On a summer's day in 1596, a young girl in Stratford-upon-Avon takes to her bed with a fever. Her twin brother, Hamnet, searches everywhere for help. Why is nobody at home? Their mother, Agnes, is over a mile away, in the garden where she grows medicinal herbs. Their father is working in London. Neither parent knows that one of the children will not survive the week. The winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 and a Sunday Times bestseller, Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet is a tender and unforget...
May 24, 2021•59 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Michio Kaku takes Robin Ince on the mind-bending ride through the twists and turns of an epic scientific journey: the quest to find a Theory of Everything. Einstein dedicated his life to seeking this elusive Holy Grail, a single, revolutionary 'god equation' which would tie all the forces in the universe together, yet never found it. Some of the greatest minds in physics took up the search, from Stephen Hawking to Brian Greene. None have yet succeeded. In this conversation with author, comic and...
May 17, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 4Ep. 17
Sitting at the intersection of art, science, and history, this week's podcast reveals fresh perspectives and fascinating insights into our material world. Scientific progress has given us a good grasp on the properties of many different materials: But most scientists cannot measure the temperature of steel just by looking at it, or know how it feels to blow up a balloon of glass. Anna Ploszajski is here to change that. A materials scientist and engineer, she has journeyed into the domain of make...
May 10, 2021•56 min•Season 4Ep. 16
What makes great stories work? What can they tell us about our world today? How can they make us better readers and how can we write them ourselves? George Saunders is one of the undisputed masters of American letters; a novelist, storyteller and essayist whose wisdom and insight have been rewarded with the highest accolades in literature. In a rare treat for authors and storytellers of all forms, he shares his insights from teaching some of the best young writers in America. Drawing on the work...
Apr 26, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Political journalist Matthew d'Ancona's issues a call to arms to challenge this age of political extremism, lazy populism and democratic torpor. The old tools of political analysis are obsolete - they have rusted and are no longer fit for purpose. We've grown lazy, wedded to the assumption that, after ruptures such as Brexit, the pandemic, and the rise of the populist Right, things will eventually go 'back to normal'. Award-winning political writer Matthew d'Ancona joins us with an invitation to...
Apr 19, 2021•1 hr 1 min
Isabel Allende has been a feminist her whole life. From a young age she rebelled against male authority, after seeing her mother Panchita abandoned by her husband and left to provide for three small children. While growing up in Chile in her grandparents’ house, Isabel realised early on that the women in her family, from matriarch to housemaid, were at a disadvantage compared to the men, treated as subordinates with no voice. As a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s, Isabel rode the firs...
Apr 12, 2021•58 min
The country’s most prolific and celebrated novelist reflects upon a life in literature. Since his rise to literary acclaim almost forty years ago for the dazzlingly grotesque short stories that earned him the moniker “Ian Macabre”, to his present-day voyages into the uncharted territories of climate change and Artificial Intelligence, one thing has remained consistent across Ian McEwan’s astonishing oeuvre: the exacting precision with which he can simultaneously dissect both the mysteries of the...
Mar 29, 2021•1 hr 12 min
If you had a trillion dollars and a year to spend it for the good of the world and the advancement of science, what would you do? It's an unimaginably large sum, yet it's only around one per cent of world GDP, and about the valuation of Google, Microsoft or Amazon. It's a much smaller sum than the world found to bail out its banks in 2008 or deal with Covid-19. In this week’s How To Academy Podcast, New Scientist senior editor and evolutionary biologist Rowan Hooper explores how $1 trillion coul...
Mar 22, 2021•35 min
Since he introduced us to his singular and inimitable brand of psychology, stagecraft and magic in 2000, Derren Brown has played Russian Roulette on live television, convinced middle-managers to commit armed robbery in the street, led the nation in a séance and exposed psychic and faith-healing charlatans. His live shows astonish audiences across the country and have captivated the West End and Broadway. He joined How To Academy to teach a lesson none of us can afford to miss: what we can do to ...
Mar 15, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Research shows that the smarter you are the more you might struggle to update your beliefs, yet some of the most successful people, from entrepreneurs to politicians, all have one thing in common: the ability to think like scientists, continually questioning their beliefs, and to embrace being wrong. As an organisational psychologist, Adam Grant is an expert on opening other people’s minds, and our own. He is one of the world’s most-cited, most prolific, and most influential researchers in busin...
