Pod Academy

“My grandchildren are so busy with all their extra classes that I seem to spend most our time together acting as a taxi service.” “When the children come to stay I'm constantly worried about keeping them safe.” “ I'd love to have fun with them, but my daughter expects me to supervise their homework and test them on their spelling.” Are today's grandmothers too protective and anxious? Benedetta Cappelini, Professor of Marketing at the University of Durham, certainly thinks so. She talks to Sally Feldman, who is currently writing a book of advice for new grannies, about the effects of the new trend in intensive parenting. 'Intensiveparenting', with its emphasis on extra curricular activities, supervised 'playdates' and conversations about thoughts and feelings is fast becoming the norm for this generation of parents, requiring the investment of significant amounts of time, money and energy in raising children. What are the implications for grandparents who did not raise their own children in this way, but who regularly look after their grandchildren?

“My grandchildren are so busy with all their extra classes that I seem to spend most our time together acting as a taxi service.” “When the children come to stay I'm constantly worried about keeping them safe.” “ I'd love to have fun with them, but my daughter expects me to supervise their homework and test them on their spelling.” Are today's grandmothers too protective and anxious? Benedetta Cappelini, Professor of Marketing at the University of Durham, certainly thinks so. She talks to Sally Feldman, who is currently writing a book of advice for new grannies, about the effects of the new trend in intensive parenting. 'Intensiveparenting', with its emphasis on extra curricular activities, supervised 'playdates' and conversations about thoughts and feelings is fast becoming the norm for this generation of parents, requiring the investment of significant amounts of time, money and energy in raising children. What are the implications for grandparents who did not raise their own children in this way, but who regularly look after their grandchildren?

What are grandmothers for? That's what Sally Feldman wondered when she first learned that her daughter was pregnant. As a former editor of BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour she was familiar with so many aspects of female experiences. But faced with the prospect of a grandchild, she realised she was clueless. So now she's writing a book of advice for new grandmothers. This podcast is a conversation with four grandmothers. Their discussion is a taster of the forthcoming book, featuring some of the joys and challenges of this most precious role. Sally would love to hear from other grandmothers, so do send your comments here, or else contact her at: sallyjoyfeldman@gmail.com

With Covid rates remaining stubbornly high and a huge pent-up demand for hospital care, the UK's National Health Service faces a tough winter. Intensive care wards are the canary in the mine, reports Rachael Jolley. Mark Toshner: We can make beds, but what we can't make are specialised staff to run those beds. The accident and emergency department needs a very specific skill set. And once you run out of their capacity, you don't really have anywhere to turn. The winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how difficult that is, I think we don't know, but it's going to be difficult. If you hear people from intensive care,  telling you things are tough, that's a really important canary down the mine, because these people are the SAS of clinical staff. And if they are telling you it's tough, you should be listening. Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area. Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy. My name is Rachael Jolley. I'm a journalist and podcast producer. In this episode, we look at the challenges for the National Health Service as it faces COVID in winter 2021. With Welsh hospitals reporting some of the longest waiting times ever and the Scottish government calling in the army to help drive ambulances are we as prepared as we can be for the winter ahead? And what does it feel like inside one of the UKs most famous hospitals right now? In September Prime Minister Boris Johnson said further restrictions could be put in place if the NHS is threatened this winter. By the end of the month COVID hospitalisations were already at a high level. To find out more and see how different this winter might be from the last one I spoke with two doctors who work at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge. We talked about how they'd coped so far and how they're preparing for this winter and what their biggest worries were. I spoke with Mark Toshner, an academic at Cambridge University, who is also a pulmonary physician, a specialist in illnesses relating to the lungs, at Addenbrooke's. While Mark doesn't normally work in intensive care last year, he was called into help out during the worst of the emergency. And Pod Academy also heard from Andrew Conway Morris, a clinical scientist at Cambridge University and a consultant working in intensive care at Addenbrookes. First we heard from Mark Toshner. Mark, if I were the Secretary of State for Health, what would you be asking me to do right now? Mark Toshner:  The first thing I would be asking is for our really honest acknowledgement that we're in a difficult place and that we have just under, I think we might even have topped 8000 people in hospital now and we've had that for weeks now, between about 7000 and 8,000 and that this was supposed to be our period of rest, or quiet time, during the summer. In actual fact we've seen almost historic highs of healthcare utilisation. That's a really tough start to then go into winter for, and, so we're in a really vulnerable position. Rachael Jolley: And Andy, what is it like in intensive care right now? Andrew Conway Morris: My unit is about a third full of COVID. We have spilled out into our higher independency area and we are ventilating patients in the high dependency area Mark Toshner: I've got plenty of colleagues who've essentially just been the coal face now for the better part of a year and a half or longer, and you can see the toll that it's taken on some of them. And it has a pretty heavy toll. And so the winter is going to be tough. I think that nobody's envisaging anything other than a really difficult winter and how difficult that is I think we don't know, but it's going to be difficult. We start off with one of the lowest ratios of doctors to population any way.

It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody. But is geopolitics getting in the way of good public health policy as we strive to overcome COVID-19?     In this podcast, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield considers how geopolitics is affecting government decisions around vaccines and distribution, with guests from the US, UK and the Philippines.   Mark Toshner: It's not about individual countries. It's not about individual regions. It's not even about blocks. This doesn't work unless we vaccinate everybody. John Nery:  The survey shows that something like 68% of Filipino adults have doubts about whether they should take the COVID-19 vaccine or not. Then that's just really worrying. Jeffrey Wasserstrom:   So we can think of it as soft power sort of related to having a space program, to have this idea that Beijing is one of the world capitals that's at the forefront of various technologies. Michael Jennings:  And if you look at many African countries, they've responded extremely effectively. They've made use of technology.  Rwanda has been making use of drones to get messaging to very remote communities. Rachael Jolley:  Hello, my name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to this episode of a series of podcasts I've hosted for Pod Academy on the global politics of the pandemic. In this episode, I talk to academics in the UK, USA and the Philippines about how national agendas are affecting decision-making, how the virus has to be tackled internationally and how history can sometimes get in the way. We also talk about misinformation around the disease and why, if we don't think globally, then in the end, the virus wins. Geopolitics is increasingly a major factor in the discussions around COVID whether about access to PPE or access to the vaccine. Delivery of stocks or stopping vaccine supply arriving over a border often gets tied up with the politics and economics between countries. As some nations trumpet how well they've done, they rank themselves against others. There's something of a global competition to see which national leader can take the most glory. In the midst of this, there are countries trying to win friends and influence people by delivering stocks of vaccine to those that don't have any. Economic alliances are being built or improved while others are being undermined. With us on the podcast are Mark Toshner, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a pulmonary vascular physician who spends a lot of time on Twitter answering the public's queries about vaccines when he's not looking at the impact of long COVID. We also hear from John Nery, who's based in Manila in the Philippines and teaches media and politics, and is the chair of the journalism centre at the Ateneo de Manila University. Also joining the conversation are Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a professor in the history of China at the University of California at Irvine, and Michael Jennings, Michael is a reader in international development in the department of development studies at SOAS, University of London, and researches global health and development. I started by talking to Mark Toshner. Mark, are you worried about geopolitics getting in the way of people's acceptance of vaccines? Mark Toshner: [00:03:09] The short answer to that is yes. I usually deal on social media with individual concerns about vaccines. And so I spend a lot of my time just addressing people and what their concerns are and, and I think they're complex and they vary from region to region. They vary from place to place, but the one thing that I think hasn't really been addressed very well in looking at how we improve uptake is that we've got a whole world to vaccinate here. So it's not about individual countries.

