The Trojan Horse Affair
A strange letter appears on a city councillor’s desk in Birmingham, England, laying out an elaborate plot by Islamic extremists to infiltrate the city’s schools. The plot has a code name: Operation Trojan Horse. The story soon explodes in the news and kicks off a national panic. By the time it all dies down, the government has launched multiple investigations, beefed up the country’s counterterrorism policy, revamped schools and banned people from education for the rest of their lives.
To Hamza Syed, who is watching the scandal unfold in his city, the whole thing seemed … off. Because through all the official inquiries and heated speeches in Parliament, no one has ever bothered to answer a basic question: Who wrote the letter? And why? The night before Hamza is to start journalism school, he has a chance meeting in Birmingham with the reporter Brian Reed, the host of the hit podcast S-Town. Together they team up to investigate: Who wrote the Trojan Horse letter? They quickly discover that it’s a question people in power do not want them asking.
From Serial Productions and The New York Times comes The Trojan Horse Affair: a mystery in eight parts.
To get full access to this show, and to other Serial Productions and New York Times podcasts on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.
To find out about new shows from Serial Productions, and get a look behind the scenes, sign up for our newsletter at nytimes.com/serialnewsletter.
Have a story pitch, a tip, or feedback on our shows? Email us at serialshows@nytimes.com
Copyright details · more info
Artwork and data is from the podcast’s open RSS feed; we link directly to audio · Read our DMCA procedure
This podcast may use tracking and attribution and dynamic content insertion
Stats: Statistics are produced by Simplecast, Podsights and Podtrac to help The Trojan Horse Affair to understand how many downloads it is getting, or how many people are listening. Your device’s IP address and user agent is used to help calculate this figure. Simplecast and Podtrac are IAB v2 certified. Here is more detail about podcast statistics.
Tracking and attribution: Podsights or its partners may connect the fact you listened to this podcast to an action elsewhere on the internet. For example - it may spot a device that downloaded an episode of The Trojan Horse Affair later visited the website of an advertiser; or it may track that a device that listened to The Trojan Horse Affair also listened to a different show. This form of attribution is used to measure advertising effectiveness.
Dynamic content insertion: Simplecast may use limited data that they know about you - the device you’re using, the approximate location you’re in, or other data that can be derived from this, like the current weather forecast for your area - to change parts of the audio. The Trojan Horse Affair may do this for advertising or for other forms of content, like news stories.
The Trojan Horse Affair is able to use the above tools since its podcast host or measurement company offers this service. It doesn’t mean that this individual podcast uses them, or has access to this functionality. We use open data.
Listen and follow
Information for podcasters
- Podcast GUID:
6c5c0013-d9d1-5ec2-91ff-d279478442a1 - See this podcast’s listener numbers, contact details and more at Rephonic
- Validate this podcast’s RSS feed with Livewire, Truefans or CastFeedValidator
Privacy: The player will download audio directly from Simplecast if you listen. That shares data (like your IP address or details of your device) with them.
Affiliate links: This page links to Apple Podcasts. We may receive a commission for purchases made via those links.
Cache: This podcast page made . Scheduled for update on . Rebuild this page now