US Presidential candidate Dr Cornel West is a philosopher and prominent advocate for social and racial justice. He’s taught at some of the top universities in the US including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, but has one major plan if he becomes President: to “dismantle the American empire”. The 71-year-old activist, who campaigned for Biden in 2020, …

Nobel Prize Laureate Joseph Stiglitz is one of the most influential economists in the world, having advised multiple Democratic Presidents of the US and the World Bank, where he worked as Chief Economist and senior Vice President. His latest book, called “The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society,” argues that the economic right’s concept…

Bassem Youssef thinks that he’s come on the wrong podcast. “People in power don't really care about any of our suggestions to change the world”, he tells Krishnan Guru-Murthy, “because if our ways to change the world affect their interests, they will stop you.” And he knows what he’s talking about, having fled his home country of Egypt after his TV…

When lawyer turned playwright Suzie Miller created a one-woman show starring Jodie Comer for the West End and Broadway called ‘Prima Facie’, she wouldn’t have dreamt that her play would fuel real change in the legal system’s approach to sexual assault cases. The play has won multiple awards, has inspired efforts to change UK laws, and has also been…

Nikki Giovanni has spent more than five decades in the public eye, as an activist, poet and innovator. Born on the "wrong side of the tracks" in Knoxville, Tennessee, during the era of segregation, Giovanni came of age during the Black power and civil rights movements in 1960s in America. She came under the spotlight again in 2007, when the univers…

Author Armistead Maupin is a pioneer - writing about AIDS and HIV for a mass audience and daring to include gay, lesbian, trans and queer lives when few others were. His ‘Tales of the City’ series, which started as a newspaper column in 1974, became worldwide best-selling novels and a Netflix series. It chronicles the lives of queer people in San F…

“I don’t write fiction to preach my politics,” says Kiley Reid - an American author whose debut novel “Such a Fun Age” was longlisted for the 2020 Booker prize. The book gained recognition for its themes on race, privilege, and social dynamics in modern America. Fast forward to 2024, and Reid’s second novel, “Come and Get It” delves even further in…

How do you measure a business’s success? For James Timpson, CEO of the Timpson’s Group, it comes down to two things: the satisfaction of its staff, and what it gives back to society. His employees only have to “put money in the till and look the part”; for the rest, they have complete authority to do whatever they think is right to offer a quality …

Bernie Sanders is the longest-serving independent senator in US congressional history and has brought income inequality, poverty and the “uber-capitalist” status quo into focus throughout his decades-long career. He nearly became the Democrats’ candidate for president, twice, and has recently been backing Joe Biden against Donald Trump, warning tha…

Crystal Hefner was 21 when she first entered the infamous Playboy Mansion in October 2008. Within months, she ascended its hierarchy to become the top girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, who was 60 years her senior, and went on to marry him in 2012. But she quickly discovered the house was not the glittering sanctuary she had believed, nor Mr Hefner’s Playb…

The past year has been a time of climate firsts, mainly for the wrong reasons. 2023 was the hottest year on record - with devastating wildfires, catastrophic flooding, ongoing loss of biodiversity and carbon emissions continuing to rise. But is there any hope for the possibility for a better future? Well, there is in fact room for ‘cautious optimis…

Ella Mills is the best-selling food writer and founder of Deliciously Ella, the food blog-turned-brand which she created in 2012 after a sudden debilitating illness led her to overhaul her diet and turn to plant-based foods as a way to get better. Since then, Mills has become a key player in bringing healthy food to the mainstream, with a brand who…

Despite being 76 years old, Arnold Schwarzenegger shows no signs of stopping. The bodybuilding champion turned Hollywood star turned US politician, now in the ‘fourth act’ of his life, has reinvented himself into a motivator, and written a book, ‘Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life’, about guiding people to achieve a ‘happy, successful, useful life’, i…

From 2019 to 2021, Samuel Kasumu was the most senior Black advisor in Downing Street, and was widely referred to as Boris Johnson’s racism advisor, working alongside the former Prime Minister during the first half of the Covid pandemic. Kasumu left Downing Street in April 2021, amid the fallout from a UK government report that dismissed institution…

Keith Allen has been many things. The father of popstar Lily and Game of Thrones actor Alfie Allen, he was also a TV presenter, theatre actor, the man behind two hit football anthems (the Fat Les ditty “Vindaloo” and New Order’s “World in Motion”, both of which he co-wrote) and a handful of small roles in cult movies (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, …

Billy Porter started singing in church when he was about five years old, and growing up saw performance as a lifeline out of the trauma and rejection he experienced as a Black gay man. The multi-hyphenate star won a Grammy and a few Tonys since his breakout role on Broadway with 2013's Kinky Boots, and was the first openly gay Black man to win a le…

Being an astronaut is a job like no other. Of the estimated 100 billion people who have ever lived, only 628 people in human history have left Earth. Tim Peake is one of them. A former test pilot who served in the British Army Air Corps, he was the first British astronaut to ever walk in space, and completed his six-month Principia mission to the I…

Caster Semenya has never doubted that she was a woman. It wasn’t until her athletics career started to take off that the now two-time Olympic Games gold medallist and a three-time World Athletics Championships gold medallist faced any questions over her gender. Called a ‘threat to the sport’ and ‘not woman enough’, she has become the most visible D…

It is nearly two weeks since Israel launched its ground offensive into Gaza and more than a month since it began intensive air strikes against Hamas, following the brutal attacks in Israel in which more than 1,400 people were killed. ActionAid is one of the many charities responding to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and its UK CEO Halima Begum is…

Carlo Rovelli has devoted large parts of his life to explaining to the general public what appears on the surface to be the unexplainable - and his bestselling science books saw him dubbed 'the poet of modern physics’. But the quantum gravity researcher is as comfortable discussing his own work on black holes, as he is talking about recent politics…

The climate crisis is the biggest single issue affecting us all - but for some, the impact will be, and already is, far greater than for others. This is the principle of climate justice, that sees the causes and consequences of climate change as inextricably linked with social inequality - and that activist Mikaela Loach has made the focus of her w…

The world is witnessing an epochal shift, according to Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis: from the now-dead capitalism, to “technofeudalism”. In his latest book, the former Greek politician - who in 2015, at the height of the Greek debt crisis, was catapulted from academic obscurity to Minister of Finance - argues that insane sums of money that were…

"You're categorised as not being particularly intelligent or able," says Jason Arday, an autistic Sociologist who became Cambridge University's youngest black professor. Jason Arday was unable to speak until he was 11 and could not read or write until he was 18. As a PE teacher in 2012, he wrote a list of goals he wanted to achieve. One of them was…

At 14, Lemn Sissay inked his initials into his hand with a homemade tattoo. He didn’t write LS, but NG, for Norman Greenwood, which he thought was his name. Except that it wasn’t. His real identity had been withheld from him since he was born. Born in Wigan to an Ethiopian mother, Lemn Sissay was raised in care; first in a foster family and then, f…

As the third Black woman ever to be elected as an MP, and then instated as a government Minister, Dawn Butler has been vocal on the disrespect that Black women face in politics. As an outspoken campaigner herself, Butler was criticised in 2019 for calling Boris Johnson a liar in the House of Commons. She was subsequently asked to leave the Parliame…