Watch the full episode with James Graham here.

INK, based on James Graham’s stage play, will be released in UK cinemas on 8 January 2027.

Aditya’s suggested reading (and watching) list for James Graham:

James has written many screenplays. I’ve listed three notable ones below:

• Dear England: about the country’s football team under manager Gareth Southgate.

• Sherwood (mentioned in the conversation): set in the village where James grew up in the shadow of the miners’ strike.

• Quiz: documenting a notorious scandal on the British gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.

On cultural stagnation:

A lot of people say culture is stuck, although few sketch out the political consequences of that stagnation as well as James Graham does in our chat.

Many disagree on why.

For ‘it was the algorithm that did it’, read Filterworld: How algorithms flattened culture by Kyle Chayka.

For a wider-ranging explanation, look at Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century by W David Marx.

Those two are fairly recent. Much earlier and truly magnificent is the much-missed Mark Fisher on what he called the slow cancellation of the future.

On the same theme, this essay by Adam Mastroianni is great.