Episode summary: Is scientific progress best characterized by discrete leaps or incremental improvement?

Episode summary: Order a hot pastrami on rye at any delicatessen and you’ll taste the briny terroir of the Jewish Diaspora. Jackson, Mississippi, was home to the Olde Tyme Deli, which Judy and Irv Feldman owned and operated from 1961 until 2000. In this episode, we’ll trace the migration of pastrami...

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Episode summary: Mark Bloschock is an engineer from Texas, and in the late 1970s he got a job with the Texas Department of Transportation renovating the Congress Avenue Bridge. The bridge was a simple concrete arch bridge that spans Lady Bird Lake in downtown Austin. It needed to be rebuilt with mor...

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Episode summary: Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures about letter writing - Mother’s Day cards travelling thousands of miles home, love letters that are cherished, hidden and lost, and a one-way correspondence bringing comfort during chemotherapy. Letters to My Dear Lovers P...

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Episode summary: An update on the future of The Test Kitchen series and PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni’s departure.

Episode summary: This fourth session in the Earth Convention series explores the huge global impact of food production on the environment and climate change - and indeed on human health. Food production is responsible for a quarter of all the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming,...

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Episode summary: The past 12 months have been tumultuous for us all. But imagine, for one second, how it would have been without a cup of tea? In the first three months of lockdown, we spent an additional £24 million on tea and coffee according to research firm Kantar. And despite tea trends divergi...

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Episode summary: Are different countries counting deaths from Covid 19 in the same way? Tim Harford finds out if we can trust international comparisons with the data available. We discover Peru currently has the most excess deaths per capita over the course of the pandemic, while Belgium has the hig...

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Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries, which figured so strongly in the imagination of the age. For those able and willing to travel, there were countless destinations from Jerusalem, Rome and Sa...

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Episode summary: Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures that centre around acts of love - from the story of Ruth Coker Burks, who became a loving caretaker for hundreds of men during the AIDS epidemic, to the poet Nikita Gill’s look at a love which ended in its beginning. Jewel...

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