The bestselling war historian Rick Stroud joins the podcast to discuss some of the lesser told narratives of World War One, drawing from his recent book, I Am Not Afraid of Looking into the Rifles. The book explores some of the stories of the women who played their part during the conflict that shaped the opening of the 20th Century and for which the sacrifice on the battlefields of male soldiers is well known. Stroud's book seeks to address the lack of space given to the contribution of women i...
Aug 24, 2024•44 min•Season 1Ep. 3051
For this episode the writer, musician and author Molly Roden Winter discusses her bestselling book, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage. The book tells the story of Roden Winter's own journey navigating the polyamorous lifestyle while upholding many of the more traditional values associated with marriage simultaneously. Joining her to talk about it is Sarah Ditum, who listeners may remember from the podcast earlier this year discussing her own book: Toxic: Women, Fame and The Noughties. We are spons...
Aug 23, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 3050
Influence can be as gentle as a bit of friendly advice or as seismic as a strategy to win an election. As a behavioural scientist who has worked with the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office and the Ministry of Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, Justin Hempson-Jones is more familiar with influence's uses – and its dangers – than most. In his recent book, Influence: Understand it, Use it, Resist it, he offers new perspectives on how individuals can use influence to achieve their goals in ev...
Aug 21, 2024•38 min•Season 1Ep. 3049
The author and broadcaster Paul Morland is one of the UK’s leading thinkers on demographics – the study of population and its characteristics. Morland has been an associate research fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and is a senior member at St Antony's College, Oxford. He last joined Intelligence Squared in 2022 and now returns to discuss his new book, No One Left. As that title suggests, Morland says the world is facing something of a crisis, with various nations facing population decl...
Aug 19, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 3048
Paulina Rowinska is a writer, mathematician and science communicator, whose new book, Mapmatics: How We Navigate the World Through Numbers, tells the stories found within crunching tricky equations. Rowinska has a PhD in Mathematics of Planet Earth from Imperial College London and across the pages of Mapmatics she explores fields ranging from map-making to forecasting elections, how we get our packages delivered on time and even how mathematics can be used to prevent crime. Joining her to discus...
Aug 18, 2024•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3047
The writer Simon Kuper returns to the podcast to discuss the follow-up to his book Chums, which highlighted the narrow and highly privileged pathway that often funnels attendees of some the UK's top education establishments into the highest seats of power in government. His new book is Good Chaps, an exploration of the idea that most politicians who have followed a privileged route into power will be naturally predisposed to following the rules and doing the right thing. Kuper is known for his w...
Aug 16, 2024•44 min•Season 1Ep. 3046
Debut novelist Amy Twigg's book, Spoilt Creatures, tells a story set on a women's commune where things take a dark turn. The novel has earned Twigg praise as one of the Observer newspaper's top 10 best new novelists of 2024. Joining her to discuss the story is Anna Bogutskaya, a writer, film programmer and podcaster, who is the creator of Eerie – a horror anthology podcast. Bogutskaya is also author of the soon to be released book, Feeding the Monster: Why Horror Has a Hold on Us. We are sponsor...
Aug 13, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 3045
A poet, performer, novelist and screenwriter, Olivia Gatwood has received international recognition for her writing, which has focused on topics including coming of age, feminism, gendered violence and true crime. Her debut novel is Whoever You Are, Honey, a dark and brilliant story set amid a secluded California beachside community living in the shadow of the neighbouring tech giants of Silicon Valley. The book has been described as, “a fever dream for the AI age,” and has already been snapped ...
Aug 12, 2024•41 min•Season 1Ep. 3044
Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley since 2015, Jess Phillips has never shied away from controversy nor has she been afraid to veer away from Labour Party lines to uphold her political principles. For this episode, we’re joined by Phillips to discuss some of the most pressing issues in British politics during a fortnight that has seen shocking scenes of violence and racism unfold across UK streets. Following Labour’s recent election win, Phillips is Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Minister ...
Aug 10, 2024•1 hr 27 min•Season 1Ep. 3043
Marcel Dirsus is a political scientist and the author of How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive. As Non-Resident Fellow at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University, Dirsus mainly works on regime instability, political violence and German foreign policy. His new book takes us into the downfall of dictators ranging from Libya's Muammar Gaddafi to Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, as well as unpacking why some dictatorial leaders and regimes remain solid. Joining him in conversation for this...
