In 1966, John Barker, a dynamic psychiatrist working in an outdated British mental hospital, established the Premonitions Bureau to investigate psychic visions. He found a network of hundreds of correspondents, from clerks to ballet teachers – including two unnervingly gifted “percipients”. The New Yorker’s award-winning Sam Knight joins us with an enthralling true story of madness and wonder, science and the supernatural – a journal to the most powerful and unsettling reaches of the human mind....
May 27, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 6Ep. 30
A creative pioneer whose genius has placed him alongside Chaplin, Keaton, and his fellow Pythons as one of the greatest British comedy talents of all-time, John Cleese’s name is synonymous with the very best popular culture our country has ever produced. From the subversive satire of Life of Brian and existential absurdity of The Meaning of Life to the precision-engineered farce and observational brilliance of Fawlty Towers and A Fish Called Wanda, his work is a testament to the power of the hum...
May 24, 2022•1 hr 17 min•Season 6Ep. 29
Minnie Driver joined us live on stage in London to tell transport us from her unconventional childhood to subsequent fame, sharing poignant stories and laugh-out-loud anecdotes from her life and career. It is a tale of acclaim, loss, fortitude and fortune: in short, the story of being human. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
May 20, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Season 6Ep. 28
Next month Michael Lewis will join us in-person in London for a live, on-stage event exploring his life and work from Liar's Poker through to the present day. In anticipation, this episode of the podcast revisits his last appearance on the How To Academy stage, in conversation with the Guardian's Owen Jones. Together they explore the corrosion of the federal government under the Trump administration - the subject of Michael's book The Fifth Risk. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastch...
May 17, 2022•1 hr 18 min•Season 6Ep. 27
With fans including Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, and Peter Thiel, no living fiction author has more influence among the elite technologists shaping our world. His ideas inspired Google Earth, Second Life and the Xbox, and Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook after Stephenson’s concept of the Metaverse, dedicating his company to the mission of creating a future inspired by Stephenson’s speculative vision. Now the legendary speculative novelist turns his attention to the cliamte crisis. In converastion wi...
May 13, 2022•57 min
How did a collective of self-taught internet sleuths end up solving some of the biggest crimes of our time? Eliot Higgins is the founder of Bellingcat, an independent international collective of researchers, investigators and citizen journalists using open-source and social media investigation to probe some of the world’s most pressing stories. He joins us to tell the story of how they created a whole new category of information gathering, galvanising citizen journalists across the globe to expo...
May 10, 2022•1 hr 2 min
For forty years humans have dreamed of persistent virtual worlds. Today, video games and their peripherals are pushing the boundaries of digital immersion, whether in the form of imaginary play spaces like Roblox and Second Life, or rich sensory augmentations that affect our experience of the physical world. But what will become of the Metaverse and cyberspace? And in our era of rapid and accelerating change, how can we accurately imagine and forecast future – to include both dazzling new techno...
May 06, 2022•48 min•Season 6Ep. 25
A literary alchemist, Ann Patchett plumbs the depths of her experiences to create gold: essays that are both self-portrait and landscape, each vibrant with emotion and rich in insight. In this episode of the podcast, she explores her latest collection, These Precious Days. Offering a unique perspective on themes as diverse as failure, family, Snoopy the dog, children, publishing, teaching, and the actor Tom Hanks, join us for a dive into one of the most extraordinary minds at work in American le...
May 03, 2022•1 hr 3 min•Season 6Ep. 24
Have you ever dreamt you could fly? Or imagined what it would be like to glide and swoop through the sky like a bird? Do you let your mind soar to unknown, magical spaces? In conversation with comedian, author and broadcaster Robin Ince, scientists and science writer Richard Dawkins explores two interweaving forms of wonder of flight: both in its literal form, the dream we all share of soaring in the skies, and flights of the mind, enabled through science, ideas, and imagination. Learn more abou...
Apr 29, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 23
For the past four years, Ed Miliband has been discovering and interviewing brilliant people all around the world who are successfully tackling the biggest problems we face, transforming communities and pioneering global movements. In this podcast, he draws on the most imaginative and ambitious of these ideas to provide a vision for the kind of society we need. He presents an inspiring array of real solutions to the toughest and most urgent of these problems, and argue that the key to success is ...
Apr 26, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 7Ep. 22
Bringing together leading Afghan politician and women’s rights advocate Fawzia Koofi, who was a member of the recent delegation negotiating peace with the Taliban; Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent Christina Lamb; and award-winning war correspondent and New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson, this podcast explores both the transformation of everyday life in Afghanistan and the major humanitarian and political questions presented by the new status quo. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit p...
Apr 22, 2022•57 min•Season 6Ep. 21
From Old Winchelsea to Skara Brae, Matthew Green transports us to Britain's shadowlands - the once thriving towns and cities that are now lost to time and memory. Drowned by storms. Buried by sand. Requisitioned by the army. One of Britain's most exciting young historians, Matthew Green has travelled the British Isles in search of the remnants of settlements that once adorned the nation's map - until nature, disease, politics or economics reduced them to ruins. In this episode of the podcast, he...