Cautiously, museums across the world are opening their doors. But there's one place where, even during the pandemic, you always get to be up close - the virtual museum. In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less a place of authority, more an agora of ideas. But we have to think outside the box to solve curatorial issues in the digital space.  Zara Karschay takes us on a tour...... . To see each and every brushstroke. To handle priceless objects. A place where figures in famous works of art turn to look back at you. A place where you can stay as long as you like in front of the Mona Lisa. Virtual collections aren't new. But for much of last year, our only option to see museum was online. And 2020 had many more cultural institutions racing to develop their virtual collections and tours. As we enter the promised ‘new normal’, or perhaps even a ‘virtual-first’ era, where we might come to see a collection and objects online before going in person, we wonder, what can virtual collections give us that physical collections cannot? How can we turn the novelty of technology into something more meaningful, something that introduces us to new stories that helps us change our minds? Or maybe, that even changes the perspective the museum has of itself?   ME: We are definitely rethinking how we're using digital in our collection.   ZK: This is Maria Economou, Professor of Digital Cultural Heritage at the University of Glasgow.   ME: The digital is not just the technology that underpins it, but also affects the way the museum is seen. It affects its identity, the way we see ourselves. I think the first few years of digital heritage and digital activity, the digital, unfortunately, was the strong partner, and the cultural heritage was the weakest relative. It's improved a lot, but you see even today that sometimes the whistles and bells and the graphics the tech was really the main driving engine rather than, “Who are we doing this for?” “Who are the users?” “What do these collections require?” and being focused more that way.   ZK: In the digital environment, the museum can take on a new role, less as a place of authority and more, an agora of ideas, which also reforms the way that visitors see their role in the museum.   ME:  To think of themselves not just as end-users and consumers and producers of this material, but to put themselves in the position of being critically engaged with this. How do we make sense of personal memories? What do we feel are common memories to be shared? What gives us and helps us define ourselves? It's a shift in your position, in your role, and much more active one.   ZK: In 2018 Professor Economou produced the Digital Heritage Strategy for the university's museum, the Hunterian. One of its themes was to find ways to engage a broader public by building and sharing knowledge. From the digital agora to the ancient Roman marketplace, the Hunterian can tell stories about associated but disparate collections, well beyond the walls of the museum.   ME: The actual act and art of storytelling has been taking place for so long. And all good cultural institutions are doing some form of storytelling. Even if it's just by putting objects together, even the juxtaposition and placement in space is telling a story and a narrative. We have, for example, in the Hunterian an important part of the Antonine world collections, which is from Roman Scotland. So, one of the parts of the Roman Empire’s most northern frontier, then it goes all over Europe, and then the rest goes south to Africa. So, it's a great big scheme for UNESCO to connect all the sites that relates to the frontiers of the Roman Empire. We were looking at how digital storytelling can support emotional engagement with our collections. So, even for people who actually don't really care that much about Roman Scotland, or history or some of those objects,

The death of writer and activist Nawal el Saadawi has just been announced.  In 2011 Tess Woodcraft interviewed her at a conference organised by the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Right Organisation for Pod Academy. We reproduce it here. Typically, and at 80 years old, she had stopped off at the Occupy encampment around St Paul's Cathedral on her way from the airport, before coming on to the conference. Note: there is also an Italian translation of this podcast, by Federica di Lascio, below. Nawal el Saadawi is one of the foremost Egyptian writers. A doctor by profession, she has written over 40 books of fiction and non-fiction, which have been translated into 30 languages. Since her very first novel, written in her twenties, she has taken on some of the most difficult, challenging, controversial subjects, including: female genital mutilation, domestic violence, child marriage, prostitution, the impact of war on women and children, so-called ‘honour killing’ and the laws that maintain women’s status as minors. It is not surprising perhaps that this has made her many powerful enemies. She has been forced out of employment, she was imprisoned by the Egyptian authorities in the 1980s and in the 1990s she lived under serious death threats from religious fundamentalists. Indeed, she was forced into exile. But now she is back in Egypt where, although now in her eighties, she took an active role in the demonstrations in Tahrir Square last Spring and continues to fight to ensure that women’s rights are part of the political settlement in Egypt. Her writing and activism are seen by women around the world as a beacon of light and she has received many awards, literary and academic. This interview was recorded at a conference in London organised by IKWRO, the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation, which works to end honour killing and sexual violence against women. Tess Woodcraft:   What did you mean when you wrote in your autobiography: ‘writing is my sole refuge, it’s like breathing’? Nawal el Saadawi:  My work is my love and when you love your work you can do it well.  Since childhood I was forced to study medicine, to become a doctor. But I didn’t dream of being a physician – I dreamt of art, music, poetry, dancing, writing novels. Of course there is no separation of creativity in science and art, but when I was a child I loved to move my body, to dance and this is natural.  But in Egypt at that time it was a taboo to be a dancer or a film actress, and it was very respectable to be a doctor. So I accepted the advice of my parents and went into the medical profession.  But all the time I felt that my writing was my life, and all the time I kept a secret diary under my pillow, and I have never stopped writing from then till now. It is more than oxygen, it is my life. It is more than breathing TW:  How do you see the relationship between your writing and your political activism? N el S: They are inseparable.  Writing and fighting are inseparable.  Why do we write?  Because it gives us pleasure.  Creativity gives us pleasure.  The pleasure of creativity is above everything – it can cure us of all our pains.  But of course creativity can also lead to you to prison and to exile because you challenge the system.  But the pleasure of creativity is more than the pain Nawal el Saadawi at the IKWRO conference TW: You’ve tackled some of the most difficult issues, – one of these is female genital mutilation.  Despite efforts to outlaw it, it is still practised in many countries.  Is it possible to change this? N el S: Of course, but there are many sexual problems in the lives of women – female genital mutilation, rape, honour killing, forced marriages.  They are usually tackled separately, but we have to connect in order to cure. In order to cure the problem, we have to know why we have it.  Why is the clitoris of women cut?  (and we have to link male genital mutilation to female genital mutil...

Journalism has sometimes been a dangerous profession during the pandemic, but there has been real innovation, too.  In this, the third part of our series on Journalism in the Pandemic, Rachael Jolley, former editor-in-chief of Index on Censorship and research fellow at the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield  considers how Covid 19 has influenced the future of  journalism.   Rachael Jolley: Welcome to Pod Academy and our third podcast in this series on journalism during the pandemic. In this episode we look at the challenges that reporters were just not prepared for. And what are the innovations and changes that come out of the crisis that will be significant for the years ahead. As the pandemic kicked off, the big challenge for many news organisations was to move their reporting teams to work completely remotely, so there was a massive shifting of equipment to people's homes. Suddenly all sorts of questions were being asked about filing stories in different ways and how to cover stories while reducing risks of infection. Very few had experience covering a pandemic before. And so there was no obvious formula to follow. Then there were the technical challenges of using new equipment or older equipment differently. At the same time, staff were off sick or on furlough or newsrooms were cut back because of financial pressures. So what were the toughest obstacles and what are the innovations that might make a difference to how journalism is done in the future? We talked to experts around the world to find out.  First, we went to Milan, the epicenter of the pandemic in Italy, and  talked to Laura Silvia Battaglia, the coordinator, and soon to be director of the Catholic University of Milan's journalism school and a journalist herself.   We kicked off by talking about the challenges for the journalism school and its students. Laura Silvia Battaglia: Here in Milan, we started in February thinking about how could it be possible to cover the pandemic. But we weren't really conscious about the challenges for our profession and also about the risks at the beginning. No one knew exactly what COVID-19 was. We started thinking about the safety for our students and the risks related to  covering these areas. So the challenges were very significant because we used to send our students around like every reporter does. But at the same time they are students. We told them immediately, to try to keep a distance, the safety distance, how to cover yourself using masks, using face shields.  So we provided all this stuff to our students and we decided  only the people that really wanted to go out for reporting (of course, covering themselves and trying to avoid  any risk and following the rules). So only the people that wanted to they did it and the others who didn't want to go reporting, they would not, they would work at a desk for our publications. Rachael Jolley: Here is Richard Sambrook, a former director of global news at the BBC and now director of the centre for journalism at Cardiff University on why it was difficult for news organisations to know where to start.... Richard Sambrook: Nobody has had direct experience of reporting a pandemic like this before. So I think it took quite a while for people to understand how to use the statistics, how to use the figures, what to expect from the science and so on as well. That took quite a lot of catching up with even for some of the health specialists. There's the whole question of being remote from the community they serve. Because actually, if anything that we've learned over the last few years is journalism has been too remote needs to get closer to the community. But now the pandemic's come in and now got in the way of that as well. So trying to report the impact, you know, in ways that are still COVID compliant is difficult and challenging and quite complicated. And then we've seen a huge rise in disinformation around COVID and around ...

