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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

Unsung Heroes

America's Next Top Superhero

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 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

Caroline Paige

Marc Thompson

Sandra Caldwell

Siobhan Fahey

Michael Cashman

Stephen Whittle

Donna Personna on Finding Community - and Finding Herself

Lisa Power on Resilience Against Adversity

Lavinia Co-op on Performance as Self-Acceptance

Sarah Schulman on Writing Queer Lives

Zsa-Zsa Fisher on Finding Freedom in Self-Expression

David Hoyle on a Life of Performance

Jide Macaulay on Reconciling Faith and Sexuality

Kevin Aviance on Reinventing Yourself, Fiercely

Rupert Raj on Forging Community

Cecilia Gentili on Living Unapologetically

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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

In the 1940s, a group of Mormons started a town in the Mexican desert. But their utopian vision quickly soured when the founding family’s son, Ervil LeBaron, unleashed a decades-long crimewave.

The One Mighty And Strong

The Massacre in Los Molinos

Welcome to the Family

The Hunt

Rena's Confession

The Betrayal

Ervil Comes Home

The Reign of Arthur

Who Wears The Crown?

The Book of Daniel

At Four O'Clock

The Tide Turns

Chasing Ghosts

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In the 1940s, Mormon fundamentalists started a town in the Mexican desert. Their utopian vision quickly soured when the founding family’s son, Ervil LeBaron, unleashed a multi-generational crimewave. Involved in bank robbery, drug smuggling, auto theft rings and multiple murders, a deadly cult evolved into a sophisticated organised crime family whose notoriety and violence only grew as the decades passed. Journalist Jesse Hyde uncovers previously unheard recordings and speaks to former cult members and survivors, as well as the reporters and cops on the case, to understand the man at the heart of it all.

Deliver Us From Ervil

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

A Nuclear Awakening

War Games in the Pink Tower

A Blip on the Radar

Exiting the Bunker

Fooling the Opposition

The Woman in the Portrait

To Absent Friends

The Social Contagion 

Doc and Jim: A Beautiful Partnership

It Takes a Village

The Riddle

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

Calico Cotton

Indian chintz dress

Wax print

Mauve mania

Viscose rayon

Readymade suit

Fisherman Sweater

Miniskirt

Ray-Bans

Air Jordans

Gus Casely-Hayford is a British curator, writer, and as the inaugural director of London's V&A East, he's an expert on cultural history. In this BBC Radio 4 series, Gus crosses continents and centuries to explore ten key moments in fashion, from the cotton trade to Air Jordans. 

 unravels the hidden histories behind the clothes we wear – and the statements we make just by getting dressed in the morning.

Torn

Harsh Reality is the story of a reality show 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

We examine the changing world of work, as our jobs and the culture around them warp and fold beneath the gravitational force of the pandemic.

Work is a four letter word we like saying. As our jobs and the culture around them warped and folded beneath the gravitational force of the pandemic, Novel and the 

 saw an opportunity to examine where the world of work was going. So far, FT correspondent Isabel Berwick has looked at a company experimenting with giving staff infinite paid holiday leave. A firm using wellness apps to monitor employee burnout. The insanity of digger-driving corporate away-days. Email sign-off status-signaling. And the eternal question of who gets to bring their dog into the office.

Working It

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

The Heart's Kaitlin Prest picks the pieces of audio that made her who she is

Tape Head: Kaitlin Prest on Sex, Sound and Storytelling

Making listeners jump out of their skin is a specialist audio art. But how do you actually do it? Novel producers explain.

Sounds Spooky: How Do You Make a Podcast Frightening?

Gus Casely-Hayford, cultural historian and director of V&A East, discusses the stories behind Torn, his Radio 4 series on the hidden history of fashion

Gus Casely-Hayford's Torn Unpicks the Hidden History of Fashion

Sam R. Anderson enters the Emerald Triangle, the USA's marijuana growing hotspot, to uncover the truth behind his former schoolmate's arrested for murder.

The Death of Jesus Jeff

Outlaws

Welcome to Weed World

Good 'Ol Fashioned Public Records

Bad LSD

A Regular Kid From Pleasantville

Hill Crazy

Broken Lies and A Missing Crystal

WTF Happened on that Mountain

The End of the Road

In the Emerald Triangle, a legendary place in mountains of Northern California known for growing most of the USA's marijuana, lives an outlaw community. A hippie nirvana that promises its residents freedom, money and an escape - hardly the conventional backdrop of a grisly murder. On the other side of the country, journalist, Sam R. Anderson learns that one of his high school classmates has been arrested for the murder. Sam resolves to understand what really happened. Through Crooked City: The Emerald Triangle, we tell Sam's story, as he retraces the steps of his former schoolmate and is pulled into a world of desperation, greed and a seemingly never-ending acid trip.

The Emerald Triangle

Ruthin Castle - Dare you stay in room 222?

Dunwich - Screams on the beach and strange noises in the woods. What is going on?

Brownsover Hall - Is the one-handed ghost real or just your mind playing tricks?

Glastonbury - When the lights go out, everything changes...

Edinburgh - Knocking on that tomb door was a huge mistake!

Whitby - What is that noise? Is it breathing? Who is it?

Ghosts, demons and myths: the only thing that gets in the way of Rachel Fairburn's fascination with the paranormal is the fact that she's absolutely, completely terrified by it all. So, who better to host a podcast exploring some of the UK's most haunted places? We got together with Global and sent Rachel off to haunted sites where a storyteller recounts three local ghost stories. The twist? Only one of them is genuine folklore. From regal corpses in Glastonbury to disappearing children in Edinburgh, Rachel must undertake a night of supernatural investigations in each location and separate the ‘real’ story from the ones invented to terrify her.

Ghoul Guide

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)

Have you ever experienced something you just can’t explain? In this show, Jamali Maddix asks comedians and celeb pals to reveal their spookiest encounters.

Alison Spittle

Rick Edwards

Kiell Smith Bynoe

Anna Leong Brophy

James Acaster

Dane Baptiste

Mike Wozniak

Lara Ricote

Babatunde Aléshé

Evelyn Mok

Maisie Adam

Jordan Gray

Are ghosts real? Science says ‘no', but who ever trusted the science? Instead, we placed our trust in comedian Jamali Maddix, who has been furiously interviewing the famous ever since. James Acaster? He witnessed a miracle. Alison Spittle: she met a real banshee after a Darius concert. And what happened when Rick Edwards tried to heat a piece of fruit using the power of Satan? There’s an ill-advised teenage run-in with a Ouija board, a boyfriend with a line in ‘cursed’ crystals – and the self-declared exorcist terrorizing Borneo’s backpacker bars.

Spooky Shit

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

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

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.

Novel

The SuperheroComplex

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