David Weinberg explores the rise and fall of Phoenix Jones, the spandex-clad leader of the Rain City Superheroes, Seattle's crime-fighting vigilantes.

Out of the Shadows

A Phoenix Rises

We Can Be Heroes

Under the Spotlight

The Rogue Era

Kryptonite

From the Ashes

The Hero We Deserve

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By day, Ben Fodor is a semi-pro MMA fighter. But at night, he’s Phoenix Jones: spandex-clad leader of the Rain City Superheroes, Seattle's crime-fighting vigilantes. At first, the oddball posse – made up of former soldiers, jailbirds, and drug addicts – is a roaring success. There are hundreds of arrests. Global fame. But in this Novel and iHeart collaboration, host David Weinberg finds Ben at the end of his arc. One night, when he’s busted selling cocaine to undercover cops, Jones becomes a hero who now needs to save himself.

The Superhero Complex

In the 1940s, a group of Mormons started a town in the Mexican desert. But what began as a utopian vision turned sour when the founding family’s son, Ervil LeBaron, unleashed a decades-long crimewave.

The One Mighty And Strong

The Massacre in Los Molinos

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Ervil LeBaron, who was at the heart of an obscure Mormon sect in the Mexican desert, had fled America in order to practice polygamy in a town named after the family: Colonia LeBaron. The place was a bizarre and often happy tribute to the land they’d left; of white picket fences and children – lots of children – playing happily in the streets. Until Ervil went on a decades long killing spree. This investigative series infiltrates the town today – as Ervil’s sons wage war on their new drug cartel enemies.

Deliver Us From Ervil

In Call Me Mother, author and journalist Shon Faye takes us into the lives of LGBTQIA+ elders, sharing the life lessons from those who got there first.

Kate Bornstein

Brad Becker

Marc Thompson

Caroline Paige

Sandra Caldwell

Siobhan Fahey

Michael Cashman

Stephen Whittle

Did you know there were alternative sexualities before 1980? It’s true, and Shon Faye’s interview series takes us into the lives of these LGBTQIA+ elders. One week it’s a 73-year-old spiritual seeker who traveled across America in the 60s, living with the Baha’i, the Amish and Scientologists. The next we’re in the 1970s, talking to a ‘lesbian punk’ trailblazer. Over time, the show builds to a series of period pieces in the timeline of gay culture – and a series of often moving life lessons from those who got there first.

Call Me Mother

Futile Attempts is a surreal safari in which artist, comedian and manic depressive, Kim Noble, pursues his fantasies, anxieties, strangers, and nemeses across the plains of modern life.

I AM SO SORRY

WE ARE NOT GOD

FEAR

CONSOLATIONS ON SEX

NOTES ON RUNNING

NOTES ON HUMAN KINDNESS

WALLS AND RELATIONSHIPS

WAITING FOR KAREN

TAI CHI & WARDROBES

THE DUMP

Pitched somewhere between Chris Morris’ 

, we’re utterly convinced that Futile Attempts (At Surviving Tomorrow) is a future cult classic. Kim Noble is a comedian who specialises in the strange and estranged. There’s nothing on earth quite like his Novel and Spotify series. Cut from Kim’s obsession with recording almost everything that happens to him, Futile Attempts is a surreal safari, in which Kim pursues his fantasies, anxieties, strangers, and nemeses across the plains of modern life.

Futile Attempts (At Surviving Tomorrow)

Harsh Reality is a story of sun, sea, sex, and a reality show with a twist so shocking it changed TV forever – and Miriam Rivera, a woman before her time who got caught up in it all.

Something About Miriam

Outlaw Superstar

Champagne, Canapés and Clubbing

Sh*t Show

Scene of a Crime?

Speed Angel

Behind the Lens

Sun, sea, sex, and a twist so shocking it changed TV forever. In 2003, six red-blooded reality contestants fought for the love of beautiful Miriam Rivera. The Mexican model was transgender and had been born a biological male – a fact that the producers of 

 held back from the bachelors until the season finale. When they found out, they destroyed the set. Starring the male contestants, our US chart-topping series with Wondery explores this moment in popular culture – and the life of a woman at the centre of a storm.

Harsh Reality

Matthew Syed is the king of the counter-intuitive big idea. In his BBC Radio 4 show, he takes on some of the biggest and most curious ideas of all.

Siding with the Enemy

1 in 73 Million

The West and the Rest

Looping the Loop

The Most Selfish People on Earth

A Recipe for Happiness

Top of the Pops

Mental Athletics

Originality Armageddon

Under the Influence

Too Big to Succeed

Brighter than Bagpuss

A Question of Justice

Let's All Be Batman

Best Feet Forward

Big Head

The Endurance of Arlene Blum

Tongue-Tied

Is This What Success Looks Like?

An appointment with Dr Leech

The Woman Who Brought Down the Mob

Inspiring Bill Strickland

Oostvaardersplassen: A Wild Idea

Sweet Harmony

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Matthew Syed is a former Olympics-grade table tennis player, turned management guru. Author of 12 books, he’s Britain’s new king of the counter-intuitive big idea. And now, he has a Novel-produced show on BBC Radio 4, in which he takes on some of the biggest and most curious ideas of all. So far, he’s debunked Stockholm Syndrome, made notes on why leeches might be good for us, explained how superhero culture helps high-perfomance athletes, and unpicked the Satanic Panic.

Sideways

Through a shady cast of chaos agents, catalysts, conspiracists and kooks, our eight-part series goes behind the scenes of the 2021 Capitol riots.