Authoritarian restrictions on the press, attacks on journalists in the streets and more accusations of 'fake news' - it's like a war zone out there.  Rachael Jolley looks at the dangers of reporting during the Covid -19 pandemic. Jolley (@londoninsider) has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic, this is the second in the series. William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth, but pandemic is in the same category Jean-Paul Marthoz:  Today being a journalist, you don't show necessarily that you are press. It's like going to a war zone Lada Price:  In Bulgaria, there are several reports of journalists being attacked, despite clearly identifying themselves as members of the press. Kirstin McCudden: We started keeping track of journalists who were harassed for covering the protests (which would be part of a normal news gathering routine, of course) Donald Trump: They are the fake, fake, disgusting news Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley and welcome to Pod Academy. This the second in our series on journalism during the pandemic. Worryingly, we're seeing the escalation of violence and aggression during this global pandemic as journalists literally battle to report on vital and public interest stories. From physical attacks to attacks on journalists' reputations to governments introducing new legislation, putting limits on reporting, those that don't want journalists to report an issue will try all sorts of measures to try and stop them even threatening to try and infect them. These are terrifying trends. The pandemic appears to have allowed the powerful to gain more tools in their armoury when it comes to squeezing media freedom. William Horsley is co-founder and international director of the Centre for Freedom of the Media at the University of Sheffield's department of journalism. William is also a former television and radio journalist at the  BBC. William Horsley: They say that the first casualty of war is truth. It turns out that pandemic is in the same category because what it does is it increases physical risk in many ways for journalists as they go about their business, particularly for example, reporting on the lockdowns. But also it gives governments the reason to assume much more executive power. And this happened against the background, of course, of a shift towards a much more authoritarian style, particularly assaults against the free and independent media.  Rachael Jolley:  Lada  Price, a senior lecturer in journalism from Sheffield Hallam University, talks about the way that this kind of emergency legislation brought in during the pandemic has been used in Eastern Europe to restrict what journalists can do. Lada Price:If you look at reports that have been issued by organisations such as Freedom House, Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders they have all raised the alarm about emergency measures that have restricted media freedom severely. Let's take, for example, Eastern European countries, such as Hungary, where at the onset of the pandemic, the government introduced laws, or rule by decree, indefinitely bypassing parliament. And that is known as the Authorisation Act. And that included actually prison terms from one to five years for those, and that could include journalists, that spread misinformation and false hope. Rachael Jolley: It's not just in Eastern Europe that governments have used COVID-19 to pass laws to restrict freedom of the press William Horsley: By June of 2020, Reporters Without Borders was reporting that half the UN member states had already enacted emergency laws, which were endangering free speech. At the end of the year, the UN Secretary General himself said that there was a pandemic of misinformation and that although the role of journalists was much more important because of the need for good information about the pandemic, in fact,

Local newspapers have been in decline for years, but the decline has been massively exacerbated by the Covid pandemic.  Can a new type of hyper-local journalism be the answer for local news and local democracy? And how will it be funded? Rachael Jolley (@londoninsider), Research fellow @sheffjournalism and former Editor  in Chief of Index on Censorship, has developed a series of podcasts for Pod Academy on News in the Pandemic.  This one, on local journalism, is the first in the series. Intro excerpts... Rachael Jolley: My name is Rachael Jolley. Welcome to Pod Academy and  our series of three podcasts, exploring journalism during the pandemic. In the first of the series, we talk about local journalism. it's economics and job losses, the hurdles and the technical challenges and find out about pink slime sites. Our, first guest is Damian Radcliffe, professor of journalism at the University of Oregon. We started off by talking about how journalists have responded to the challenges of working during the pandemic. Damian, what do you  think have been the biggest challenges for local journalists in the US and elsewhere during this period? Damian Radcliffe: [00:00:21] Well, I think there's been a lot of different challenges that local news outlets have faced. Some of those are sort of long-term structural issues in terms of trust. It access to, to read as an audience is advertising revenues and so forth. And then we've also seen a whole bunch of pandemic-era, issues that have suddenly emerged, such as reporting safely and from a distance, the emergence of culture wars around mask wearing, which has been very pronounced, , here in the United States and massive uncertainty about the future of the profession as [00:01:00] a result of both. Large-scale job losses that we have seen, you know, they're not unique to local journalism. We've seen that over the course of the last 10, 15 years, but have really, really accelerated over the course of the last nine to 10 months and a real reckoning about the sort of future of local journalism against a new civil rights movement and kind of racial backdrop, which is rightly making a lot of newsrooms ask if they are still fit for purpose. Rachael Jolley: [00:01:28] Interestingly, we have seen quite a surge in readership for some local news sites. Why does that happen do you think? Damian Radcliffe: [00:01:36] I think the biggest reason why we've seen that surge is that there was so much, and there continues to be so much, uncertainty about the implications of the pandemic and what it means for you and your family, for your work, for your community and so forth. And you just can't get the level of granularity that you might need to make informed decisions about your life. And what you do day to day if [00:02:00] you're accessing national news. So in that environment, local news really comes into its own in terms of being able to take that bigger picture and being able to unpack it for audiences at a local level. So I think that's been a key reason why we've seen, particularly in the early stages of the pandemic, a lot of growth of, of interest in, in local journalism, because it's answering questions that other outlets are just not answering. Rachael Jolley: [00:02:26] You've mentioned in some of the work that you've done, that local news sites such as the San Francisco Chronicle and the Seattle Times have seen a spike in readership. But that's not true of the readership of some more directly partisan sites. What do you think is happening here? Damian Radcliffe: [00:02:43] It's a great question. I think to be honest part of it, we just don't know, but I wonder if some of the reasons for that are around trust and kind of going to sort of more neutral sources and kind of more non-partisan sources to try and get a sense  of what's going on. And, critics of some of those outlets would still say that they have an agenda, but I think they're sort of more,

Pod Academy's Chair, Chris Creegan, reflects on Covid-19 and HIV.

