Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Arts myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.With elections in the UK and US imminent, it’s hardly surprising that everyone and their dog is launching a political podcast. But the all-new The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart represents a meeting of two distinct audio trends: the politics pod and the talk-show-host side-hustle. Last year brought us the limited series Strike Force Five, hosted by Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, John Oliver and Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel, along with the interview pod What Now? with Trevor Noah. As of this year, even James Corden, late of The Late Late Show, has a podcast.The Weekly Show is very much an extracurricular project for its presenter, arranged around his ongoing TV gig presenting The Daily Show on Mondays (presumably he has some extra time on his hands after the cancellation of his Apple series, The Problem with Jon Stewart). But where The Daily Show is satirical, The Weekly Show is deadly serious (don’t be fooled by the jokey trailer). In the opening episode, our host attempts to explain what the podcast is about. This proves more difficult than expected. The plan, he says, is to examine “the threat to healthy, functioning democracies . . . What are the vulnerabilities in our democratic systems that make them less resilient to those kinds of threats?” It takes a minute or two for him to list those threats: authoritarianism, autocracy, Donald Trump, Christian radicalism. But, he adds, he is also interested in the “low-level hum of corruption [and] a system that is having difficulty meeting the needs of the people it purports to represent.”The second and newest instalment is inspired by the D-Day commemorations earlier this month and picks apart the concept of military might and US endeavours to shape the world “through this incredibly gigantic and perhaps bloated military machine”. Stewart’s guests are Bill Hartung, from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Roxana Tiron, senior reporter at Bloomberg.Here the discussion feels more structured as it takes in spiralling defence budgets, arms sales, US incursions into Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq and the American impulse to exert control over countries while flying the flag of democracy. While there remains a conspicuous absence of gags (note: this is a Comedy Central production), Stewart is knowledgeable, authoritative and endlessly alert to the absurdities of US policy.I would argue that, much like the US military machine, The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart is currently on the flabby side, with the second episode clocking in at an hour and four minutes. Still, that the podcast is, at the time of writing, number five in the US podcast charts, while, in the UK, The Rest Is Politics and The News Agents sit at number one and four respectively, feels significant. Could it be that the common lament about the public’s current lack of political engagement is ill-founded?
