How To Academy Podcast

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Dennis Duncan - Index, a history of the Sep 06, 2021

Show notes

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 coffee houses of Georgian London, an d with a cast including Plato, Sherlock Holmes, and Norman Mailer, this witty history of an invaluable and underappreciated tool is sure to delight bibliophiles everywhere.

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Mary Portas - How to Thrive in the New Kindness Economy Aug 30, 2021

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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 dominated by the biggest, fastest and cheapest. But those values no longer resonate. We've come to realize that more doesn't equal better. How we live, buy and sell is changing. The post-pandemic era is all about care, respect and understanding the implications of what we're doing.

This 'Kindness Economy' is a new value system where in order to thrive businesses must understand the fundamental role they play in the fabric of our lives. They need to add, not just grow, balancing commerce with social progress. Because we don't just want to buy from brands - we want to buy into them.

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Gordon Brown – How to Change the World Aug 24, 2021

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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 diplomats, working to widen access to education and break the poverty cycle.

In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, he joins Tom Fletcher, former diplomat and Principal of Hertford College, Oxford, to share his insights into the major crises of the 21st century.

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Anish Kapoor - a Life in Art Aug 16, 2021

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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 an artist both revered by critics and overwhelmingly loved by the public.

From Chicago’s Cloud Gate to the London Olympic Park’s Orbit, the Rockefeller Center’s Sky Mirror to Paris’s Leviathan, Kapoor’s sculptures resonate with mythic significance, belonging to a tradition and a way of thinking that extends back to the great wonders of the world.

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Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green - The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine Aug 09, 2021

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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 manufacturing of the vaccine, join us to separate fact from fiction and explain how they made a highly safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching.

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Charles Yu - Interior Chinatown Aug 03, 2021

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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 one of the best books of 2020. A New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2020 National Book Award, the novel confirms Yu as one of America's most exciting young authors.

In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, he explores the history of Chinese culture in the US, how his personal experiences as a first generation Taiwanese-American shaped the narrative, and what his own time in Hollywood has taught him about the art of storytelling.

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Mike Rothschild - The Rise of QAnon Jul 26, 2021

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In 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark at a gathering of military officials, describing it as ‘the calm before the storm’-then refused to explain himself to puzzled journalists. But on internet message boards, a mysterious poster called ‘Q Clearance Patriot’ began an elaboration all of their own.

In this week's podcast, Mike Rothschild explores his new book, The Storm Is Upon Us. With families torn apart and with the Capitol under attack, he argues that mocking the madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Instead, he argues that QAnon tells us everything we need to know about global fear after Trump-and that we need to understand it now, because it’s not going away.

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Lisa Taddeo and Hadley Freeman - Madness, Transgression, and Power Jul 19, 2021

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Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was a world-wide sensation – forever changing how we think about women and desire. A bestseller in the US and the UK, “Book of the Year” for more than thirty of the most respected media titles, including the FT, Times and Time magazine, an instant classic beloved by cultural icons including Gillian Anderson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Elizabeth Gilbert, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a global phenomenon.

Now Lisa’s debut novel Animal is set to do the same for how we think about madness and trauma. Animal opens with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head of an unrequited lover and becomes a road-trip to California, centring on a woman who is driven to extremes by the violence of her past. In this episode of the podcast, Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman explores the inspiration behind this brazen and daring fictional debut.

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Daniel Kahneman - Why We Make Bad Judgments Jul 12, 2021

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The quality of professional judgments have a huge and lasting impact on all of our lives: the decision of an A&E doctor treating a patient, a teacher grading a paper, or a high court judge delivering a sentencing should not be a matter of personal taste. And yet there is huge, unwanted variability across human judgment.

Bias has long been the star of the show when it comes to errors in decision making. Now Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony have uncovered a critical and overlooked factor: noise. Noise explains why police officers show greater leniency towards offenders who have the same name as they do; why doctors prescribe more drugs at the end of the day than at the beginning; why judicial sentences tend to be more severe in hot weather; and why stock-market performance is affected by sunshine.

In conversation with Diana Fox Carney, Kahneman, Sunstein and Sibony reveal how noise and bias both shape our thought processes – and the remedies we can take to make far better decisions and judgments.

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John Higgs - William Blake vs the World Jul 05, 2021

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Join us for a wild journey through culture, science, philosophy and religion to better understand the mercurial genius William Blake. Taking us on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context. The journey begins with us trying to understand him, but we will ultimately discover that it is Blake who helps us to understand ourselves.

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