How To Academy Podcast

With fans including Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Peter Thiel, no living fiction author has more influence among the elite technologists shaping our world. His ideas inspired Google Earth, Second Life and the Xbox, and Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook after Stephenson’s concept of the Metaverse, dedicating his company to the mission of creating a future inspired by Stephenson’s speculative vision. Now the legendary speculative novelist turns his attention to the cliamte crisis. In converastion with comedian and broadcaster Robin Ince, Neal sounds sounds a clarion alarm, ponders potential climate solutions and risks, and share his insights into the future of life on earth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did a collective of self-taught internet sleuths end up solving some of the biggest crimes of our time? Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open-source and social media investigation to probe some of the world’s most pressing stories. He joins us to tell the story of how they created a whole new category of information gathering, galvanising citizen journalists across the globe to expose war crimes and pick apart disinformation, using just their computers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For forty years humans have dreamed of persistent virtual worlds. Today, video games and their peripherals are pushing the boundaries of digital immersion, whether in the form of imaginary play spaces like Roblox and Second Life, or rich sensory augmentations that affect our experience of the physical world. But what will become of the Metaverse and cyberspace? And in our era of rapid and accelerating change, how can we accurately imagine and forecast future – to include both dazzling new technologies like VR and AR and wider social trends? Starring in this episode Found In Conversation are David Chalmers, Professor of Philosophy at New York University and the author of Reality Plus; Jane McGonigal, game designer, futurist and author of Imaginable; and Shaniel Ramjee, a Senior Investment Manager in the International Multi Asset & Strategy team at Pictet. The host of the conversation is Clara Bertrand. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A literary alchemist, Ann Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: essays that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. In this episode of the podcast, she explores her latest collection, These Precious Days. Offering a unique perspective on themes as diverse as failure, family, Snoopy the dog, children, publishing, teaching, and the actor Tom Hanks, join us for a dive into one of the most extraordinary minds at work in American letters today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Have you ever dreamt you could fly? Or imagined what it would be like to glide and swoop through the sky like a bird? Do you let your mind soar to unknown, magical spaces? In conversation with comedian, author and broadcaster Robin Ince, scientists and science writer Richard Dawkins explores two interweaving forms of wonder of flight: both in its literal form, the dream we all share of soaring in the skies, and flights of the mind, enabled through science, ideas, and imagination. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

For the past four years, Ed Miliband has been discovering and interviewing brilliant people all around the world who are successfully tackling the biggest problems we face, transforming communities and pioneering global movements. In this podcast, he draws on the most imaginative and ambitious of these ideas to provide a vision for the kind of society we need. He presents an inspiring array of real solutions to the toughest and most urgent of these problems, and argue that the key to success is to raise our sights and think big. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bringing together leading Afghan politician and women’s rights advocate Fawzia Koofi, who was a member of the recent delegation negotiating peace with the Taliban; Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent Christina Lamb; and award-winning war correspondent and New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson, this podcast explores both the transformation of everyday life in Afghanistan and the major humanitarian and political questions presented by the new status quo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Old Winchelsea to Skara Brae, Matthew Green transports us to Britain's shadowlands - the once thriving towns and cities that are now lost to time and memory. Drowned by storms. Buried by sand. Requisitioned by the army. One of Britain's most exciting young historians, Matthew Green has travelled the British Isles in search of the remnants of settlements that once adorned the nation's map - until nature, disease, politics or economics reduced them to ruins. In this episode of the podcast, he shares stories of medieval boomtowns, an ancient settlement that predates the pyramids, and many more highlights that cannot be found in any contemporary tourist's guidebook. In the face of climate change and other major historical forces, this tour of Britain's shadowlands serves as a powerful reminder of the transcience not only of our own lives, but of the manmade world itself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Our family relationships fundamentally influence our health and happiness -- but we think too narrowly about the impact of our families on our lives. In this episode of the podcast, bestselling psychotherapist Julia Samuel turns from her acclaimed work with individuals to draw on her sessions with a wide variety of families. She explores a range of common issu Uncovering how deeply we are influenced by our families, she offers a moving and reassuring meditation that, amidst trauma and hardship, will tell us unforgettable stories of forgiveness, learning and love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 1982, East Germany's fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. Journalist Philip Oltermann spent five years rifling through Stasi files, digging up lost volumes of poetry from musty basements, and tracking down the surviving members of the circle to uncover the little-known story of this famously ruthless intelligence agency's obsession with literature. In this episode of the podcast, he joins us to reveal what he discovered. Praise for Philip Oltermann's The Stasi Poetry Circle: 'A magnificent book . . . at once touching, exquisite, devastating and extraordinary.' - Philippe Sands 'A vivid, funny, and imperturbable portrait of Soviet Russia's most loyal satellite.' - Nell Zink 'Grippingly well-written' Anthony Quinn, Observer 'Oltermann's own prose is fast-moving and lucid, with a enjoyably pulpy, hardboiled quality' Telegraph The podcast is presented in partnership with Surfshark. Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/HOWTOPOD - Enter promo code HOWTOPOD for 83% off and 3 extra months free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The concept of a shared, single heritage and culture is central to Vladimir Putin’s justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But what is the true story of the two nations, and how can it illuminate the nature of the conflict? This episode of the podcast brings together historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose books on Russia include The Romanovs and Stalin - The Court of the Red Tzar, and award-winning foreign correspondent Luke Harding, who was expelled from Russia by the Kremlin in 2011 in the first act of its kind since the end of the cold war. Together they reflect on the deep roots of the conflict and share their insights in the ongoing invasion. The podcast is presented in partnership with Surfshark. Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/HOWTOPOD - Enter promo code HOWTOPOD for 83% off and 3 extra months free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Max Porter broke new ground with his highly-original debut Grief is a Thing With Feathers, and firmly established himself as a major literary talent with his second novel Lanny. The cult author joined us to explore his latest and most ambitious novel yet: The Death of Francis Bacon, a collection of 'verbal paintings' depicting the final moments of the artist’s life. What responsibility does an author owe to their subject, and to their audience, in the age of the Internet? Is culture becoming less tolerant of ambiguity? How far can a novelist experiment before commercial considerations kick in? Max answers all these questions and more -- and gives us a breathtaking performance from the new novel quite unlike any literary reading you've ever heard. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Few figures make such a seismic impact on their artistic medium that they transform its reputation from childish pulp entertainment to a vital and exhilarating creative form, capable of exploring the great mysteries of metaphysics, science, and the human spirit – but Alan Moore is one. A modern-day alchemist who transmuted comic books into literary gold, his works not only inspired a later generation of authors who are now household names, from Neil Gaiman to Susanna Clarke, but filmmakers, artists, and storytellers in every medium. Alexandra Ocasio Cortez quotes him online; the Occupy and Anonymous movements adopt the mask of his hero V; and Time magazine honours Watchmen as one of the 20th century’s greatest works of literature. A sculptor, poet, performance artist and professor at Oxford’s Ruskin School, Brian Catling’s creativity transcends any given form. Late in his career he turned his attention to the novel, reimagining its possibilities from the ground up to produce one of the most startling rich and strange works of fantasy ever produced: The Vorrh. Now he returns to the literary world with Hollow: the mesmerising tale of a band of mercenaries journeying through the grotesque, monstrous landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch to deliver an oracle to the monastery at the foot of the Tower of Babel. Coming together to celebrate the magic of human creativity, this unmissable conversation will restore your faith in the power of art to transform life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Food writers Olia Hercules and Alissa Timoshkina have been friends since university and together they have come together to launch #CookForUkraine - a campaign which aims to raise awareness and funds through a shared appreciation of the rich tradition of Ukrainian cooking with supper clubs, events and encouraging people to share recipes, along with the stories behind the dishes. In its first weeks they have whipped up an extraordinary amount of support from everyone from Jamie Oliver to Nigella Lawson as well as numerous restaurants and institutions. Here they talk to Hannah MacInnes about the campaign, about the war and the tragic impact it is having on both the people of Ukraine and of Russia, on their families and friends, the strong cultural ties between the two countries, their rich culinary traditions and much more. Please head to their website and justgiving page at https://www.justgiving.com/fundraising/cookforukraine to find out more and to donate. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What if everything we thought we knew about the origins of human civilisation is a myth? In their book The Dawn of Everything, the late David Graeber and his collaborator David Wengrow tell an ambitious and revelatory new history of the world – one that overturns the notion of Rosseau’s innocent Noble Savage and the ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives of Thomas Hobbes alike. In this episode of the podcast, Wengrow joins former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to transform your understanding of our past and offer a powerful, playful, and extraordinarily original vision of our future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Medical historian Dr Paul Craddock joins the How To Academy Podcast to takes us on a journey from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants, uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, this podcast explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal and machine, and continues to do so today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Raised in the hardy forest communities of British Columbia, scientist Suzanne Simard overturned conventional beliefs in proving that trees and plants are connected underground by an immense web of fungal mycelia, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that sustain the forest. She joins author and traveller Sophy Roberts to tell the story of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their perceptions, behaviours, healing capacities, language, memory and wisdom. Simard's landmark work has been immensely influential, revealing the complex cycle of forest life - on which we rely for our existence - and offering profound lessons about resilience and kinship. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, author and documentarian Jon Ronson and political scientist Brian Klaas investigate the relationship between power, psychopathy, and corruption. Drawing on the insights from Jon's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test and Brian's new book Corruptible, for which he met some of the world's most reviled and dangerous leaders, this is a provocative and revelatory journey into what power is and who gets to wield to it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Yrsa Daley-Ward’s work explores all parts of the human condition, but especially those we don’t tend to speak of: mental health, sexuality, love, grief and addiction. Her words have resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers around the world: through her acclaimed books of poetry and memoir, bone and The Terrible and through her powerful writing for Beyoncé’s cultural touchstone Black Is King. In conversation with acclaimed novelist and poet Salena Godden, Yrsa joins the How To Academy Podcast to offer a compelling invitation for self-renewal. How can we remove our filters, and see and feel more of who we really are behind the preconceived notions of property and manners we've accumulated with age? Find out from one of the most celebrated young voices in contemporary culture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How can we live a more ethical life? This question has plagued people for thousands of years, but it's never been tougher to answer than it is now, thanks to challenges great and small that flood our day-to-day lives and threaten to overwhelm us with impossible decisions and complicated results with unintended consequences. The Good Place was the smash hit Netflix comedy that made moral philosophy fun. Now the series creator, Michael Schur and its star Jameela Jamil join us with a foolproof guide to making the correct moral decision in every situation you ever encounter, anywhere on earth, forever. This episode includes some unfiltered swearing. If you would prefer a bleeped version, you can find it on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the Victorian era, in the shadow of Darwin's ideas about evolution, a new full-blooded attempt to impose control over our unruly biology began to grow in the clubs, salons and offices of the powerful. It was enshrined in a political movement that bastardised science, and for sixty years enjoyed bipartisan and huge popular support. Eugenics was vigorously embraced in dozens of countries. It was also a cornerstone of Nazi ideology, and forged a path that led directly to the gates of Auschwitz. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, bestselling author, geneticist and broadcaster Adam Rutherford tells the story of this dangerous pseudoscience, and investigates its modern day legacy: the prospect of tinkering with the DNA of our unborn children to make them smarter, fitter, stronger. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How did the Mughal empire – which then generated just under half the world’s wealth – come to be replaced by the first global corporate power - the East India Company? And how does the legacy of British imperialism continue to shape life and culture in Britain today? Bringing together Empireland author and Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera and bestselling award-winning historian William Dalrymple, this episode of the How To Academy Podcast will tell a story that is barely taught in schools or mentioned in museums but is critically important to who we are as a nation in the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Fi Glover and Jane Garvey are radio legends. Already major BBC stars in their own right, their podcast together, Fortunately… with Fi and Jane has grown from a cult following to become one of the nation’s most loved and celebrated shows. Described in their own words as a “podcast in which two women exchange random thoughts, occasional pleasantries, fatuous double-entendres, real-life challenges, and often sudden bursts of something approaching wisdom”, this witty, refreshing take on the drama and hilarity of the modern world has been an anchor and a lifeline for so many of us during the pandemic, coming to represent the best that British broadcasting has to offer. Just before Christmas, Fi and Jane joined us live on stage in London, sharing the wit and wisdom for which they have won the nation's hearts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In February 1991, Robert Maxwell made a triumphant entrance into Manhattan harbour aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to complete his purchase of the ailing New York Daily News. Crowds lined the quayside to watch his arrival, taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand and children asked for his autograph. But just ten months later, Maxwell disappeared from the same yacht off the Canary Islands, only to be found dead in the water soon afterward. As his empire fell apart, long-hidden debts and unscrupulous dealings came to light: and soon his reputation was in tatters. Journalist and author John Preston has interviewed everyone from Rupert Murdoch to Peter Mandelson, from Alistair Campbell to Nicholas Coleridge; seeking to uncover the true Robert Maxwell. On this week's podcast, he joins us to deliver a definitive account of his extraordinary rise and scandalous fall. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Described by The Times as a modern Daphne de Maurier, Claire Fuller’s writing is beautifully dark and vividly atmospheric. Her fourth novel, Unsettled Ground, follows the lives of two adult twins whose world is upturned after the death of their mother. After surviving for years off-grid and at the mercy of the seasons in their secluded cottage, the twins are tumbled into the present and forced to confront their change of circumstance and long-ignored family secrets. Unsettled Ground is at once a haunting study of our society's resistance to the unconventional and a sensitive portrait of familial love. Claire shares with us how writing the novel has changed her perception of modern life and asks why contemporary fiction has lost sight of the realities of rural poverty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorising? In conversation with mathematician and Oxford Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cursed with biases, fallacies and illusions. Offering a guide to the tools of rationality, Rationality matters. It leads to better choices in our lives and in the public sphere, and is the ultimate driver of social justice and moral progress. Brimming with insight, this podcast will enlighten, inspire and empower. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bexy was raised in a secret commune deep in the British countryside. At 10, she was placed on Silence Restriction, forced to be silent for a whole year. Even from an early age, she knew what was happening was not right. At the age of 15, she escaped, leaving behind her parents and 11 siblings. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, she tells us her family came to be part of the Children of God, and how she found the courage to get out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Emily Ratajkowski has established herself as a multifaceted talent. As a model, she has appeared on the covers of major fashion magazines and is currently the face of L’Oréal’s hair care line Kerastase. As an actress, she has appeared in films including David Fincher’s Gone Girl and alongside Amy Schumer in I Feel Pretty. Ratajkowski is also outspoken politically, continually using her platform to advocate for her political beliefs, having campaigned for Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020. She joined How To Academy live on stage in London to explore the themes of her essay collection My Body in conversation with journalist and broadcaster Pandora Sykes. Investigating the culture's fetishization fo female beauty and its obsession and contempt for women's sexuality, this is an must-hear discussion for everyone concerned with the dynamics of gender and power in the modern world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A good life involves more than just pleasure. Suffering is essential too. It seems obvious that pleasure leads to happiness - and pain does the opposite. And yet we are irresistibly drawn to a host of experiences that truly hurt, from the exhilarating fear of horror movies or extreme sport, to the wrenching sadness of a song or novel, to the gruelling challenges of exercise, work, creativity and having a family. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, pre-eminent psychologist Paul Bloom explores the pleasures of suffering and explains why the activities that provide most satisfaction are often the ones that involve greatest sacrifice. He will argue that embracing this truth is the key to a life well lived. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Philip Pullman’s novels are a testament to the power of the human imagination and a celebration of our capacity for wonder, proving to millions of readers across the globe that enchantment still has a profound role to play in our age of reason. It is an ethos shared by the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, whose book The Master and His Emissary was that rare thing: a bestselling classic of modern philosophy with genuine relevance to human life. In this podcast, the two men will come together to explore The Matter With Things, McGilchrist’s ground-breaking sequel to The Master and His Emissary and the culmination of a lifetime of thought. How does the brain produce our experience of the world? What role do science, reason, and imagination play in the search for truth – and how much should we trust each of these paths to knowledge? On this week's show you'll hear new answers to these ancient questions - and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

'For the left, elections are a brief interlude in a life of real politics, a moment to ask whether it's worth taking time off to vote . . . Then back to work. The work will be to move forward to construct the better world that is within reach.' – Noam Chomsky A giant of both 20th and 21st century intellectual life, Noam Chomsky’s influence on the development of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science cannot be overstated; but it is as a political thinker, activist and social critic that his ideas have made the most impact outside of the academy. In conversation with the author Fatima Bhutto, he joins us live to shed light on the world in 2021, sharing his insights into the post-pandemic world, exposing the catastrophic nature and impact of authoritarian policies on people and the planet, and exploring the dynamics of our dog-eat-dog society. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What we can do to have better conversations with our children and with each other about race, and build a better world? Beverly Daniel Tatum and Robin DiAngelo have dedicated their lives to anti-racist education. The bestselling authors of, respectively, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and White Fragility, their insights are essential for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of race in the United States and beyond. In the age of Trump, Black Lives Matter, and increasingly polarisation, they join the How To Academy Podcast with an urgent call to embrace courage, lifelong commitment and accountability in the struggle for equality. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Chief historian of the BBC's Horrible Histories TV show and the host of chart-topping podcast You're Dead to Me, Greg Jenner is a master in the art of turning the messiness of history into whip-smart comic entertainment. He joined us to explore his favourite historical questions and their often surprising answers - as submitted by the general public. From chariot racing to bank robbery, Egyptian mummies to Monty Python, this episode of the How To Academy Podcast is a ride through some of the wildest and weirdest episodes in ten thousand years of human civilisation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

