Yrsa Daley-Ward’s work explores all parts of the human condition, but especially those we don’t tend to speak of: mental health, sexuality, love, grief and addiction. Her words have resonated with hundreds of thousands of readers around the world: through her acclaimed books of poetry and memoir, bone and The Terrible and through her powerful writing for Beyoncé’s cultural touchstone Black Is King . In conversation with acclaimed novelist and poet Salena Godden, Yrsa joins the How To Academy Pod...
Feb 28, 2022•55 min•Season 6Ep. 9
How can we live a more ethical life? This question has plagued people for thousands of years, but it's never been tougher to answer than it is now, thanks to challenges great and small that flood our day-to-day lives and threaten to overwhelm us with impossible decisions and complicated results with unintended consequences. The Good Place was the smash hit Netflix comedy that made moral philosophy fun. Now the series creator, Michael Schur and its star Jameela Jamil join us with a foolproof guid...
Feb 21, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 6Ep. 8
In the Victorian era, in the shadow of Darwin's ideas about evolution, a new full-blooded attempt to impose control over our unruly biology began to grow in the clubs, salons and offices of the powerful. It was enshrined in a political movement that bastardised science, and for sixty years enjoyed bipartisan and huge popular support. Eugenics was vigorously embraced in dozens of countries. It was also a cornerstone of Nazi ideology, and forged a path that led directly to the gates of Auschwitz. ...
Feb 14, 2022•49 min•Season 6Ep. 7
How did the Mughal empire – which then generated just under half the world’s wealth – come to be replaced by the first global corporate power - the East India Company? And how does the legacy of British imperialism continue to shape life and culture in Britain today? Bringing together Empireland author and Times columnist Sathnam Sanghera and bestselling award-winning historian William Dalrymple, this episode of the How To Academy Podcast will tell a story that is barely taught in schools or men...
Feb 08, 2022•1 hr 4 min
Fi Glover and Jane Garvey are radio legends. Already major BBC stars in their own right, their podcast together, Fortunately… with Fi and Jane has grown from a cult following to become one of the nation’s most loved and celebrated shows. Described in their own words as a “podcast in which two women exchange random thoughts, occasional pleasantries, fatuous double-entendres, real-life challenges, and often sudden bursts of something approaching wisdom”, this witty, refreshing take on the drama an...
Feb 01, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Season 12Ep. 5
In February 1991, Robert Maxwell made a triumphant entrance into Manhattan harbour aboard his yacht, the Lady Ghislaine, to complete his purchase of the ailing New York Daily News . Crowds lined the quayside to watch his arrival, taxi drivers stopped their cabs to shake his hand and children asked for his autograph. But just ten months later, Maxwell disappeared from the same yacht off the Canary Islands, only to be found dead in the water soon afterward. As his empire fell apart, long-hidden de...
Jan 25, 2022•54 min•Season 6Ep. 4
Described by The Times as a modern Daphne de Maurier, Claire Fuller’s writing is beautifully dark and vividly atmospheric. Her fourth novel, Unsettled Ground , follows the lives of two adult twins whose world is upturned after the death of their mother. After surviving for years off-grid and at the mercy of the seasons in their secluded cottage, the twins are tumbled into the present and forced to confront their change of circumstance and long-ignored family secrets. Unsettled Ground is at once ...
Jan 18, 2022•37 min•Season 11Ep. 3
In the twenty-first century, humanity is reaching new heights of scientific understanding - and at the same time appears to be losing its mind. How can a species that discovered vaccines for Covid-19 in less than a year produce so much fake news, quack cures and conspiracy theorising? In conversation with mathematician and Oxford Professor Marcus du Sautoy, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker rejects the cynical cliché that humans are simply an irrational species - cavemen out of time fatally cur...
Jan 10, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 6Ep. 2
Bexy was raised in a secret commune deep in the British countryside. At 10, she was placed on Silence Restriction, forced to be silent for a whole year. Even from an early age, she knew what was happening was not right. At the age of 15, she escaped, leaving behind her parents and 11 siblings. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, she tells us her family came to be part of the Children of God, and how she found the courage to get out. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoic...
Jan 06, 2022•47 min•Season 2Ep. 1
Emily Ratajkowski has established herself as a multifaceted talent. As a model, she has appeared on the covers of major fashion magazines and is currently the face of L’Oréal’s hair care line Kerastase. As an actress, she has appeared in films including David Fincher’s Gone Girl and alongside Amy Schumer in I Feel Pretty . Ratajkowski is also outspoken politically, continually using her platform to advocate for her political beliefs, having campaigned for Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020. Sh...