Aug 09, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 3042
The award-winning science journalist Olive Heffernan’s work has been featured in National Geographic, New Scientist, The Guardian, BBC Wildlife and more. Her new book is The High Seas: Ambition, Power and Greed on the Unclaimed Ocean. Two thirds of the ocean lie beyond national borders and yet they are home to some of the richest natural resources and natural biodiversity on the planet. It makes these areas highly coveted territories and Heffernan’s book studies both the exploitation of the mari...
Aug 07, 2024•1 hr•Season 1Ep. 3041
A truly multifaceted talent, Joelle Taylor is a poet, playwight, actor and most recently a novelist, who has written four collections of poetry along with also being a Poetry Fellow of the University of East Anglia and a Fellow at the Royal Society of Literature. Taylor's new novel is The Night Alphabet, a narrative of interconnecting stories told via tracing the interwoven tapestries found on the skin of a heavily tattooed figure living in a future London of 2233. Joining Taylor to discuss the ...
Aug 05, 2024•44 min•Season 1Ep. 3040
The award-winning classicist and cultural critic Daisy Dunn is the author of seven books including her latest, The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World through the Women Who Shaped It. The book re-examines not only the female individuals who were at the heart of many well-known stories of the ancient world, but also looks at the whole of wider history through the perspective of women too. Joining Dunn to discuss it is Peter Stothard, the author specialising in ancient history and w...
Aug 03, 2024•45 min•Season 1Ep. 3039
Sheila Heti is a writer from Toronto who has published 11 books since the early 2000s. Those include Motherhood, Pure Colour, and How Should A Person Be? That latter title was a breakout work mixing memoir with fiction and self-help in a quest to examine her own authenticity. Her latest book is Alphabetical Diaries – a slim, elegant volume that compresses 10 years of Heti’s own diary entries into 60,000 words across 25 chapters. Every entry, as the title suggests, is organised alphabetically. Jo...
Aug 01, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 3038
This episode is brought to you by CHANEL. CHANEL Connects – the acclaimed arts and culture podcast – is back for its fourth season, with nine episodes featuring the artists, curators and thinkers shaping culture today. If you enjoy the episode, you can hear much more from the new season, just search CHANEL Connects now on your preferred streaming platforms or visit chanel.com. The artist William Kentridge and curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev are old friends who, together, have created some of ...
Jul 30, 2024•37 min•Season 1Ep. 3037
Orlando Whitfield started his career as a dealer in the feverish global art market but left it disillusioned and burnt-out a decade later. Today he works as a writer and his recent book is All That Glitters, a memoir that explores his experience as an associate of Inigo Philbrick, an ambitious art market player who in 2022 was sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding investors in what has been described as allegedly the biggest art fraud in American history. Whitfield, by contrast, ende...
Jul 28, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 3036
James Comey is the former FBI Director turned crime novelist who has spent a career fighting organised crime and hostile threats to American democracy. In 2016 as head of the FBI, he reopened a previously closed investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails from her time as Secretary of State, which is still a divisive moment that many say helped define the election of that year. In July 2024 Comey came to the Intelligence Squared stage for our first ever event in Brighton, where he discussed the ...
Jul 28, 2024•1 hr 19 min•Season 1Ep. 3035
This is an episode of Generation One: The Climate Podcast, brought to you by UCL. Generation One is a collective of people committed to a new era of positive climate action. By turning science and ideas into action, they are working towards creating a positive, fair and progressive future. For us and for the generations to come. Hosts Professor Mark Maslin and Dr Simon Chin-Yee tackle the biggest challenges facing the climate crisis, with insights from world-leading academics, industry experts, ...
Jul 25, 2024•34 min•Season 1Ep. 3034
Ukrainian journalist Illia Ponomarenko is a co-founder of The Kyiv Independent and former defence and security reporter for the Kyiv Post. He's been one of the most important voices reporting from the war in Ukraine all the way from its beginnings in 2014 through to February 2022 and up to today. His new book is I Will Show you How it Was, a story of the earliest days of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia and the siege of Kyiv that followed. Joining him to discuss the book is the resea...
Jul 23, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 3033
Cultural historian Elsa Richardson discusses her book, Rumbles: A Curious History of the Gut. It looks at our relationship over the centuries with a very intimate part of the body but one for which many know little more about than having a general gut feeling. Richardson is Lecturer of History at the University of Strathclyde and holds a Chancellor's Fellowship in the History of Health and Wellbeing at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare. In addition to lecturing in the hi...
Jul 22, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 3032
The is the second instalment of a two-part discussion. We’re living longer than ever before but we are also spending more years in poor health and some communities become more sick than others. In June 2024 science journalist Layal Liverpool and medical doctor Chris van Tulleken came to Intelligence Squared to reveal the underlying causes of our growing health crises. Drawing on the themes of their respective books Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Ill, and Ultra-Processed People, they uncover h...
Jul 20, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 3031
The is the first instalment of a two-part discussion. We’re living longer than ever before but we are also spending more years in poor health and some communities become more sick than others. In June 2024 science journalist Layal Liverpool and medical doctor Chris van Tulleken came to Intelligence Squared to reveal the underlying causes of our growing health crises. Drawing on the themes of their respective books Systemic: How Racism is Making Us Ill, and Ultra-Processed People, they uncover ho...
Jul 19, 2024•47 min•Season 1Ep. 3030
Renowned social anthropologist Harvey Whitehouse is Director of the Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Oxford and has crisscrossed the globe, living in remote parts of Papua New Guinea as well as sitting down with militias during Libya’s Arab Spring uprising, in order to learn what it means to be a human. The groups that have largely been the focus of Whitehouse’s work could be an organised religion, a tribe or a kingdom – but perhaps key to them all are th...
Jul 17, 2024•52 min•Season 1Ep. 3029
Emily Oster is an economist whose analytical eye is often focused on how to make better sense of the data behind raising children. As professor of economics at Brown University her analysis of the facts and figures involved in parenting have made her one of the most influential thinkers in how to create healthier families in recent years. Her books include Cribsheet, Expecting Better and The Family Firm, and she’s the founder of Parentdata.org, a data-driven guide through pregnancy, parenthood a...
Jul 15, 2024•46 min•Season 1Ep. 3028
This is a dip back into the extensive Intelligence Squared archive from October, 2021. Should capitalism be reformed or replaced? Former Greek Finance Minister and economist Yanis Varoufakis and Gillian Tett US editor at large at the Financial Times discuss and debate their visions for a post-COVID economy live in London. The moderator is Anne McElvoy senior editor at The Economist. We are sponsored by Indeed. Go to Indeed.com/IS for £100 sponsored credit. If you'd like to become a Member and ge...
Jul 14, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 3027
Mark Miodownik is the materials scientist and engineer whose new book is It’s a Gas: The Magnificent and Elusive Elements that Expand Our World. The book is an exploration of that most ethereal of material states – gas – that can be as light as a substance to make us laugh or hang as heavy as one of the roots of the carbon-fuelled climate crisis. Miodownik is Professor of Materials and Society at University College London and he is also Director of the Institute of Making. Joining him to discuss...
Jul 12, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 3026
The history of Turkey is often told in well-worn tropes but journalist, audio producer and now author Sami Kent is going for something a little more heartfelt in his new book, The Endless Country: A Personal Journey through Turkey’s First 100 Years. Kent’s father is Turkish and the writer’s dual perspective as an outsider with one foot on the inside has allowed him to create a book chronicling a century of Turkish history that’s steeped in curiosity as much as it is rich in local knowledge. Join...
Jul 10, 2024•43 min•Season 1Ep. 3025
This is a dip back into the extensive Intelligence Squared archive from May, 2022 Every second of the day, tiny biological clocks are ticking throughout your body, from the neural pathways of your brain down to your very cells. But modern life is disrupting this ancient and delicate mechanism in ways we are only just beginning to understand. Artificial light, jet lag, smartphones, air pollution and out-of-sync work-and-meal routines are conspiring to push us out of joint. This is not only exacer...
Jul 08, 2024•57 min•Season 1Ep. 3024
The spectres of political disillusionment and apathy have weighed heavily on this year of momentous elections but can we take inspiration from the past to reinvigorate our political imagination going forward? In this episode, Cambridge Professor and host of the Past Present Future podcast David Runciman discusses his new book, The History of Ideas: Equality, Justice and Revolution, which looks back on how big thinkers have tried to reimagine the way we do politics. Speaking to Dr Sophie Scott-Br...
Jul 06, 2024•51 min•Season 1Ep. 3023
Edward Wong is a diplomatic correspondent for The New York Times and its former Beijing bureau chief. The son of Chinese immigrants in Washington, DC, his work has often focused on global affairs and U.S. foreign policy but his new book, At the Edge of Empire: A Family's Reckoning with China, is a much more personal dive into the societal and cultural dynamics driving a superpower. Joining Wong to discuss it is the researcher, author and co-founder of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media ...
Jul 05, 2024•40 min•Season 1Ep. 3022