A Scottish Laird becomes Lord of the Bedchamber in the Abyssinian/Ethiopian court and finds the source of the Nile. Like many of his wealthy contemporaries in the 18th and 19th centuries, Lord James Bruce of Kinnaird made the grand tour of Europe (see the companion blog to this podcast).  Unlike many of them he also ventured further afield. For three years, from 1769 to 1772, the six-foot four Scottish laird with vivid red hair, travelled to Abyssinia, the old Ethiopian Empire comprising the northern half of present-day Ethiopia.  But his reasons for going are shrouded in mystery. Was he trying to find the source of the Nile or like an 18th century Indiana Jones, was he really searching for the Ark of the Covenant? Our producer Antonia Dalivalle takes up the story…. Bruce arrived in the country at a time when Abyssinians weren’t exactly fans of Europeans.   A century earlier, the Emperor had kicked out the Portuguese Jesuits. They had pushed their luck and tried to convert the already-Christian Ethiopians to Catholicism. After the last of the Portuguese fled with their tails between their legs, Abyssinia closed itself  off to outside influence – barricading itself against those they called the hyenas of the west.   Abyssinians paid each other to spread ‘fake news’ to foreigners about the journey into the interior– hoping they would turn around and go back the way they came. A common bluff was that a rampant warlord was blocking the road. With a couple of exceptions, Bruce was pretty much the first European to set foot in the country since the expulsion of the Jesuits. A notable exception was the seventeenth century  French doctor Jean-Baptiste Poncet, who exclaimed that the Abyssinian highlands, fragrant with flowers, reminded him of “The most beautiful part of Provence!” Bruce surely achieved his passage to Gondar not only because of the liberal distribution of gifts - from gold to English pistols - but also because he was fluent in Ethiopian languages,  having studied them industriously before leaving Europe. He arrived in Gondar on the occasion of an outbreak of smallpox. But this unfortunate event had a silver lining for Bruce. Europeans before him had used medicine to get into the Abyssinian court. Luckily for Bruce, he had studied medicine in Arabia, and was able to lend a hand. As a Protestant Scot, Bruce was in a position to forge a closer bond with the imperial family, who were anti-Catholic. At one point, Bruce placed his hand on a Bible, and explained to the Abyssinian Queen, the Iteghe, “I declare to you, by all those truths contained in this book, that my religion is more different from the Catholic than yours is. There has been more blood shed between the Catholics and us, on account of the difference of religion, than ever was between you and the Catholics in this country." In Abyssinia, royal and religious history are interwoven. If asked ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, Abyssinian Queens could justifiably say the Queen of Sheba.  Abyssinian royalty traced their lineage back to the King of Kings, King Solomon. Bruce was similarly insistent about his royal lineage. He commissioned the Bruce of Kinnaird tartan to be woven from fourteen colours of yarn – twice the royal seven.  Bruce was the direct descendant of the fierce Scottish warrior-king, Robert the Bruce. After a grueling interrogation from the teenage Emperor on the subject of England, he became Lord of the Bedchamber. The Scottish laird was now an official member of the glorious Gondarian court.  Fluent in Amharic and Ge’ez, with his hair curled and perfumed in the ‘Abyssinian fashion’, he was the most punctilious guest. And Bruce said about the Emperor: “Nor did I ever after see, in his countenance, any marks either of doubt or diffidence. But always, on the contrary, the most decisive proofs of friendship, confidence, and attention”. Musical Interlude----‘Duelling African Lyres: The Ancient Egyptian Lyre ...

Take a look at The Tribuna of the Uffizi by Johan Zoffany. What do you see? A group of Georgian Grand Tourist poseurs.  But one figure, towers above the rest, stands apart, on the far right of the painting. It is James Bruce of Kinneard, the real Indiana Jones. James Bruce is introduced in this blog, and in the accompanying short podcast  by our producer, Antonia Dalivalle.  Antonia explores the story of Bruce's travels in Abyssinia/Ethiopia in her  longer podcast The Real Indiana Jones - coming soon.  In the left-hand corner of the painting, a jumble of valuable artefacts - including a distressed looking lion sculpture – are strewn across the floor. The connoisseurs are crowded into a chapel-like space, the Tribuna in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. This was a ‘Holy of Holies’ – a ‘Hollywood Walk of Fame’ – of treasured European antiquities and artworks. They were on an eighteenth-century equivalent of the ‘Gap Year’. They weren’t finding themselves – but rather, the roots of European culture, through art, literature and archaeology. Between coffee breaks at Rome’s Caffè degli Inglesi, the go-to-place for Brits abroad, members of the landed gentry would draw classical antiquities and attempt to elevate their minds.Zoffany’s painting was designed to be a ‘conversation piece’. And it achieved its aim. In November 1779, Horace Walpole sent a letter to Sir Horace Mann, sneering that the piece is ‘crowded with a flock of travelling boys, and one does not know or care whom’. Bit awkward, considering Horace Mann himself is in the painting. The son of Robert Walpole (the first Prime Minister of Britain) Horace himself had sashayed through Europe on a Grand – or rather, Grandiloquent - Tour. Instead of following the pack of milordi around the to-do list of Florentine sights, Horace enjoyed balmy evenings on the Ponte Vecchio bridge in his wide-brimmed straw hat and linen nightie, recounting a list of all the sights he couldn’t be bothered to go and see. Back to the Tribuna. On the right, a small gathering of Grand Tourists admire the voluptuous posterior of the Venus de’ Medici. One of them goes in for a closer look with his magnifying glass. One figure, towering above the rest, stands apart. In the midst of the swaggering, sniggering gaggle of Grand Tourists, he almost escapes our notice. He’s at the margin of the painting, and seemingly an outsider, but he’s an essential compositional device. He’s one of only three participants in this painting who meet our gaze directly. The ruddy face of Zoffany peeps at us from behind the Niccolini Madonna and Titian’s sassy Venus of Urbino gives us the eye. Is Zoffany trying to tell us something, trying to mark this person out from the others? Who was he? Zoffany thought he was a ‘great man – the wonder of his age’.2 He had presence. A six-foot four, red-headed Scottish laird, with a loud, booming voice. Despite his raging tempers, he was empathetic and charismatic. His name was James Bruce of Kinnaird.   In 1774, he was in Florence, having just been on a diversion in his Grand Tour. It was a very long and unusual diversion. He went to ‘Abyssiniah’ on his Gap Year. James Bruce of Kinnaird was the real Indiana Jones. On his black horse Mizra, Persian for ‘scholar’, he visited the ancient city believed to be the Queen of Sheba’s hometown and dwelling-place of the Ark of the Covenant, the Holy of Holies. But Bruce was no interloper. He stayed in Abyssinia, today known as Ethiopia, for three years, from 1769 to 1772.  He would become a familiar of the Abyssinian royal court. Appointed Lord of the Bedchamber to the Emperor, he would gain unique insights into the country’s royal and political history. He became friends with the Machiavellian Governor of Tigray and fell in love with his wife,Ozoro Esther, a beautiful and brutal princess. When he left Abyssinia, she threw a lavish party for him. They dined on honey and hunted buffalo.

What does it mean to be a 'good man'? With so much talk about toxic masculinity,  there is, perhaps. a pre-supposition that there is no good masculinity. This lecture by Dr Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Roehampton University, is based on her forthcoming book, What do Men Want?  It is part of the IF Project's 2019 lecture series, Thinking Between the Lines: truth, lies and fiction in an age of populism. Nina Power points to the resentment men feel towards women (and women's resentment of men).  Nowhere is that resentment more apparent than in the male only groups that are springing up  such as Fathers for Justice, INCEL men, and Men Going their Own Way (mgtow), whose website says. Happiness is a man who protects and cares for his family, goes forth and conquers, gives of himself for a greater cause, and ensures his legacy – because that’s what he was made to do.........But today’s men are ... told to “man up” and tough it out through turbulent waters while being called misogynists for expecting sustenance. They’re shamed into putting down roots in infertile hypergamous soil that offers no support, then are financially ruined and separated from their children when they cannot weather the storm. It is this that Nina Power, as a feminist, is seeking to understand.  Pointing to the popularity of Jordan Peterson - his sell-out book 12 Rules for Life, the fact that he recently filled the O2 Arena in London - she suggests that men are searching for a role. Peterson, says Nina Power, is a patriarchal figure.  Patriarchs in the bible like Abraham are protectors, they take responsibility.  Feminsts talk about 'the patriarchy'but where are the patriarchs now? she asks This lecture roams over the post Me Too fear of touch, male suicide, trans men ,pick-up artists, sex on campus, men who live without contact with women, and time and again, men's uncertainly about their role. But we live in a hetero-social society, men and women work together, live together, play together.  Nina Power suggests that we need to talk more, understand each other more, and have more fun together. Photo:  "Making Men" by Damien Schumann is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0   

