Unabridged with Tristan Whitfield
The show where we invite you down the rabbit hole with us.
This show is free, and always will be.
Unabridged is free, in full, with no advertising in the audio and no signup to listen. We make our living from Simply The News, not from this show, and we would rather put the whole thing in front of you than meter it.
If it's useful to you, the best way to say thank you is to support Simply The News. But you don't have to, and nothing here is held back.
Unabridged is a weekly round-table deep dive. We take one contested subject — a conflict, a policy fight, a question with real stakes — and we do not summarise it. A table of characters argues it out in full, and our host moderates.
The characters are fictional AI characters with AI-generated names. The positions they represent are real: real scholars, real clergy, real jurists and real traditions hold them. Every claim made on air is cited, and every source — primary documents where they exist, multiple high-quality corroborating sources where they do not — is linked from the companion page for each episode.
Tristan Whitfield chairs. He is a structural narrator, not a judge: he names the patterns he sees, corrects factual errors against the documentary record, and never tells you where the truth falls. Every position gets equal structural treatment. The one thing he will not do is break evenness — no position is ever labelled fringe, extreme, or mainstream, and a lone view gets the same time and the same framing as a common one.
Each episode is built from primary sources rather than from coverage of them. That is what the name means, and it is also the promise: you hear the whole argument, and you can follow any claim back to the document it came from.
It is made for people who want the whole argument rather than the angle. You can listen in the car, and then follow any claim straight back to the document it came from.
Who it's for
People who already follow a subject and are tired of being told what to think about it. Students, researchers, journalists, policy people, and anyone who has ever finished a news segment feeling like they were told a conclusion instead of shown the evidence.
Episodes
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Episode one puts the maximum number of positions we have ever seated — twelve characters — on the longest-running conflict in the news. The League of Nations Mandate to Resolution 242 to the Gaza war, argued in full, with every source linked.
Companion document — sources, timestamps and the full argument →