese cuisine - both in China and in the West.

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Alexei Sayle has never much cared for a conventional view of the world.

Born in 1950s Liverpool to committed communist parents, he was named after Maxim Gorky - real name Alexei Maximovich Peshkov. Dyed-in-the-wool Marxism, in other words, was baked in from birth, and he’s Jewish on his mother's side.

His first two memoirs, Stalin Ate My Homework and Thatcher Stole My Trousers, told the story of that red upbringing. Now Sayle is back with volume three: How I've Tried to Change the World, exploring a lifetime of protests, marches, and what decades on the picket line have taught him about being a Marxist today.

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In 2011, Luke Harding was ordered to leave Russia - the first Western journalist to be exiled since the fall of the Soviet Union. As the Guardian's senior correspondent, he continued to watch Russia from afar, covering WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, and the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. But in recent years he crept back closer to Moscow, reporting from the front lines of the war in Ukraine.

His new book, Betrayal, follows the many contours of this conflict and what they tell us about the new age of global power: What kind of control does Russia have over Donald Trump? How did North Korean soldiers end up in Ukraine? Why did a Reform leader undertake work for the Russian state for 40k?

Luke Harding joins Oli Dugmore in this episode of The Exchange, a podcast from the New Statesman.
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