Dec 21, 2021•1 hr 9 min•Season 5Ep. 27
A good life involves more than just pleasure. Suffering is essential too. It seems obvious that pleasure leads to happiness - and pain does the opposite. And yet we are irresistibly drawn to a host of experiences that truly hurt, from the exhilarating fear of horror movies or extreme sport, to the wrenching sadness of a song or novel, to the gruelling challenges of exercise, work, creativity and having a family. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, pre-eminent psychologist Paul Bloom e...
Dec 14, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 25
Philip Pullman’s novels are a testament to the power of the human imagination and a celebration of our capacity for wonder, proving to millions of readers across the globe that enchantment still has a profound role to play in our age of reason. It is an ethos shared by the neuroscientist Iain McGilchrist, whose book The Master and His Emissary was that rare thing: a bestselling classic of modern philosophy with genuine relevance to human life. In this podcast, the two men will come together to e...
Dec 06, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 5Ep. 24
'For the left, elections are a brief interlude in a life of real politics, a moment to ask whether it's worth taking time off to vote . . . Then back to work. The work will be to move forward to construct the better world that is within reach.' – Noam Chomsky A giant of both 20th and 21st century intellectual life, Noam Chomsky’s influence on the development of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science cannot be overstated; but it is as a political thinker, activist and social critic that h...
Nov 30, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 9Ep. 23
What we can do to have better conversations with our children and with each other about race, and build a better world? Beverly Daniel Tatum and Robin DiAngelo have dedicated their lives to anti-racist education. The bestselling authors of, respectively, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria ? and White Fragility , their insights are essential for anyone interested in understanding the dynamics of race in the United States and beyond. In the age of Trump, Black Lives Matte...
Nov 23, 2021•57 min•Season 5Ep. 22
Chief historian of the BBC's Horrible Histories TV show and the host of chart-topping podcast You're Dead to Me , Greg Jenner is a master in the art of turning the messiness of history into whip-smart comic entertainment. He joined us to explore his favourite historical questions and their often surprising answers - as submitted by the general public. From chariot racing to bank robbery, Egyptian mummies to Monty Python, this episode of the How To Academy Podcast is a ride through some of the wi...
Nov 16, 2021•49 min•Season 1Ep. 21
World-renowned ethologist and conservationist Dr Jane Goodall, DBE, Founder of the Jane Goodall Institute and a UN Messenger of Peace, has spent more than a half-century warning of our impact on our planet. From her famous encounters and research into the wild chimpanzees in the forests of Gombe which began more than sixty years ago and continues to this day, to her tireless campaigning for the environment in her late eighties, Jane has become the godmother to a new generation of climate activis...
Nov 10, 2021•56 min•Season 5Ep. 20
Few works of literature have the power to change who we are and how we conceive our place in the universe – but Richard Powers Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning masterpiece The Overstory is one. For Barack Obama, Powers ‘changed how I thought about the Earth and our place in it’; for Emma Thompson, The Overstory was a ‘the best book I've read in 10 years… a lodestone’; for Ann Patchett, it was simply ‘one of the best novels, period’. This year's follow-up, the Booker shortlisted Bew...
Nov 02, 2021•1 hr 10 min•Season 5Ep. 19
Bernard-Henri Levy is one of the world’s most esteemed philosophers and public intellectuals; but his understanding of philosophy is anything but theoretical. A humanitarian activist of deep conviction, for fifty years he has reported from the sites of human rights abuses and humanitarian crises that fail to receive global attention or an active response, shedding light on urgent stories that Western media and governments have chosen to ignore. He joined us on stage in London to issue a stirring...
Oct 26, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 4Ep. 18
Kate Bowler had always accepted the modern idea that life is an endless horizon of possibilities. As many of us do, she saw life as a series of choices that, if made correctly, would lead us to a place just out of reach. But then, aged just thirty-five, Kate was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. She was forced to ask one of the most fundamental questions of all: How do we create meaning in our lives when the life we hoped for is put on hold? In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Kat...
