Episode summary: Raymond Blanc has spent decades growing an orchard at Le Manoir. An orchard Raymond has planted with 2500 rare trees from in the hope of saving lost and endangered varieties. He explains to Dan Saladino why the orchard might end up being his greatest legacy, a story he has captured...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: We welcome Kevin Roose to the podcast — tech reporter for The New York Times and thorn in the side of Facebook — to talk to us about how platforms’ laser focus on growth resulted in building a misinformation ecosystems and algorithms that they don’t really understand. Kevin and Etha...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: This week a special edition from the Bristol Festival of Economics with Helen Thompson and Adam Tooze talking about what might follow the pandemic. From vaccines to changing patterns of employment, from action on climate to new tensions with China, we explore what the long-term effe...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: The Wikipedia founder explains how the online encyclopedia will maintain objectivity in polarizing times

Episode summary: Enron collapsed nearly 20 years ago, but chances are something you use today was affected by emails sent by 150 of the company’s top employees. These emails — about meetings and energy markets but also affairs, divorces, and fraud — have helped create new technologies, fight terrori...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: The philosopher Mary Astell (1666 – 1731) has been described as “the first English feminist”. Born in Newcastle in relatively poor circumstances in the aftermath of the upheaval of the English Civil War and the restoration of the monarchy, she moved to London as a young woman and be...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Safiya Noble, author of Algorithms of Oppression and co-founder of the Center for Critical Internet Studies at UCLA, outlines her abolitionist framework for Big Tech. Recorded the day after Jacob Blake was shot by Kenosha, WI police in August, Noble joins us to talk about what it mi...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: Tim Harford explores what we know about mortality rates in the current pandemic. We discuss the differences between the risks to different age groups, and why that has an effect on a country’s Covid 19 fatality rate. We speak to Dr Hannah Ritchie from the University of Oxford and Dr...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: We talk to the historian Margaret MacMillan about the changing character of war, from the ancient world to the twenty-first century. Do we still understand the risks? Where are the conflicts of the future likely to break out? And how can we reconcile the terrible destructiveness of...

There’s more ➢

Episode summary: In 1932, a group of men in a speakeasy in New York City hatched a plan — to take out life insurance on a loner named Michael Malloy, and make his death look like an accident. They thought it would be easy money. But Michael Malloy would become known as the man who just wouldn’t die....

There’s more ➢