-
🎧 How and Why did Sexual Reproduction Evolve on our Planet? With Dr Lixing Sun
Before sex evolved on our planet, two billion years ago, all reproduction happened asexually. So why and how did sexual reproduction evolve?
Dr Lixing Sun is Distinguished Research Professor in behavior and evolution at Central Washington University. In a new book, On the Origin of Sex, he explo...
-
🎧 How deeply was the British Crown involved in the transatlantic slave trade?
How deeply was the British Crown involved in the transatlantic slave trade? New research by historian Brooke Newman argues that, from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, until well into the 19th century, the Crown and its navy helped expand, finance and protect the trade in enslaved African people.
...
-
🎧 Who Are Renoir’s Mystery Girls? With Catherine Ostler
Could one of Renoir’s most iconic paintings conceal one of the most astonishing true stories of scandal and tragedy in Golden Age Paris?
In 1881, Pierre-Auguste Renoir painted two young sisters from a Jewish banking dynasty at their home in Paris’s grand 8th arrondissement. Pink and Blue, a port...
-
🎧 Is There an Overdiagnosis Crisis in Modern Medicine? With Suzanne O’Sullivan
More people are being labelled with medical conditions than ever before. Diagnoses of autism, ADHD, allergies, and long COVID have skyrocketed - but are we actually getting less healthy?
In this episode, neurologist Dr Suzanne O’Sullivan speaks to Dr Güneş Taylor about an impending crisis of ov...
-
🎧 Should You Be Talking To AI? with Jamie Bartlett
Hundreds of millions of people now talk to AI, such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini every day. They organise their finances and holidays, ask advice, seek therapy and find love – via machines. Almost overnight, chatbots are transforming society, politics and business. This is one of the biggest and ...
-
🎧 How Has Translation Transformed Shakespeare? With Daniel Hahn
What does it mean to translate some of the most recognisable and revered works in the English language? When the wordplay, poetry, and syntax of Shakespeare are all changed, is it still truly Shakespeare?
In this episode, host Mythili Rao speaks with translator Daniel Hahn about his new book If ...
-
🎧 How Will the Climate Crisis Reshape Global Politics? With Arthur Snell
Our changing climate is accelerating conflict and migration, with the potential to drive political instability from the Sahel to Saudi Arabia to Siberia. From the water-stressed mountains of the Arabian Peninsula to the wildfires raging through America’s most populated regions, the climate crisis...
-
🎧 Stalin’s Apostles: Revisiting The Cambridge Five, With Antonia Senior
The Cambridge Five - Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Kim Philby, John Cairncross and Keeper of the Queen's Pictures Anthony Blunt - made up one of the most notorious spy rings of the 20th century. Besotted with communist ideology and radicalised while at Cambridge University in the 1930s, their clan...