Mar 08, 2021•1 hr 7 min
We all have a voice in our head that we tune into from time to time for guidance, ideas and wisdom. Except sometimes, this voice leads us down a rabbit hole of negative self-talk and endless rumination which undermines our performance at work, interferes with our ability to make good decisions, and negatively influences our relationships. Since we aren’t going to stop talking to ourselves— and, frankly, we don’t want to, since the voices in our heads have valuable things to say—it’s important we...
Mar 01, 2021•1 hr 4 min
Even before the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, capitalism was stuck. It had no answer to the different challenges facing the world – from those related to health to digital privacy to the climate crisis. Taking inspiration from President Kennedy’s ‘moonshot’ programmes that successfully co-ordinated public and private sectors to put a man on the moon, Mariana Mazzucato calls for the same level of boldness and experimentation to be applied to the biggest social and political issues of our time. In co...
Feb 22, 2021•1 hr
We live during the most important era of human history. In the twentieth century, we developed the means to destroy ourselves – without developing the moral framework to ensure we won't. This is the Precipice, and how we respond to it will be the most crucial decision of our time. In this week's podcast, Oxford moral philosopher Toby Ord explores the risks to humanity's future, from the familiar man-made threats of climate change and nuclear war, to the potentially greater, more unfamiliar threa...
Feb 15, 2021•50 min
How can we best approach one another across our differences? The first and only poet to write a New York Times bestseller, the winner of every significant literary prize in the United States, and recipient of a MacArthur “genius grant”, Jamaican-born Claudia Rankine is an icon of contemporary American letters. In this conversation with Guardian columnist Owen Jones, she explores her own prejudices and those of others, and celebrate vulnerability, openness and the willingness to be wrong. It’s an...
Feb 08, 2021•59 min
A tour de force of neuroscience and philosophy, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary speaks to everyone searching for happiness, meaning and understanding in the modern world. For millennia humans have speculated upon the differences between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Why did evolution lead to humans and many other animals developing two cerebral hemispheres, separated by a groove? No neuroscientist would dispute that there are significant differences; but until now, ...
Feb 01, 2021•1 hr
From Blink to Outliers, Revisionist History to David and Goliath, no-one challenges our shared assumptions and invites us to rethink human nature like Malcolm Gladwell. Named one of Time Magazine’s 100 most influential people and Foreign Policy’s Top Global Thinkers, his ideas have passed into common currency and made him one of the most recognisable and beloved public intellectuals of our time. He is uncannily tuned into the zeitgeist, able to fuse scholarly insights, human stories and a global...
Jan 25, 2021•42 min
‘First, you have to learn how to be a woman. Then middle age arrives, and you realise you have to become … more than a woman. To those around you, you’re now the Fourth Emergency Service.” – Caitlin Moran Caitlin Moran was home-educated on a Wolverhampton council estate and went onto become the most iconic columnist and critic of her generation. From How to Be a Woman to Moranifesto, How to Build a Girl to Channel 4 sitcom Raised by Wolves, her game-changing take on feminism, the patriarchy and ...
Jan 18, 2021•1 hr 1 min
The events of 2020 have upturned the order of the world, and the medical, economic and political crises we face will not fade quietly as the new year begins. Though so much of the present moment feels strange and unprecedented, there is wisdom in heeding to George Santayana’s famous proverb that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it. To help ensure that we do not fall foul of the prophecy, Simon Schama joined How To Academy to share his insights into the past and near future...
Jan 11, 2021•1 hr 4 min
“My eyes are constantly wide open to the extraordinary fact of existence. Not just human existence but the existence of life and how this breathtakingly powerful process, which is natural selection, has managed to take the very simple facts of physics and chemistry and build them up to redwood trees and humans. That's never far from my thoughts, that sense of amazement.” – Richard Dawkins Richard Dawkins has done more than any other scientist to promote and celebrate the origins of life on Earth...
Dec 09, 2020•1 hr 14 min
Whether exposing Britain’s powerful elites in The Establishment or defending the white working class in Chavs, fighting for equality and social justice as a Guardian columnist and broadcaster, Owen Jones may be the most influential and widely respected political journalist of his generation. In conversation with world-renowned economist and former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, he gives an unflinchingly honest, insider’s account of Labour’s electoral defeat in 2019 – and explores where...