World-renowned ethologist and conservationist Dr Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a UN Messenger of Peace, has spent more than a half-century warning of our impact on our planet. From her famous encounters and research into the wild chimpanzees in the forests of Gombe which began more than sixty years ago and continues to this day, to her tireless campaigning for the environment in her late eighties, Jane has become the godmother to a new generation of climate activists. She joined the How To Academy Podcast to teach us how to find strength in the face of the climate crisis. Photo attibution: Vincent Calmel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Few works of literature have the power to change who we are and how we conceive our place in the universe – but Richard Powers Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning masterpiece The Overstory is one. For Barack Obama, Powers ‘changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it’; for Emma Thompson, The Overstory was a ‘the best book I've read in 10 years… a lodestone’; for Ann Patchett, it was simply ‘one of the best novels, period’. This year's follow-up, the Booker shortlisted Bewilderment, is no less profound; an acclaimed exploration of the fragility of life on Earth that dares to ask the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet? Richard joined us on stage in London in conversation with broadcaster Razia Iqbal to explore why storytelling matters. In an age of impending ecological catastrophe, how can the novel help us to grow our empathy for one another and expand our awareness and love of the natural world? This podcast was produced in association with the Conduit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Bernard-Henri Levy is one of the world’s most esteemed philosophers and public intellectuals; but his understanding of philosophy is anything but theoretical. A humanitarian activist of deep conviction, for fifty years he has reported from the sites of human rights abuses and humanitarian crises that fail to receive global attention or an active response, shedding light on urgent stories that Western media and governments have chosen to ignore. He joined us on stage in London to issue a stirring rebuke to indifference and an exhortation to level our gaze at those most hidden from us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Kate Bowler had always accepted the modern idea that life is an endless horizon of possibilities. As many of us do, she saw life as a series of choices that, if made correctly, would lead us to a place just out of reach. But then, aged just thirty-five, Kate was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. She was forced to ask one of the most fundamental questions of all: How do we create meaning in our lives when the life we hoped for is put on hold? In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Kate explores how to navigate life with the knowledge that it could end at any moment. As we struggle to decipher what constitutes a meaningful existence in this strange new world, at a time when our lives have never been further from our control, Kate will demonstrate how we can find meaning without having to pretend that life is always getting better. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In anticipation of Steven Pinker's return to How To Academy later this month, this episode of the podcast revisits his conversation with Stephen Fry on stage in London in 2018. The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the past. In conversation with actor and author Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker makes the case for an Enlightenment newly recharged for the 21st century, urging us to use our faculties of reason and sympathy to solve the problems that inevitably come with being products of evolution in an indifferent universe. We will never have a perfect world, but - defying the chorus of fatalism and reaction - we can continue to make it a better one. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this week's podcast, science writer and Sunday Times bestselling author James Nestor joins us with a guide that will forever change the way you think about health and wellbeing. We breathe 25,000 times a day: yet as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly - with grave consequences for our health. James travelled the world to discover the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. He shared his story with Hannah MacInnes. You will never breathe the same again. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this special bonus episode by our friends at New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association, Professor Alice Roberts takes us through important archaeological discoveries to help us better understand life in Britain today. About With Reason: From New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association, With Reason is a podcast offering intelligent thinking for turbulent times. Interviews with thinkers who speak to our age – on subjects including religion, race, politics, sex, tech, work and much more. Find it on Apple, Spotify, Google, or their website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From My Left Foot to Harry Potter, Fleabag to Killing Eve, Fiona Shaw is an integral presence in the Irish and British screen drama of the last three decades; and in collaboration with the foremost directors of our time – from Deborah Warner to Nicholas Hytner – is universally renowned as one of the most outstanding and distinguished stage actors of her generation. Whether in her ground-breaking performance as Shakespeare’s Richard II or her unforgettable turn as Brecht’s Mother Courage, as Euripides’ Medea or Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, her work is experimental, provocative, and risk-taking, daring audiences to reassess what they thought they knew about theatre and the human condition. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, she explores her life and work with writer and broadcaster Matthew Stadlen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Philippe Sands meets Rutger Bregman, one of the greatest young thinkers of our time, to hear a new story of human nature that places our capacity for kindness, not selfishness, at its heart. It’s a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we’re taught, are by nature selfish and governed by self-interest. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, human rights lawyer and award-winning author Philippe Sands QC meets the bestselling Dutch historian and viral superstar Rutger Bregman to hear a new argument: that it is realistic, as well as revolutionary, to assume that people are good. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In this week's podcast, literary scholar Dennis Duncan takes us into the secret world of the index and reveals how it transformed the way we read and process knowledge forever. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. From the library of Alexandria to the coffee houses of Georgian London, an d with a cast including Plato, Sherlock Holmes, and Norman Mailer, this witty history of an invaluable and underappreciated tool is sure to delight bibliophiles everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Mary Portas loves business. Fundamentally, she lives and breathes it. What she loves best about it is making businesses work. But in this week's podcast, she argues that we’ve been doing it wrong. In 2021, it’s not only possible to build healthy businesses that do less bad and add more good – it’s a commercial imperative. Rampant consumerism has been driving the economic machine and we have put the pursuit of profit above all else. Over the past thirty years the business of what we buy has been dominated by the biggest, fastest and cheapest. But those values no longer resonate. We've come to realize that more doesn't equal better. How we live, buy and sell is changing. The post-pandemic era is all about care, respect and understanding the implications of what we're doing. This 'Kindness Economy' is a new value system where in order to thrive businesses must understand the fundamental role they play in the fabric of our lives. They need to add, not just grow, balancing commerce with social progress. Because we don't just want to buy from brands - we want to buy into them. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is time for a new era of global order. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown joins us with authoritative solutions to the greatest challenges of our age. Gordon Brown knows more than most politicians about how to handle an international crisis. As Prime Minister during the 2008 financial crisis he played a major role in steering the global response and driving the recovery; and as the UN’s Special Envoy for Global Education he is one of the world’s most prominent and influential frontline diplomats, working to widen access to education and break the poverty cycle. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, he joins Tom Fletcher, former diplomat and Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, to share his insights into the major crises of the 21st century. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

An icon whose spectacular works occupy a liminal space between sculpture, engineering and architecture, Anish Kapoor is one of the world’s most ambitious living artists. The first living artist to take over the Royal Academy with a record-breaking blockbuster exhibition, the recipient of a Turner Prize, a knighthood, the LennonOno Prize for Peace, the $1 million Genesis Prize, an Oxford doctorate and the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour, Anish Kapoor holds the rare status of an artist both revered by critics and overwhelmingly loved by the public. From Chicago’s Cloud Gate to the London Olympic Park’s Orbit, the Rockefeller Center’s Sky Mirror to Paris’s Leviathan, Kapoor’s sculptures resonate with mythic significance, belonging to a tradition and a way of thinking that extends back to the great wonders of the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On New Year’s Day 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever heard of. Less than 12 months later, vaccination was rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Catherine Green, who led on the manufacturing of the vaccine, join us to separate fact from fiction and explain how they made a highly safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Willis Wu mostly gets to play Generic Asian Man. If he is lucky, sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son. For now he is a bit player: but he dreams that one day he will be offered the most coveted role someone who looks like him might aspire to: Kung Fu Guy. A coruscating satire of race, assimilation and Hollywood, Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown is both a groundbreaking experimental novel and a deeply personal and affecting family story heralded as one of the best books of 2020. A New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2020 National Book Award, the novel confirms Yu as one of America's most exciting young authors. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, he explores the history of Chinese culture in the US, how his personal experiences as a first generation Taiwanese-American shaped the narrative, and what his own time in Hollywood has taught him about the art of storytelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark at a gathering of military officials, describing it as ‘the calm before the storm’-then refused to explain himself to puzzled journalists. But on internet message boards, a mysterious poster called ‘Q Clearance Patriot’ began an elaboration all of their own. In this week's podcast, Mike Rothschild explores his new book, The Storm Is Upon Us. With families torn apart and with the Capitol under attack, he argues that mocking the madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Instead, he argues that QAnon tells us everything we need to know about global fear after Trump-and that we need to understand it now, because it’s not going away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was a world-wide sensation – forever changing how we think about women and desire. A bestseller in the US and the UK, “Book of the Year” for more than thirty of the most respected media titles, including the FT, Times and Time magazine, an instant classic beloved by cultural icons including Gillian Anderson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Elizabeth Gilbert, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a global phenomenon. Now Lisa’s debut novel Animal is set to do the same for how we think about madness and trauma. Animal opens with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head of an unrequited lover and becomes a road-trip to California, centring on a woman who is driven to extremes by the violence of her past. In this episode of the podcast, Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman explores the inspiration behind this brazen and daring fictional debut. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices