Far from being distant and peripheral, organised crime shapes our everyday lives, from the materials used to construct our homes to the illicit funds that quietly circulate through financial institutions. Global security expert Mark Galeotti reveals the dark heart of the underworld, how states and criminal networks are far more interconnected than most people realise, and how understanding these entanglements is essential for making sense of how societies function, collapse, and rebuild. Learn m...
Jan 13, 2026•1 hr 5 min
100 years on from Schrödinger’s equation, we’re on the cusp of the second Quantum revolution. Everything is about to change again – but how? Theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and astrobiologist Paul Davies investigates quantum theory's extraordinary predictive power and the debates that continue to surround the field, diving into the very nature of quantum reality and the beginnings of the universe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
Jan 09, 2026•1 hr 4 min
Bestselling novelist Rebecca F. Kuang returns to How To Academy in conversation with Hannah MacInnes to dive into her new novel, Katabasis , inviting us on a journey to the underworld and back. From the literal and metaphorical meanings of descending to hell, to the question of eternity, to the imaginative expanse of Rebecca's literary vision in an age where freedom of expression is under threat, Rebecca illuminates the art of her craft and imagination with humour, warmth, and deeply personal co...
Dec 19, 2025•1 hr 13 min
When Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman went into an Alabama state prison to film a revival meeting, they discover that the prisoners wanted to talk to them off-camera and share their stories; after Andrew and Charlotte left, the incarcerated men were able to use contraband mobile phones to reveal the hidden realities of prison life. Their stories included the horrifying death of prisoner Stephen Davis at the hands of guard, and a labour strike coordinated across the prisons (that is beginning...
Dec 16, 2025•38 min
Do you avoid conflict? Do you tend to take the blame? Do you take care of others at the expense of yourself? Do you live in a state of hypervigilance? Fawning can appear in a plethora of different ways, it can be visible or invisible; it can manifest in our relationships to sex or money, or in the tendency to 'people-please'. But one thing remains constant: it is about finding safety in an unsafe world, often at our own expense. Fawning expert and clinical psychologist Dr Ingrid Clayton shines a...
Dec 10, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Widely heralded as the most provocative Norwegian writer since Ibsen and simply ‘one of the finest writers alive’ by the New York Times , Karl Ove Knausgaard’s five-part autobiographical novel sequence My Struggle sent him into the stratosphere of literary fame, inspiring a wave of imitators that continues to this day and cementing his place as an outspoken giant of contemporary literature. A long-time resident in London, Karl Ove now turns his attention to the capital for the first time in The ...
Dec 05, 2025•1 hr 17 min
A boy scout from smalltown America known for his sincere, folksy charm. A chain-smoking maverick dedicated to the pursuit of the Art Life. A womaniser with a female skewing fanbase. A Hollywood outsider who was also a mainstream celebrity. Who was the real David Lynch, and why did his bizarre, avant garde art films - from Eraserhead to Inland Empire - gain him recognition and love far beyond any of his contemporaries? The cultural critic John Higgs returns to the podcast to unpick the meaning of...
Dec 02, 2025•56 min
In this episode of the podcast neuroscientist Nicholas Wright reveals how, whether we like it or not, the brain is wired for conflict – in the office or on the battlefield. Blending insights from cutting-edge research with stories from across history, Nicholas joins war correspondent David Patrikarakos to explore the past, present, and future of warfare and reveal the truth about why we fight, lose and win wars. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices...
Nov 25, 2025•57 min
The son of Stephen and Tabitha King and brother of Owen King, Joe Hill was raised in a uniquely gifted literary family and has long established a reputation of his own as a first rate storyteller across prose fiction, comics, TV and film. Drawing on influences as diverse as The Secret History, The Hobbit, and his father's dark fantasy classic The Gunslinger, his new novel King Sorrow follows six friends as their Faustian pact with the deliciously cruel eponymous dragon unravels over many decades...
Nov 21, 2025•58 min
How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory? In Waves and Stones , Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interactio...
Nov 18, 2025•1 hr 30 min
Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall reveal the insights you need to better understand what's on your dinner plate, how it got there, and why you eat it. Award-winning health journalist Julia Belluz and internationally renowned nutrition and metabolism scientist Dr Kevin Hall will unpack the science behind our diets, metabolism, and the food systems that shape them. Together, they will explore how our food environment is the key influence on our eating behaviours, challenge popular myths about diet, and ...
Nov 14, 2025•1 hr 6 min
Though well-known across Europe by name, the real lives of women such as Joan of Arc and Jadwiga of Poland have been buried under banners of nationalistic agendas that have twisted their stories through the ages. Oxford historian Janina Ramirez joins Sir Tony Robinson to illuminate the truth of these incredible women, and disentangle their real stories from the myths imposed on them through time. From Lady Godiva's real name, Godgifu, and how her eroticised image has overshadowed her real surviv...
Nov 11, 2025•1 hr 17 min
Today, trauma permeates media, from music and television to films and books. While the increasing openness is welcome, Darren has observed that the webs of digital networks surrounding us and which commodify our most vulnerable experiences often harm us more than help us heal. How did we get here? What role does social media play in commodifying our experiences? And are the stories we’re telling ourselves liberating us or keeping us trapped? In conversation with Nicola Sturgeon, Darren explores ...
Nov 07, 2025•1 hr 12 min
In his four Time Travellers Guides to England, historian Ian Mortimer has taken us from the Medieval period all the way to the Regency, revelling not in the business of courts and princes but the minutae of daily life for ordinary men and women. In this podcast, he shares his insights into how the English people have changed over time - and how they have stayed the same. Touching upon liberty and leadership, xenophobia and violence, this whistlestop tour of a thousand years of English life is an...
Nov 04, 2025•43 min
Two decades ago, Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia and transformed the world’s access to knowledge. Today, people view Wikipedia 11 billion times every month in the English language alone. Yet in an age of ‘alternative facts’, conspiracies and disinformation, the foundations of Wikipedia are increasingly under threat. The concept at the heart of it all extends to the whole of society: trust Like water and electricity, our society can’t function without it. Without it, we have no knowledge, and witho...
Oct 31, 2025•1 hr 25 min
Jens Stoltenberg was Prime Minister of Norway from 2005-2013, and when he took office as Secretary General of NATO in 2014, the world was already changing. What followed was a decade marked by war, diplomatic crises, and decisions that helped shape our shared security. Now he joins Adam Boulton to go behind closed doors and offer a rare insight into how the world’s most powerful military alliance handles crises and to share why after all this time, NATO still matters. Learn more about your ad ch...
Oct 28, 2025•1 hr 22 min
Marie Kondo’s unique approach to organising our lives and our homes has transformed the relationship we have with the objects around us, helping us all to seek out the joy in our daily lives. In the eleven years since The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up made her famous across the globe, journalists, readers and fans have asked her one question more than any other: what role did Japanese philosophy and culture play in shaping her life and thought? Here, Marie shares her principles for living, a...
Oct 24, 2025•40 min
A pioneering voice in Arab cinema, Annemarie Jacir has written, directed, and produced over sixteen films, with premieres at Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, Rotterdam, and Toronto. In 2007, she made history by shooting the first feature film by a Palestinian female director. All four of her feature films have been chosen as Palestine’s Oscar submissions. Set in 1936 during the Arab Revolt in British-ruled Palestine, Palestine 36 chronicles the intertwined lives of farmers, revolutionaries, and ...
Oct 21, 2025•31 min
Philippa Gregory takes us behind the myths to reveal how Jane Boleyn became a scapegoat of Henry VIII’s tyranny and the historians who defended it. Drawing on the silences of the record and the resilience of women navigating a perilous court, Gregory explores how fiction can reveal the internal lives of historical characters who we think we know so well. In Boleyn Traitor , Jane emerges not as a schemer but as a survivor: navigating a world ruled by fear, spectacle and the whims of a king who be...
Oct 16, 2025•33 min
Returning to the podcast following episodes around his prize-winning debut The Mountain Under the Sea and his acclaimed novella The Tusks of Extinction , Ray Nayler joins us to explore the rise in authoritarian systems of control and celebrate the power of human agency to drive meaningful social change. These are the themes of his new novel Where the Axe is Buried : a dystopian fable set in a near-future Russia where Artificial Intelligences, technocrats, and a Putinesque dictator come into an u...
Oct 14, 2025•47 min
Dr Kerry Burnight reveals a transformative new approach to aging—one that goes beyond lifespan and healthspan to embrace joyspan : the ability to experience joy from within. Dr Burnight reveals how joy differs from happiness, the damaging effects of internalised ageism, and the surprising abilities—such as judgment, emotional regulation, and humour—that often improve with age. Dr Burnight also shares the four essential practices necessary to expanding our joyspan as we age. With her guidance and...
Oct 10, 2025•1 hr 5 min
From our new technological era ushered in by AI, to the fall of democracies across the globe, the world today appears fraught with uncertainty, poised between repeating errors from the past and entering a new age of the unknown. What lies behind tribalistic claims of patriotism, and on what does democracy truly depend? How might technology shape the narrative to come, and what remains in our control? Bestselling author of Sapiens and Nexus , Yuval Noah Harari joins Ritula Shah to help us better ...
Oct 07, 2025•1 hr 15 min
How has loopholes around social media's censored word, 'kill', found its way into students' essays on Hamlet ? What is the history of 'skibidi' and 'delulu' and how are these concepts shaping the way we think, write, and speak? Linguist and content creator Adam Aleksic turns a keen eye to explore how the internet has transformed our linguistic landscape, from the rise of 'YouTube accents' to the meaning of 'brain rot', from the ephemerality of memes to the enduring power of language to shape con...
Oct 03, 2025•27 min
From the Thames to the Tigris, the Ure to the Euphrates, rivers have flowed through the history of humanity, shaping our civilisations and sustaining our species. Robert Macfarlane and Elif Shafak illuminate the life-giving force of rivers, the stories they have inspired, and explore the crucial question of how humans can coexist with the natural world on which our survival depends. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the gods of old, from the ancient Euphrates to the Thames of today, from lost rivers...
Sep 30, 2025•1 hr 18 min
Drawing on the economist’s toolkit, she reframes “happiness” as utility, shows how to maximize it under constraints, and treats fertility as “reproductive capital” to be timed and invested thoughtfully. She shifts the spotlight from women “leaning in” to men leveling up at home, and from vibes to data: track time, surface invisible labor, and use BATNA thinking to set walk-away points at work and in relationships. In an age of burnout and performative perfection, Low offers practical moves: pay ...
Sep 26, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Drawing on everything from Dougal and the Blue Cat to Angel Heart , from Walter Murch’s “pickle jar” of sound to Tarantino-style needle drops, Kermode turns listening into a way of seeing: treat scores as storytelling, not wallpaper; hear nostalgia without depending on it; notice how rooms, acoustics, and “vibrations” change performances; and understand why live accompaniment can transform a film in the moment. Along the way: Ken Russell’s emotional maximalism, Under the Skin ’s alien minimalism...
Sep 23, 2025•1 hr 6 min
In 2003, British police infiltrated a group of idealistic young environmental activists, forming sexual relationships and spying without warrant on hundreds of innocent civilians. Among these young activists was Kate Wilson, who developed an intimate relationship with Mark. Unbeknownst to her, Mark was a fictional persona created by the Metropolitan Police to spy on her. After this shocking discovery, Kate Wilson fought back, and now she joins us to tell her story. Learn more about your ad choic...
Sep 19, 2025•34 min
Drawing on Aristotle’s playbook, he shows how to turn rhetoric inward: treat the “soul” as your better self, shift from past/present blame to future-tense choices, separate needs from appetites, and tune out the social “white noise” of feeds, trends, and bucket lists that distort motivation. In an age of distraction and burnout, Heinrichs offers practical tools: the “lure and ramp” for easing into new behaviors, kairos (timing) and chaos as opportunity, analogical thinking, rhythmic mantras (pae...
Sep 16, 2025•1 hr 5 min
A journey of both past and future, of the natural world and metaphysical realms, Philip Hoare guides us through a dreamscape slipping through time and space with the unpredictable guide of William Blake. From William's visions of angels to his radical approach to artistic creation, from his anarchic and seditious writing to the enchanting and democratic force of his art, from his belief in the holiness of every living creature to his staunch opposition to slavery, William Blake was an artistic g...
Sep 12, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Immunologist Jenna Macciochi reveals the “wellness system” linking body and brain, urging us to focus on healthspan as well as lifespan. She explains “immune age,” inflammaging, and the body’s cycle of inflammation and repair, showing how stress, mind, and lifestyle choices—from sleep and movement to diet—shape immunity. Amid chronic stress, isolation, and processed diets, Macciochi offers evidence-based habits: meditation, community, smart nutrition, and supplementation. She recasts immunity as...
Sep 09, 2025•1 hr 3 min