Apr 19, 2022•38 min•Season 6Ep. 20
Our family relationships fundamentally influence our health and happiness -- but we think too narrowly about the impact of our families on our lives. In this episode of the podcast, bestselling psychotherapist Julia Samuel turns from her acclaimed work with individuals to draw on her sessions with a wide variety of families. She explores a range of common issu Uncovering how deeply we are influenced by our families, she offers a moving and reassuring meditation that, amidst trauma and hardship, ...
Apr 11, 2022•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 19
In 1982, East Germany's fearsome secret police - convinced that writers were embedding subversive messages in their work - decided to train their own writers, weaponising poetry in the struggle against the class enemy. Journalist Philip Oltermann spent five years rifling through Stasi files, digging up lost volumes of poetry from musty basements, and tracking down the surviving members of the circle to uncover the little-known story of this famously ruthless intelligence agency's obsession with ...
Apr 08, 2022•32 min•Season 6Ep. 18
The concept of a shared, single heritage and culture is central to Vladimir Putin’s justification for the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But what is the true story of the two nations, and how can it illuminate the nature of the conflict? This episode of the podcast brings together historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, whose books on Russia include The Romanovs and Stalin - The Court of the Red Tzar, and award-winning foreign correspondent Luke Harding, who was expelled from Russia by the Kremlin in 20...
Apr 05, 2022•44 min•Season 6Ep. 17
Max Porter broke new ground with his highly-original debut Grief is a Thing With Feathers, and firmly established himself as a major literary talent with his second novel Lanny. The cult author joined us to explore his latest and most ambitious novel yet: The Death of Francis Bacon, a collection of 'verbal paintings' depicting the final moments of the artist’s life. What responsibility does an author owe to their subject, and to their audience, in the age of the Internet? Is culture becoming les...
Apr 01, 2022•45 min•Season 6Ep. 16
Few figures make such a seismic impact on their artistic medium that they transform its reputation from childish pulp entertainment to a vital and exhilarating creative form, capable of exploring the great mysteries of metaphysics, science, and the human spirit – but Alan Moore is one. A modern-day alchemist who transmuted comic books into literary gold, his works not only inspired a later generation of authors who are now household names, from Neil Gaiman to Susanna Clarke, but filmmakers, arti...
Mar 29, 2022•1 hr 5 min
Food writers Olia Hercules and Alissa Timoshkina have been friends since university and together they have come together to launch #CookForUkraine - a campaign which aims to raise awareness and funds through a shared appreciation of the rich tradition of Ukrainian cooking with supper clubs, events and encouraging people to share recipes, along with the stories behind the dishes. In its first weeks they have whipped up an extraordinary amount of support from everyone from Jamie Oliver to Nigella ...
Mar 25, 2022•43 min•Season 6Ep. 14
What if everything we thought we knew about the origins of human civilisation is a myth? In their book The Dawn of Everything, the late David Graeber and his collaborator David Wengrow tell an ambitious and revelatory new history of the world – one that overturns the notion of Rosseau’s innocent Noble Savage and the ‘nasty, brutish and short’ lives of Thomas Hobbes alike. In this episode of the podcast, Wengrow joins former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis to transform your understanding ...
Mar 21, 2022•1 hr•Season 6Ep. 13
Medical historian Dr Paul Craddock joins the How To Academy Podcast to takes us on a journey from sixteenth-century skin grafting to contemporary stem cell transplants, uncovering stories of operations performed by unexpected people in unexpected places. Bringing together philosophy, science and cultural history, this podcast explores how transplant surgery constantly tested the boundaries between human, animal and machine, and continues to do so today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit po...
Mar 18, 2022•36 min•Season 6Ep. 12
Raised in the hardy forest communities of British Columbia, scientist Suzanne Simard overturned conventional beliefs in proving that trees and plants are connected underground by an immense web of fungal mycelia, at the centre of which lie the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful entities that sustain the forest. She joins author and traveller Sophy Roberts to tell the story of a lifetime spent uncovering startling truths about trees: their perceptions, behaviours, healing capacities, language...
Mar 15, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Season 6Ep. 11
In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, author and documentarian Jon Ronson and political scientist Brian Klaas investigate the relationship between power, psychopathy, and corruption. Drawing on the insights from Jon's widely acclaimed book The Psychopath Test and Brian's new book Corruptible, for which he met some of the world's most reviled and dangerous leaders, this is a provocative and revelatory journey into what power is and who gets to wield to it. Learn more about your ad choice...
Mar 08, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 10
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 Podc...
Feb 28, 2022•56 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 5 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•50 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 5 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 9 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 deb...
Jan 25, 2022•55 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 a...
Jan 18, 2022•38 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 2 min•Season 6Ep. 2