This lecture on Left populism is part of the IF Project’s lecture series, Thinking between the Lines: Truth, Lies and Fiction in an age of populism.   Dr Marina Prentoulis, Senior Lecturer in the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at University of East Anglia and a member of Syriza, explores the differences between Left and Right Wing populism. She recognises that Left and Right populism are often seen as two sides of the same coin, and points to What is Populism? by Jan-Werner Müller (one of the best known books on populism) as being an analysis which wrongly conflates left wing and right wing populism, in part because it uses a journalistic rather than a rigorous theoretical approach, focusing on form rather than policy.  For example, Werner contends that “populist claim that they, and only they, represent the people” p. 20 “populists live in a kind of political fantasy world: they imagine an opposition between corrupt elites and a morally pure, homogeneous people” (p. 41) “Populists create a Homogeneous people in whose name they have been speaking all along” (p.48) “…populism is thus a moralized form of anti-pluralism…” (p.20) By contrast, Dr Prentoulis challenges the notion of a 'homogenous people' and argues that it is policy that makes left and right populism very different from one another, with open borders, internationalism and inclusion being fundamental to all forms of left populism, and 'nation' and exclusion being an intrinsic part of all right wing populisms.   Picture:  Occupy London 2011 Global Democracy Now Occupy London Tents in front of St Pauls, London Sunday 16th October 2011 by Neil Cummings

"No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other, and no one, as far as I. know, has ever counted truthfulness among the political virtues. Lies have always been regarded as necessary and justifiable tools not only of the politician's or the demagogue's but also of the statesman's trade. Why is that so? And what does it mean for the nature and the dignity of the political realm, on one side, and for the nature and the dignity of  truth and truthfulness, on the other?" From Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought So says political philosopher Hannah Arendt, the subject of this lecture which is part of the IF Project's lecture series, Thinking between the Lines: Truth, Lies and Fiction in an age of populism. Dr Dan Taylor of Goldsmiths, University of London, takes the title Truth and Politics (the title of Arendt's essay quoted above), to explore the testy and troublesome relationship between truth and politics. Are all politicians just liars?  asks Dr Taylor.  No, but some lie a lot more than others.  Why? he asks.  Is there something about being powerful and wealthy that makes you lie to mystify the conditions of your own power to suggest that your position is well earned, natural? And why do we place such a premium on the truth, anyway, when we are so cynical about it? Dr Taylor uses Arendt's work as a tool to consider Donald Trump's 'alternative facts', Ivanka Trump, Extinction Rebellion and climate deniers, the Pentagon Papers, Rudy Giuliani (who said the truth is not the truth), and the 'spin' of Tony Blair. Facts are just facts, says Dr Taylor, but lies create an alternative reality and undermine our faith in democracy.  Totalitarianism relies on a network of lies, that reinforce each other and create an alternative reality. Hannah Aarendt is perhaps best known for writing about "the banality of evil" in connection with the trial of Adolf Eichmann 1961-63.

Who is allowed to make things up?   What does fiction writing have to do with life? Is a novel a document? This is the second lecture in the If Project series, Thinking Between the Lines: truth, lies and fiction in an age of populism.  Dr Katie da Cunha Lewin (@kdc_lewin) explores what it means to 'make things up' in literature, especially looking at writing by women.   “I don’t have to go anywhere, I don’t have to imagine anything. It’s in the living room with me. – Sheila Heti The quote above from Sheila Heti, a Canadian writer whose recent work Motherhood (2018), dealt with the many questions that underpin the idea of mothering and child-rearing, helps us think about the central idea of this lecture: what does it mean to ‘make things up’ in literature? Who is allowed to make things up? And what happens if writing avoids doing that all together? In my argument for this lecture, I want to unpack some of these questions, but I also want to suggest something about the politics of making things up. This lecture will be split into two sections: in the first, I’ll be talking about writing and its relationship to life; that is, writing and our idea of its relation to truth. In the second section, I want to discuss the relationship between writing, invention and reality in contemporary American writing by women. I want to think about how this relation to truth changes according to who is doing the writing, and importantly how that truth is perceived by the wider reading public. In this, we find lots of issues to do with authority, agency, and labour – but there is also a wider question about why we want our fiction to be ‘made up’ and what it is that our fiction looks like. And also want to look ahead slightly to (perhaps the not so distant future) about the effect on technology and our ‘truth.’  This theme has come from my own research on the idea of the genius and who is allowed to ‘be’ a genius. I don’t particularly like the term, but the way it is used, thrown around in reviews, or used as selling points for exhibitions interests me. Much of what comes to define a genius is, I suggest, that we know what the genius looks like: a single, solitary man, brooding somewhere remote: like THIS [SLIDE – Image 1] or THIS [SLIDE – Image 2]. The first image shows us the isolated romantic hero, surveying the land and looking out at the contrasts and beauties of nature, isolated in a wild landscape beyond human reckoning. In the other we have the idealised image of solitude, the man alone in his room, thinking deeply and engaging with the world from within his own domain. This image of the solitary genius is defined the space in which the genius lives: this space, the ‘writing room’ as we may think of it, is quiet, owned by them in some capacity, out of way enough to allow them to work undisturbed, and often full of particular possessions, books, posters, artwork, comfy chairs, writing equipment, and a desk. I’ll be looking at some extracts from novels, and some short stories, but I’ll also be including some extracts from interviews and also reviews. In this way, we can see not only what women were writing about but also the reception of the work. This is how the lines of culture are drawn: it is not only through readers that authors meet their fate; it is also through the tastemakers, those who help facilitate the production of culture, publishers, editors, cultural critics, magazine editors, radio programmers etc. etc. It’s important to remember that by the time a book is published it has gone through many hands already; once is out there in the world it also has to be sorted, assigned a genre, a place on the bookshelf, the sort of home it goes to – pre/post. In today’s world of publication – which, we mustn’t forget is also a business – there are certain trends and certain styles of writing which are of interest. So, in the book industry, we now have an interesting tension between writing that dubs itself autofiction (o...

"We need to get away from the idea that knowledge, expertise and truth are obvious and given." This first lecture in the IF Project lecture series 2019, Thinking Between the Lines: Truth, lies and fiction in an age of populism is given by Professor Will Davies of Goldsmith's, University of London. Professor Davies's powerpoint can be found here. What does it mean to know the world?  Why can't we agree on what is true anymore?  Why do many people no longer trust experts? Professor Davies sets out to fathom what is driving the conflicts and fragmentations in the infrastructure underpinning our understanding of the world.   Using his most recent book, Nervous States, as a jumping off point he analyses the the disintegration of consensus, identifying the roles played by the ubiquity and speed of technology as well as economics and psychology. Importantly he asks, what is a fact?  And in answer looks back in history, drawing on the work of Mary Poovey (A History of the Modern Fact ) who traced the origins of 'accepted facts' to the development of accountancy conventions in the 17th century for merchants in Amsterdam who needed to have a commonly understood, accepted, shared and trusted basis for commercial transactions. He considers why facts that describe the world in this 'neutral' way, independent of political, moral and theological argument (such as where civil servants collect data on births, marriages, deaths, road and rail use, levels of immigration, home ownership etc and on which they then base policy recommendations) seem to be less and less persuasive.  He suggests that this is because establishing these neutral facts takes time - in a world guided by feelings and emotions, where we have to be constantly adaptive and alert, decisions are often gut reactions, taken fast. He ends with a plea for time - time for research, time for reflection.  But concedes that this is swimming against the current tide.   Main picture:"Day 15 #Truth" by mishey_mouse, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Pat Thane, Research Professor at King's College, London and Professor Emerita, University of London, explores the social and political history of Britain over the past 100+ years with Pod Academy's Lee Millam, as they discuss her latest book, Divided Kingdom. This podcast is a tour de force as Professor Thane takes us from the founding of the Labour Party in 1900 in response to low wages and poor working conditions, through 2 world wars and the arrival of globalisation with its attendant precarity and poverty wages.  Highlighting changing living standards and expectations and inequalities of class, income, wealth, race, gender and sexuality,  she reveals what has (and has not) changed in the UK since 1900, explaining how our contemporary society, including its divisions and inequalities, was formed. Over the years there are recurring themes such as housing shortages and women's campaigns for equality, and there are some surprises - the much derided 1970s were actually the time of the greatest equality! Divided Kingdom, a history of Britain 1900 to the present by Professor Pat Thane is published by Cambridge University Press.

What is the real cost of IVF?  As Louise Brown the world’s first “test tube” baby celebrates her 40th birthday – this seminar organised by the Progress Educational Trust  explores not just the economic cost, but also the emotional and psychological costs.  Worldwide there have been 60 million live births as a result of IVF, but it is still the case that over 60% of IVF cycles don't work. Does receiving fertility treatment confer any benefit to patients, even if there is no baby to take home at the end? Is unsuccessful fertility treatment more devastating than no treatment at all, or is it better to at least have had the chance to try? The event was held at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). You may be interested to read the RCOG scientific impact paper on multiple pregnancies following assisted conception, referred to in the seminar Chaired by Sally Cheshire, Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority Speakers Dr Rebecca Brown Jacky Boivin Professor of Health Psychology and Chartered Health Psychologist at Cardiff University's School of Psychology Research Fellow at the University of Oxford's Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics Jessica Hepburn Author of the books The Pursuit of Motherhood and 21 Miles: Swimming in Search of the Meaning of Motherhood Professor Lesley Regan President of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Photo:  Test tube baby by Brendan Dolan-Gavitt  

This podcast is drawn from a Progress Educational Trust (PET) event called Putting Your Genome to Work: For the NHS, for Industry, for the UK Post-Brexit Chair:  Sarah Norcross, Director of PET Speakers: Dr Eliot Forster, Chair of MedCity  Dr Edward HockingsFounding Director of Ethics and Genetics Dr Athena Matakidou, Head of Clinical Genomics at AstraZeneca's Centre for Genomics Research, and Consultant in Medical Oncology at Cambridge University Hospitals Dr Jayne Spink, Chief Executive of Genetic Alliance UK We are at the beginning of a biomedical revolution built on the promise of genomics. The British government has put this at the heart of its post-Brexit industrial strategy.  So what is the potential of genomics, what is the journey we are setting out on, and what are the pitfalls? The British Government's Industrial Strategy White Paper Building a Britain Fit for the Future sets out an ambition for the UK to 'be the world's most innovative economy' and play a leading role in a 'fourth industrial revolution... characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital and biological worlds'. The White Paper argues that 'the government, the NHS and charities can all contribute to make the UK an attractive location for businesses to invest and for patients to benefit'. According to the first in a series of Sector Deals published in the wake of the White Paper, the Life Sciences Sector Deal, 'a new genomics industry is beginning to emerge... with UK companies like AstraZeneca, Cambridge Epigenetix, Genomics plc and Congenica working with Genomics England'. The Sector Deal discusses investments from and agreements with a variety of companies, involving the whole genomes of around 70,000 participants in the 100,000 Genomes Project and around half a million participants in UK Biobank. GSK and others have committed to sequencing the whole genomes of the latter, while a separate consortium coordinated by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals will sequence the exomes (partial genomes) of these same participants in the shorter term. Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt says the Sector Deal 'proves that life science organisations of all sizes will continue to grow and thrive in the coming years, which means NHS patients will continue to be at the front of the queue for new treatments'. However, there remains a degree of public unease about the involvement of commercial interests in health. This unease may be intensified at a time when how best to fund and manage the NHS, how best to approach Brexitand who can be trusted with health-related data are all matters of ongoing concern. Issues discussed at the event included: What are the benefits of genomics for patients? How can we ensure that the NHS, and its patients, derive reciprocal benefit from scientific and medical advances that involve people's genomic data? How can we address the view that there is, or should be, a clear partition between public and private involvement in health, when the development of medicines and diagnostics has always been led by the private sector (and now the Industrial Strategy involves closer collaboration)? What can we learn from the world of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, where consumers often consent to their data being used in research (to the commercial benefit of the testing company)? Finally, can we learn anything from proposals by a US company to treat members of the public neither as patients nor as consumers but rather as 'data owners', who will use blockchain technology to make their genomic data accessible (or inaccessible) to whomever they wish? Photo:  PLOS One Pyhlogeny Comparative genomic DNA hybridization and in silico comparison of gene content within mobile elements of bovine and human SA isolates

Maxwell Ward talks to Dr Lawrence Rosenthal, chair of the Berkeley Centre for Right-Wing Studies, about the Alt-Right’s unlikely journey into the mainstream of US politics and their more recent struggles. What are their ambitions? What do they really think of Donald Trump? And where do they go from here? But the first thing Maxwell wanted to know… who and what are the Alt-Right? Dr Lawrence Rosenthal: The Alt-Right represents what has long been called in the USA the fringe of American politics. What made them the fringe, or the very definition of the fringe, is that they are outside of the mainstream and do not have particularly a role in national politics. The kinds of ideology that we’re talking about are things that have characterised the Klu Klux Klan in this country and Neo-Nazi organisations in this country. They have not had a role in American Politics nationally since the 1920s and 1930s. But, they continued to exist and they existed in atomised corners. There would be groups in rural Ohio or rural Michigan. There would be numbers of them. But, comes the internet age, and above all social media, they networked. So that’s step one. These guys networked. Two, there were events that made these people come together beyond simply politics. That has to do with what is better understood as culture. Above all, there was a thing called Gamergate. To some extent, the base of the Alt-Right online consists of what used to be called in Social Science “alienated young men” and they were gamers online. A controversy arose around the place of women in the gamer world. It provoked an immense backlash against feminism itself. Very anti-women. That consolidated this element of what would constitute the Alt-Right. Donald Trump famously said, “Well, these online things aren’t necessarily from Russia. They could have been from some 400-pound kid lying on his mother’s bed somewhere.” The point being that there are these unhappy young men who are engaged more culturally than politically. So, you get the rise of this essentially nihilistic internet culture in which things like Pepe the frog become symbolic and there is a vast array of these symbols. Basically, the thrill of it is it’s edgy and anti-establishment and it’s anti all establishments. Left, right, etc. So you have those guys, the alienated young men and you have the formerly atomised neo-Nazi and KKK groups who have discovered social media and are now not atomised anymore but are a social network or networking on social media. Finally, you get step three which is the candidacy of Donald Trump. What happens in the world of what would become the Alt-Right is they are electrified. They are electrified because suddenly, at the level of presidential politics in the USA, somebody is talking their language. So, the experience, the decades long political experience of being marginalised, of being the fringe, has suddenly changed. Somebody who is running for president is talking about immigrants the way they talk about them, the very premise of whose campaign is anti-Mexican, anti-Muslim, anti-feminist… well, let me be clear about that, anti- “political correctness”. Donald Trump would say things like, “the biggest problem in this country is political correctness.” That, above all, had two constituent elements for the Alt-Right. One was feminism and the other was multi-culturalism. Both of which seem forced down their throats by elites and in these two, in particular, the liberal elites. Donald Trump was like a siren call from the thoroughly unexpected province of not only national politics but presidential politics. So, the Alt-Right became mobilised and a participant in the election of 2016 in a way that that kind of ideological warrior had not participated in American elections since the 1920s and 1930s. MW: You talk about these disparate groups that have come together. Would you say that, apart from that kind of combative element, that there is a thread,