Nov 30, 2020•1 hr 4 min
An icon of the last fifty years, Stephen Hawking seems to encapsulate genius. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, his colleague and collaborator Leonard Mlodinow offers an intimate account of this giant of science in conversation with comic and broadcaster Robin Ince. The two met in 2003, after Stephen asked Leonard if he would consider writing a book with him. As they spent years working on A Briefer History of Time followed by The Grand Design, they forged a deep connection and Leon...
Nov 23, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Our meat and dairy intensive diets are destroying the planet. In this week's podcast, animal welfare environmentalist Philip Lymbery shares the new science of living sustainably and makes a powerful case for changing how we eat. From vegan alternatives to free range pasturised meat, cultured meat to precision fermentation, Philips considers the new dietary habits, technological innovations and political developments that could change the way we farm and eat and make a seismic impact on the clima...
Nov 16, 2020•53 min
They were the most famous sisters in China. As the country battled through a hundred years of wars, revolutions and seismic transformations, the three Soong sisters from Shanghai were at the centre of power, and each of them left an indelible mark on history. Red Sister, Ching-ling, married the ‘Father of China’, Sun Yat-sen, and rose to be Mao’s vice chair. Little Sister, May-ling, became Madame Chiang Kaishek, first lady of pre-Communist Nationalist China and a major political figure in her ow...
Nov 09, 2020•57 min
For more than thirty years, Julia Cameron has helped ordinary people and world-renowned artists alike discover their passions and transform their lives. From Booker Prize winners like Anna Burns to world-famous musicians like Alicia Keys and Pete Townshend, actors like Reese Witherspoon and comedians like Russell Brand, the list of artists, innovators and creatives who cite a debt of gratitude to Julia Cameron and her bestselling creativity bible, The Artist’s Way is extraordinary. An icon to an...
Nov 02, 2020•1 hr
Since their discovery over 160 years ago, Neanderthals metamorphosed from the losers of the human family tree to A-list hominins. In conversation with particle physicist and broadcaster Brian Cox, archaeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes reveals the Neanderthals as curious, clever connoisseurs of their world, technologically inventive and ecologically adaptable. They ranged across vast tracts of tundra and steppe, but also stalked in dappled forests and waded in the Mediterranean Sea. Above all, they w...
Oct 26, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Lying is probably as old as human language itself – an inevitable consequence of humanity’s greatest superpower. And comedian, Observer columnist and Peep Show star David Mitchell lies quite often (mostly about whether he is free to come to social events). But even he never expected to live in the post-truth age. In conversation with broadcaster and journalist Hannah MacInnes, he joins us to rail against the times with the characteristic wit, warmth, originality and insight we’ve come to expect....
Oct 19, 2020•1 hr 4 min
At a time when many of us feel the world isn’t listening, Jess Phillips is here to teach us how to get organised, speak out and fight against injustice in all its forms. Jess Phillips is no stranger to speaking truth to power. Since becoming the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley in 2015, she has earned widespread acclaim as an authentic, fearless and uncompromising force for good in British politics, unafraid to stand up against injustice no matter the cost. Now she returns to How To Academy to t...
Oct 12, 2020•1 hr 3 min
She is the most iconic American feminist of the 20th and 21st centuries: a journalist and activist whose career spanned the campaign trails of Bobby Kennedy and Hillary Clinton. As a co-founder of Ms. Magazine, Gloria Steinem demonstrated a unique gift for offering hope and inspiring action – and to this day her words continue to serve as a source of guidance, humour and unity for people around the world. As the Emmy and BAFTA winning star of Westworld and The Line of Duty, alongside a cinematic...
Oct 05, 2020•1 hr 1 min
As the inventor of an entirely new genre of entertainment, legendary video-game designer Sid Meier is a true creative pioneer a godfather to a multi-billion dollar industry. When Sid Meier designed his first computer game at the University of Michigan in the early 1970s computer-games hardly existed – and there were certainly no professional computer-game designers. In the following decades he would create some of the most famous and celebrated video-game titles ever made – including Civilizatio...
Sep 21, 2020•41 min
The question of whether Western nations must return the artefacts plundered under colonial rule is the most pressing issue in the art world today. From the Elgin Marbles to the return of more than twelve thousand stolen artefacts from Belgium’s Africa Museum, the cry for the restitution of cultural objects once stolen under armed force or conquest is being heard across the globe. And the call is being heard in the highest echelons of power: from President Macron’s commitment to returning hundred...
Sep 14, 2020•36 min