The Digital Fever Swamp

Stop The Steal

No Ordinary Rioters

The Canary in the Coal Mine

The Inside Man

Hugs and Kisses

The Lost Cause

The Digital Dragnet

Through a shady cast of chaos agents, catalysts, conspiracists and kooks, our eight-part series goes behind the scenes of the 2021 Capitol riots. Scanning the TV footage from that day, we picked out the key faces in the crowd then traced their paths forward towards 6 January. Some were big players - like the rebel senator Josh Hawley. Others more internet-famous, like the streamer Baked Alaska. Others were pure products of radicalisation: like the Pennsylvanian housewife Rachel Powell, who is facing 25 years in jail.

The Assault on America

David Weinberg, host of The Superhero Complex, speaks to Jon Ronson about the rise and fall of Phoenix Jones – a real-life superhero they've both encountered.

Cape Fear: Jon Ronson on the Phoenix Jones phenomenon

Marc Smerling, the man behind HBO series The Jinx, catches up with Novel's creative director Austin Mitchell to chat documentary storytelling, humanising the bad guys and more.

Talk/Talk: Marc Smerling & Austin Mitchell

Latif Nasser, one of the hosts of the hugely-popular WNYC science podcast, Radiolab, picks out the podcasts and radio shows that have influenced him.

Tape Head: Latif Nasser on Coke, fiancés and imposters

Charli XCX throws open her VIP contacts book and steps into the interviewer’s chair to ask her celeb pals for the best songs for life's ultimate playlist.

Christine and the Queens

Addison Rae

Mark Ronson

Ziwe

Beabadoobee

Benito Skinner

Edgar Wright

Barbie Ferreira

Bowen Yang

Caroline Polachek

Dev Hynes

Tommy Dorfman

King Princess

Jack Antonoff

Tove Lo

Jordan Firstman

Lukas Gage

Gracie Abrams

Mad Dog Jones

Rita Ora

Troye Sivan

Dasha Nekrasova

Rina Sawayama

A.G. Cook

Max Minghella

Shygirl

Rachel Sennott

Phoebe Bridgers

Grimmy

Joy Crookes

Kim Petras

Jade Thirlwall

Fatboy Slim

Olly Alexander

Charli XCX throws her VIP contacts book open and steps into the interviewer’s chair. In this one-on-one weekly format, she asks what their favourite song is for a particular situation. Best song to fall in love to? For Christine of Christine and the Queens, it’s 

 by Max Richter: a reimagining of Vivaldi’s 

. This is Desert Island Discs for situations other than being stuck on a desert island.

Best Song Ever with Charli XCX

After 13 years crafting angel statues, Kenny Hill's sculpture park was hailed as one of America’s great works of ‘outsider art’. But one day, he beheaded one of his angels and vanished.

When Kenny Hill arrived in Chauvin, he started building his own world. First, the bricklayer constructed a modest house beside a bayou. Then he started to make statues; crafting angels that he knocked straight into the swampy Louisiana soil. In this Novel and BBC Radio 4 special, we visit the town to tell the story of how, over 13 years, Kenny gradually created a sculpture park hailed as one of America’s great works of ‘outsider art’ – before beheading one of his angels and vanishing, leaving Chauvin to continue its gradual collapse into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Angels of the Bayou

Bellingcat, a group of open-source investigators, painstakingly uncover the truth about flight MH17, which was mysteriously shot down in 2014.

The People Who Fell From The Sky

A Pack of Lies

The Murder Weapon

Manhunt

The Men on the Ground

Avenues to Justice

The Executions

The Hunt

When Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was shot out of the sky in 2014, all 298 civilians on board lost their lives. For years, loved ones agonised over the plane’s strange disappearance. With Russian anti-aircraft guns suspected of firing the fatal missile, Vladimir Putin’s Internet Research Agency soon flooded into the internet, to throw up a vast flak of counter-narrative. Opposing them were the ground-breaking open-source investigators, Bellingcat. Through painstaking investigation – from harvesting cell-mast data to cold-calling Muscovites – we uncovered the truth about MH17.

The Bellingcat Podcast

Roma Agrawal, one of the structural engineers who built the Shard, explores how the built environment has shaped the people who actually live inside the dreams we call ‘blueprints’.

Visions in Glass

Dreams in the Air

Dreams in the Earth

For all their anchored bricks and mortar, every building starts life as a weightless idea. Roma Agrawal is one of the structural engineers who built the Shard. In this returning series for BBC Radio 4, she moves from the failed utopianism of Sheffield’s Park Hill and its elevated ‘Streets in the Sky’, to London’s menagerie of glass monoliths she herself has helped erect. Throughout, Roma weaves a history of how new materials and changing styles have shaped the people who actually live inside the dreams we call ‘blueprints’.

The Dreams We Live Inside

What would the world look like if the best everyday solutions to climate change scaled up to planet-size? Google and Novel collaborated on this podcast to find out.

Rewilding = tradition + technology

Can a city act like a forest?

Navigating an ocean of data

The ground beneath our feet

Measure what matters

From farm to folk

De la ferme à la fourchette

What, Google and Novel wondered, would the world look like if the people with the best everyday solutions to climate change scaled up to planet-size? Be that the rewilding of Finland, the use of deep-sea drones to measure the Gulf Stream, or future-facing young farmers actively plowing carbon back into the soil. The twist is that we start at the dramatic end point and then tell the story backwards, so that each episode scans like a Christopher Nolan film - except, one about landfill waste and supermarket labelling.

Planet Progress

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We’re Novel, a podcast company. We make shows that go long on story, rich in detail and heavy on sonics. The kind that creates fans, not consumers.

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