Hello, this is Pod Academy.  Of late, there has been much talk of sexism, in particular sexual harassment, behind the scenes in the film industry.  But what about the films themselves?  Pod Academy’s Tatiana Prorokova took a look at the hit movie Beauty and the Beast.  One of the highest grossing films this year, it has taken over $1bn worldwide. The recent adaptation of the famous Disney cartoon – Beauty and the Beast – is the film that through a children's story raises the profound questions of female oppression and sexism that have existed in our society for centuries. The story focuses on the girl Belle (played by Emma Watson) who lives with her father in a small village in France. Belle is considered weird by most of the villagers and the reason for that is her love for books. The girl is frequently portrayed with a book in her hands; such an image, however, provokes rather negative responses from the people around her primarily because they believe that education, which, in this context, is access to books that Belle has, is not for women. The scene that illustrates this idea even more vividly takes place later in the film when Belle is teaching a small girl how to read. The crowd largely disapproves of that. Sexism thus manifests itself not only through the reactions to the girl who likes reading but also, and perhaps even more crucially, through the idea that men and women have different privileges. This foregrounds gender inequality and reminds the audience about the perverse norms that were generated and sustained by patriarchy. Belle later finds herself in the castle, where she came to save her father (played by Kevin Kline). She chooses to stay there instead of him, sacrificing herself for the well-being of her parent. Her stay in the castle supports the ideas of sexism and female inequality in multiple ways. First and foremost, being the Beast’s (played by Dan Stevens) prisoner, she is literally locked in the castle. Yet one can interpret this imprisonment from a different angle and argue that it figuratively embodies the existing gender inequality. The visibly subordinate relationship between Belle and the Beast metaphorically visualizes patriarchy in the family life or perhaps even stands for family tyranny. In this respect, the image of the Beast only intensifies the power and cruelty of the oppressor. The castle becomes Belle’s cage where she is both literally and symbolically locked. The girl can only wait for someone from the outside to come and save her. That savior, as the audience can easily guess, could be Gaston (played by Luke Evans) – the former soldier who wants to marry Belle. Belle is thus portrayed as a fragile girl who is oppressed by a male and who can be ultimately saved only by another male. In the castle, the enchanted servants forcefully redress Belle so that she can look like a real lady – again, the image that is constructed by patriarchy as the only right one and imposed on women. Belle is portrayed in a pompous dress, she is wearing a wig, and her face is richly covered with vulgar makeup. The girl ultimately rejects these clothes, preferring to stay in her old ones. While the castle symbolizes Belle’s cage, it is pivotal that this is the only place where she is not laughed at for her love for books. The Beast shows her his large library and Belle’s heart seems to melt, for she now has something that she wanted to have so much – access to education. Nevertheless, Belle remains a prisoner; thus while she gets something what she likes, she is still under full control of the Beast. Apart from Belle, there is another important female character in the film that is introduced to support the issue of sexism provoked by patriarchy. This is Agathe (played by Hattie Morahan). Agathe is first introduced to the audience as a beggar who saves the life of Belle’s father but later turns out to be the enchantress. There are several scenes in the film with Agathe and Gaston that ...

A radical vision for arts policy should be at the heart of any progressive government argue Professor Rod Stoneman and Adam Stoneman. Note: This is not a transcript of the podcast interview with Rod and Adam, but rather the text of a paper by them on arts policy. Restoring financial support for the arts would hardly amount to a radical transformative vision for the arts.  The major proposals in a recent document from the Labour party, for example, were entirely defensive: ‘reinstate arts funding’, ‘safeguard our galleries and museums’, ‘protect the BBC’. It does not have to be like this; in 1965, Government Minister Jennie Lee published Britain’s first cultural white paper, ‘A Policy for the Arts: The First Steps’, in which she addressed uneven regional distribution and unequal access to the arts and committed state support for infrastructure. The paper led to the creation of countless museums, galleries and concert halls across the country and completely transformed Britain’s cultural landscape. Rather than attempting to merely return to this post-war model of funding however, we should apply its principles to the challenges of the present. Access and involvement. Research shows that well-educated middle-class professionals are most likely to be drawn to the areas of the cultural sector that are dependent on public funding such as opera and theatre, with those on less well-educated unskilled and semi-skilled workers tending to be more involved in the commercial culture industry. Instead of restoring a subsidy model that entrenches this division, we should seize the opportunity to change the funding system in a way that broadens and deepens the audiences that engage with publicly funded arts. The prevalence of unpaid internships and unpaid labour in the arts presents a major financial barrier to access for those who do not come from privileged backgrounds. Discussion of a ‘real living wage’ to protect arts workers is a good start but there should be a root and branch approach to tackling the lack of diversity in arts organisations, from the shop floor to upper management – of the directors of our ten most popular museums, all are white and only one is a woman. Renewed and dynamic versions of culture need to be brought out of the institutions into the widest public sphere; for large sections of the population there are invisible barriers to entering galleries, arts centres and concert halls – we can unconsciously assume “those places are not for me”. We should be looking to bring art activities beyond existent facilities to intervene directly in public spaces and within communities. Theatre groups working on civic initiatives, artists’ placements, musical ensembles from housing estates, filmmakers in workplaces and writers conducting workshops in local libraries enable myriad forms of individual and group self-activation. A focus should be placed on facilitating and empowering marginalised communities to speak without constant mediation; this would include the funding of workshops, training and skills-based initiatives, enabling communities to shape discourse about themselves from the very beginning. Importantly this should not be sidelined into ‘community art’ as once-off, philanthropic gestures but should be a guiding principle of national arts policy. Public art can renew the sense that urban space belongs to all of us. The success of the Fourth plinth project in Trafalgar square, or the use of billboards to display modern painting in Tehran demonstrates this well. Too much of our visual environment is dominated by commercial marketing; companies operating billboards on public land could be required to periodically devote space to classical or contemporary art. Regional access should be inclusive, localised and democratic; London, and to a lesser extent, the other select urban centres benefit disproportionately from arts funding. Publicly funded theatre, dance,

When you use a SatNav, or check a modern weather forecast, you're using technology made possible by space exploration. Emerging space industries include tourism, and some tentative plans to mine asteroids, or the Moon, for rare materials. Space now has its lawyers, its policymakers, and even its ethicists. Robert Seddon went to King's College, London, to meet Tony Milligan, a moral philosopher who has worked extensively on the ethics of space exploration. Robert Seddon:  So, how did that begin? Tony Milligan:  Well, that’s a piece of guidance from my students, in fact. There was a student who wanted to work on the issue of terraforming—which is one of the big, sexy issues in space ethics—and I thought, hmmm, does the world really need this to be done? And then I looked into it, and he produced the work, and it was a good piece of work. So I thought, this bears looking into a little bit closer; so I did a short course, and the blurb advertising the course was picked up by Space Policy, the journal: they invited me to write an article. And then from the article other people wanted other things, so it sort of snowballed into a new research direction for me, which was good, because it’s a fresh area, and it’s interesting stuff, and you’re also dealing with things that matter. And that’s always a nice added bonus. RS: Do you see much engagement from people involved in space industries in practical terms? TM: Well... up to a point. I think there are people who want to have a story about the importance of space. Elon Musk wants to have a story about backing up the biosphere and the ethical significance of what they’re doing, and he’s got shareholders that he has to keep happy, and so on. So there is that high level interest, and the stories aren’t particularly convincing ones from an academic ethicist’s point of view, but they’re interesting stories. And then you’ve got the wilder reaches of the ethics of space, which is all about really big questions, and it doesn’t connect up with the agencies. And then you’ve got stuff that’s done by people like myself, Jacques Arnould... And we try, in our own modest ways, to be embedded, not... We would like, ideally, more of a dialogue, I think, with the players within industry, but you already have the agencies, you have NASA, you have the European Space Agency, and we connect up at that level. And so at the moment, for example, there’s a white paper getting put together—I’m meant to be doing editing; I’ll diligently do that tomorrow—and that’s for the establishing of a European institute for astrobiology, and the role of the key people that you would want across Europe, with some feed-in from NASA people and elsewhere, to the rationale to get that off the ground and funded. And one of the things that we say in the white paper is that we need to get, to move, beyond that level of academics talking to the institutions. We also need much more of a dialogue with people from industry. RS: Do you think Musk and co. will get what they want, or will they have to make do with something else? TM: Well, nobody ever gets quite what they want... or if they do then they’re never quite sure that it’s what they wanted. When you’ve got investors, when it’s a big money game, when there’s a lot on the line, you have to sell things quite hard. So it’s difficult to understand, or difficult to separate out, what’s the image, what’s the sales patter, from what he realistically expects will be realised. One of the things that usually is over-optimistic is time scales. So there are people: Mars One and so on... (That’s not Elon Musk; Musk’s much more... He’s got the technology to do stuff. Mars One doesn’t.) But they’ll talk about: well, we’re going to put somebody on Mars within a couple of years—and that’s ridiculous: there’s nothing... There’s no way you’re getting there. So they’ll change their time scales, and so on, and you get the same thing up to a point with Musk,

