The Intelligence from The Economist

The Intelligence is The Economist's weekday news show, and it does something most US-produced daily podcasts don't: it treats the world outside Washington as the main event. A typical episode runs about twenty-five minutes and covers three stories, with at least one almost always international. You might hear a segment on a coup in West Africa, then one on the Japanese yen, then a closing piece on a strange but revealing cultural shift somewhere in Europe. Hosts rotate through Jason Palmer, Rosie Blor, and others from The Economist's audio team, all of them British, all of them working from the magazine's bench of correspondents. The tone is dry in a very Economist way, with the occasional wry aside, but the reporting underneath is serious. Correspondents call in from the countries they cover, so you're hearing from someone actually in Nairobi or São Paulo rather than a studio analyst riffing on wire copy. The show assumes you're reasonably informed already and doesn't waste time re-explaining basic context, which some listeners love and others find off-putting. If you want a daily news podcast that treats foreign affairs as more than an afterthought, this is probably the best one going.