Oct 19, 2021•56 min•Season 1Ep. 17
In anticipation of Steven Pinker's return to How To Academy later this month, this episode of the podcast revisits his conversation with Stephen Fry on stage in London in 2018. The challenges we face today are formidable, including inequality, climate change, Artificial Intelligence and nuclear weapons. But the way to deal with them is not to sink into despair or try to lurch back to a mythical idyllic past; it's to treat them as problems we can solve, as we have solved other problems in the pas...
Oct 12, 2021•1 hr 20 min•Season 10Ep. 16
In this week's podcast, science writer and Sunday Times bestselling author James Nestor joins us with a guide that will forever change the way you think about health and wellbeing. We breathe 25,000 times a day: yet as a species, humans have lost the ability to breathe correctly - with grave consequences for our health. James travelled the world to discover the hidden science behind ancient breathing practices to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. He shared his story with Hannah MacIn...
Oct 04, 2021•1 hr•Season 5Ep. 15
In this special bonus episode by our friends at New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association, Professor Alice Roberts takes us through important archaeological discoveries to help us better understand life in Britain today. About With Reason: From New Humanist magazine and the Rationalist Association , With Reason is a podcast offering intelligent thinking for turbulent times. Interviews with thinkers who speak to our age – on subjects including religion, race, politics, sex, tech, work...
Sep 25, 2021•50 min
From My Left Foot to Harry Potter , Fleabag to Killing Eve , Fiona Shaw is an integral presence in the Irish and British screen drama of the last three decades; and in collaboration with the foremost directors of our time – from Deborah Warner to Nicholas Hytner – is universally renowned as one of the most outstanding and distinguished stage actors of her generation. Whether in her ground-breaking performance as Shakespeare’s Richard II or her unforgettable turn as Brecht’s Mother Courage, as Eu...
Sep 21, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 17
Philippe Sands meets Rutger Bregman, one of the greatest young thinkers of our time, to hear a new story of human nature that places our capacity for kindness, not selfishness, at its heart. It’s a belief that unites the left and right, psychologists and philosophers, writers and historians. It drives the headlines that surround us and the laws that touch our lives. From Machiavelli to Hobbes, Freud to Dawkins, the roots of this belief have sunk deep into Western thought. Human beings, we’re tau...
Sep 14, 2021•1 hr 5 min•Season 2Ep. 13
In this week's podcast, literary scholar Dennis Duncan takes us into the secret world of the index and reveals how it transformed the way we read and process knowledge forever. Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office and made us all into the readers we are today. From the library of Alexandria to the c...
Sep 06, 2021•41 min•Season 6Ep. 12
Mary Portas loves business. Fundamentally, she lives and breathes it. What she loves best about it is making businesses work. But in this week's podcast, she argues that we’ve been doing it wrong. In 2021, it’s not only possible to build healthy businesses that do less bad and add more good – it’s a commercial imperative. Rampant consumerism has been driving the economic machine and we have put the pursuit of profit above all else. Over the past thirty years the business of what we buy has been ...
Aug 30, 2021•59 min•Season 5Ep. 11
It is time for a new era of global order. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown joins us with authoritative solutions to the greatest challenges of our age. Gordon Brown knows more than most politicians about how to handle an international crisis. As Prime Minister during the 2008 financial crisis he played a major role in steering the global response and driving the recovery; and as the UN’s Special Envoy for Global Education he is one of the world’s most prominent and influential frontline diplom...
Aug 24, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 5Ep. 10
An icon whose spectacular works occupy a liminal space between sculpture, engineering and architecture, Anish Kapoor is one of the world’s most ambitious living artists. The first living artist to take over the Royal Academy with a record-breaking blockbuster exhibition, the recipient of a Turner Prize, a knighthood, the LennonOno Prize for Peace, the $1 million Genesis Prize, an Oxford doctorate and the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour, Anish Kapoor holds the rare status of ...
Aug 16, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 12Ep. 9
On New Year’s Day 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever heard of. Less than 12 months later, vaccination was rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19. In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Catherine Green, who led on the manufac...
Aug 09, 2021•1 hr 1 min•Season 5Ep. 8
Willis Wu mostly gets to play Generic Asian Man. If he is lucky, sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son. For now he is a bit player: but he dreams that one day he will be offered the most coveted role someone who looks like him might aspire to: Kung Fu Guy. A coruscating satire of race, assimilation and Hollywood, Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown is both a groundbreaking experimental novel and a deeply personal and affecting family story heralded as ...
Aug 03, 2021•34 min•Season 5Ep. 7
