Memorial Day – PoetryNow
Sunnylyn Thibodeaux mediates on the anxieties and ambitions of adult life. Produced by Sarah Geis. {listen}
Are We Living in a Simulation?
Elon Musk thinks we definitely could be, and it seems he is not alone. The idea that we might simply be products of an advanced post-human civilisation, that are simply…
Refresh Your Mind
This week, Manoush’s book - the book that started with you, listeners - hits the shelves. To encourage you to #GetBored and find brilliance, we made a weird earworm. It’s…
Proms Extra: Sleep and Insomnia
Nick Littlehales, sports sleep coach and chair of the British Sleep Council, talks with novelist A. L. Kennedy about sleep and insomnia. {listen}
Proms Extra: Opium and Creativity in the 19th c.
From Thomas De Quincy via Coleridge to Berlioz, a second-generation opium addict, Daisy Hay and Richard Davenport-Hines discuss why drugs were thought integral to creativity first in England and later…
Technobabble
UK podcast star Helen Zaltzman of The Allusionist helps me figure out why one set of poorly understood pseudo-scientific terms can sink a scene, while another set can make a…
The Culture Inside
Is there a part of ourselves that we don’t acknowledge, that we don’t even have access to and that might make us ashamed if we encountered it? We begin with…
Wet weekend
Rob's weekend has been wet, even though it hasn't rained! What's happened? Feifei's about to find out and learn a new authentic English expression! {listen} Transcript FeifeiHello. I'm Feifei and…
The Stethoscope – 99% Invisible
In the early 1800s, an invention came along that changed everything. Suddenly the doctor could clearly hear what was happening inside the body. The heart, the lungs, the breath. This…
What hunter-gatherer gut microbiomes have that we don’t, and breaking the emoji code
Sarah Crespi talks to Sam Smits about how our microbial passengers differ from one culture to the next—are we losing diversity and the ability to fight chronic disease? For our…