Episode summary: Web programmer John Siracusa joins the Automators to share his thoughts on automation workflows, the best programming language for automation, and how automating your Mac desktop can become a road to madness.

Episode summary: For many businesses, it’s all about looking forward. New trends, new brands, new verticals. But Sharon Price John sees a different path: one that involves looking to the past. She has made a career of reinvigorating forgotten and failing brands, including Nerf, Stride Rite, and Barbie Fashions. But her career hasn’t been all success all the time. Alex talks to Sharon about a bet she made that went very wrong, and about her biggest turnaround yet, as the CEO and President of Build-a-Bear Workshop.

Episode summary: Russia has glittering towers and a jet-set elite, but grinding rural poverty. It has one of the world’s great literary traditions, but throws dissenters in jail for a blog post. Who is Vladimir Putin, the man who created this new world power through force of will? New York Times’ correspondent Steven Lee Myers unravels some of this question for Alec. His book is The New Tsar. Myers talks to Alec about Putin’s early years, the Putin-Trump connection and how being the New York Times’ Beijing correspondent is different from — and similar to — being Moscow correspondent.

Episode summary: On the 80th Anniversary of the night 20,000 Americans attended a Nazi Rally in the heart of Manhattan, the Memory Palace is teaming up with Radio Diaries. We’ll hear their new story about that rally after we listen back to a Memory Palace episode that took place on that same evening, in which some Nazis get punched. Learn more about this evening at www.radiodiaries.org. For info on the original Memory Palace episode, head here.

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Episode summary: A quick episode in your ear and out your brain with 3 things I want you to know - two are related to how I’d love to be able to help you and one is how you can join me on a journey to try something new.

Episode summary: Dinner under Pressure

Episode summary: A break from Brexit this week: we talk to the novelist Richard T. Kelly, author of Crusaders and The Knives, about what makes great political fiction. We discuss the research needed to make a political novel authentic, how to get inside the head of a politician and we ask whether May or Trump would make good fictional heroes. Plus we pick some of our favourite political novels, with literary critic Kasia Boddy. Don’t worry: more Brexit soon! Talking Points: How does a novelist know what it’s like to be a Conservative Home Secretary? - It’s about research and empathy. - Novelists should understand and contain forces of both revolution and counter-revolution within themself. The best political novels often extend forward into dystopia but also backward into history to explain how you got to that outcome. - Writing the present is extremely difficult. - Political novels need human drama and conflict. - The human elements allow you to get beyond Washington or Westminster. - The challenge is to capture both…

Episode summary: Before 1970, the most popular radio stations in the U.S were run by white people. But that all changed when Percy Sutton helped to form Inner City Broadcasting with the mission of putting black programming in the hands of black people. Together he and his son Pierre—and later Pierre’s daughter, Keisha—built a radio empire. But it was about more than just entertaining listeners; together they changed the culture and radically influenced how radio stations and record labels treated black artists. Alex talks with Pierre and Keisha about the unlikely rise—and heartbreaking fall—of their family business.

Episode summary: Linda Civitello is a food historian whose latest book is Baking Powder Wars: the cutthroat food fight that revolutionized cooking. My kind of book, it uses an ingredient we all today take completely for granted to look at everything from fake news and dodgy sales demonstrations to changes to the US constitution. Our chat barely scratched the surface. We didn’t, for example, talk about the connection between baking powder and the Indianapolis Speedway. Nor did we talk about how the rise of baking powder made it so much easier to eat an excess of sugar, fats and carbs. But we did cover a lot of other ground, from before the outbreak of hostilities to the eventual end of the war. The winner might not surprise you if you have a tin of baking powder in your cupboard. I imagine it did surprise some of the combatants. Notes Get Baking Powder Wars at Amazon and I get a teeny kickback – just like those corrupt Missouri senators. The banner photograph is a detail from John Frederick Peto’s Still Life with Cake,…