My week: My new podcast, Andy Burnham and Bengali lessons

Hello, I’m the Guardian’s senior economics commentator, Aditya Chakrabortty. This week I bring you something new, which a few of us here are a bit excited about. To extend the conceit I have something blue, with Everton fan Andy Burnham. Did you think I’d forgotten something borrowed? Stick around, friends.

The late master of op-eds, William Safire, summed up the life of a weekly columnist. He likened it to standing under a windmill, its blades getting dangerously close, while waiting anxiously for a subject, an argument, a thousand words. Finally! The deadline is fended off and the fins swoosh away, so you come out of your crouch – only for the same thing to happen next week, and for ever after.

Safire liked that life enough to do it for more than 20 years. But for the past few weeks, I have edged away from the windmill and paused columnising. This could be an existential puzzle: what do you call a columnist who doesn’t do columns? But in the modern media age, the answer is really quite simple: you call them a podcaster.

That’s right, a team of us have been putting together a podcast that launches today on the Guardian website, as well as on Spotify and YouTube. It’s called Radical Thinking, because that is what this moment demands: fresh analysis that takes us beyond a failing consensus. Each week, I talk to one or two of the most interesting thinkers around. We begin the series with Yanis Varoufakis, who in 2015 was minister of finance for Greece, when it was at the dead centre of the world financial crisis. We talk about what his experience of dealing with heads of government and top officials taught him about politics. It is a hard-hitting discussion, in which he concludes: “There’s no such thing as democracy.”

Next week we have Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor talking about how Trump’s America is veering towards fascism – and how it can be beaten. After that, to shake the bottle and wake the drink, we have Michael Gove on where the right is going now. Please give it a listen here on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts; I’d love to know what you think.

I was reminded of this while reading a book called The Fortnight in September by RC Sherriff (borrowed from the library, naturally. See? Never let a motif go to waste). Some of the most piercing moments in the book are when it registers the advent of new technology. The family changes trains at Clapham Junction, and note the difference between the steam rail and the new electric. Most of us live between old and new, patching up what we have and slowly adopting expensive innovation.

What I’ve been learning: Growing up in the 1980s, I was discouraged at school from learning my mother tongue of Bengali. Many years later, I’m having a crack at it. Early every Sunday morning, I have a Google Meet with Paromita, my teacher in Kolkata. The best bit is my two daughters have started their own lessons, because they want to learn what I should call their grandmother’s tongue.

What I’ve been reading: At the end of August, I had perhaps the best reading experience of my year. Jackdaw Cake by Norman Lewis, a memoir from the mid-80s by the travel writer of growing up in Carmarthenshire, southwest Wales and then in my own home of Enfield, north London.

What I’ve been drinking: Coffee. A lot of iced coffee. Making a new podcasts takes a lot of the morning.

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