Journalism has been called 'the first draft of history', and as a first draft it may be written over, forgotten, ignored.  In this podcast, journalist Martin Bright (@martinbright) considers one tiny strand of the story of the Iraq war. It illustrates truth and fake news, things that are very much on our minds at the moment.  It is taken from a lecture Martin gave for IF, the free university in London, in its series 'Thinking Without Borders'  in 2017. Martin Bright:  Let's begin with the rules of journalism - never befriend a politician, never befriend a PR, never betray a source and never use PowerPoint (though that one I am ignoring....) I'm going to look at one story that plays its part in the history of the lead up to the Iraq war which you may or may not have heard about. It is a story in which I as a journalist felt I was writing the first draft of history. It's a story I wrote while working on The Observer [a UK Sunday newspaper] in early 2003. It is a story left out of the reports on the Iraq war (it was not in either the Chilcot or the Hutton reports).  It is just a footnote in history, maybe less than a footnote. It is the story of Katharine Gun, who,in 2003, was working at GCHQ. GCHQ is the third arm of British Intelligence - there is MI6 (foreign intelligence), MI5 (domestic intelligence) and GCHQ (surveillance). Katharine was born in Taiwan, is a fluent Mandarin speaker, and she spent her days at GCHQ listening to China and deciding what was interesting - Chinese broadcasts, bugged conversations etc.  She enjoyed her job, she considered herself a patriot, she didn't see anything wrong with spying, she felt she was working in the British national interest, for the good of the country. But she became increasingly concerned about the build up to war in Iraq, she was sceptical, she didn't think the British intelligence service should be used to further the war aim of the Government. One day she was working, translating, when she received a memo from the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US.  Subsequently, the NSA and GCHQ have become much more high profile institutions since the Edward Snowden leaks (we know a lot more about what they can tap into) but there has always been a close relationship between the two agencies. In January 2003, we were being told that war was not a forgone conclusion, there were still negotiations going on in the UN and Tony Blair and George Bush were saing that should Saddam Hussein give up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD) there would be no need to go to war.  But it was a period of high tension. There were inspectors in Iraq looking for WMD and having difficulty finding them. Such was the tension within GCHQ itself that on 24 January 2003, a memo was sent to all GCHQ staff reassuring them that they would not be asked to do anything unlawful (which is interesting in itself since you might expect that to be the case anyway!). At the same time what is happening in the US is a continuing hardening up of the documents being fed to the US government as to what is going on in Iraq and the weapons Saddam is supposed to have.  Then, rather inconveniently, on 27 January 2003, Hans Blix (one of the main weapons inspectors) and his team state that Iraq has no nuclear capacity and has been cooperative.  The French Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin, states that France won't go to war while inspections continue.  So it is getting tricky for those who want to go to war.  We also know that there will be a presentation to the UN by Colin Powell to argue that Iraq is in breach of its international commitments. And while all this is happening, this memo from Frank Koza arrives in Katharine Gun's inbox, just after midnight on January 31st: To: [Recipients withheld] From: FRANK KOZA, Def Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) CIV/NSA Sent on Jan 31 2003 0:16 Subject: Reflections of Iraq Debate/Votes at UN-RT Actions + Potential for Related Contributions

Following the election of Donald Trump, the alt-right has come to play a significant role in American political discourse. They are an upstart political movement that rejects traditional conservatism and championed Trump and his opposition to political correctness. But how did a movement rooted in online and video game culture come to be so influential? Angela Nagle (@angnagle) is an Irish writer and academic who has written extensively on the rise of anti-feminism and the revitalised culture wars. She’s recently written a new book called Kill All Normies, in it she documents how fringe online politics and discussion boards have become mainstream.   Alex Burd spoke to Angela to discuss the book. He started by asking when the alt-right became a mainstream force. Angela Nagle: It has to be the election of Donald Trump. I know that's very recent. Maybe you could say something like Gamergate brought a lot of different right leaning movements and forums and things that weren't very overtly political ended up much more closely mingling over Gamergate. Those are the younger ones. The more serious people like American Renaissance and Richard Spencer and people like that, they're a bit older and have been around for years. They've been taking things much more seriously and have been for a long time. But it's only when all these geeky online sub cultures started to come together that it started to be more legitimate to call them the Alt-Right rather than just the far right. Alex Burd You reference the Gamergate movement. How is that it went from something that was about 'ethics in games journalism' to a political ideology built around the twin pillars of misogyny and white supremacy? AN: Well essentially, depending on who you ask. Gamergate - the gamers say it's about 'ethics in games journalism', the people on the other side say they were merely pointing out sexism in gaming and ended up getting viciously attacked. The people involved in it love endlessly having these competing stories about the precise details of particular attacks which I don't find remotely interesting. Even if you take the most conservative estimate of the levels of attack that were going on they were really bad. Even the ones that are out there for the public to see. And you know a critic should be able to argue that gaming is dominated by sexist attitudes, but essentially it was viewed by gamers - where they got the 'ethics in games journalism' line from is a very long, boring story - essentially it was over political correctness. What they perceived to be feminists and anti-racists and liberals trying to change the culture and take away their fun hobby and destroy everything through liberal censorship. One of the reasons I'm not very sympathetic to that is I just think that, as in film, there's room for different viewpoints. These people were not saying games containing sexism should be banned. They were just saying that the kind of style that dominates has an attitude towards women that they had an issue with. It became basically, for whatever reason, it brought together all these different groups from the Daily Stormer, which is a Nazi website, through to apolitical vaguely sort of pro-free speech types. It brought together a whole range of people that saw themselves in different ways as opposing political correctness. AB: And they were politicised by the fact that a largely white male space was becoming invaded leftist politics and women in particular? AN: Yeah, definitely. Leftist cultural politics, yeah. AB: How did it go from a misogynist reaction to that to something that has become heavily based around white supremacy and racial politics? AN: Well when I started looking at reactionary forums of different types, I started my PHD about seven years ago, I finished about two years ago, I was looking at anti-feminist forums and at that time opposition to feminism was the main issue that really animated these kind of forums.

We appear fascinated with the phenomenon of the woman who kills. In the last year alone in the UK, both ITV and channel 4 have launched popular documentary series chronicling the shocking lives and crimes of women who commit murder. But what is it about the murderess that renders her so interesting? To social historian Dr Anna Jenkin (@acjenkin), it is her ability to offer unique insight into the gender dynamics, and broader cultural climate, of the society in which she lives. Anna's PhD thesis explores female perpetrated homicide in eighteenth-century London and Paris. Dr Sarah Burdett caught up with Anna to discuss the findings of her research.She began by asking what it was that inspired her to investigate the topic. Anna Jenkin: I started as an undergraduate studying eighteenth-century London, and in the second year of my undergraduate I looked specifically at the case of Sarah Malcolm, who is a serial killer, mass murderess, in 1730s London. I found the case a really interesting insight into an aspect of life in London, and women's lives specifically, that often you don't get a lot of detail about. So although it was quite an extreme example of a woman who killed her employer and two other maids in the household that she was working, in telling her story you actually get much more about the intricacies of everyday life in London at this time. So I thought this was a really interesting way of thinking about how men and women were living in these cities, but also, of much broader dynamics of power. Because female murder is such a rare act, and was such a rare act, it was particularly distressing to the society in which it took place, particularly in these very close urban areas, so you find a lot of much broader dynamics of power projected onto these cases. So that is why I decided on the question of female murder. I wanted to look specifically at eighteenth-century London and Paris because it was a time when both cities were undergoing very major paths of modernisation and growth. There were great deals of similarities between these two cities which were undergoing huge amounts of population expansion as well as economic booms, which were leading to the growth of a bourgeoisie, or middling sort, but on the other hand, politically, there were these huge differences between London post-Glorious Revolution, and France before the French Revolution, which meant that there are some really interesting similarities and differences that can be unpicked between these two cities. Female homicide is such a rare crime, that contemporary commentators don't have the general narratives of criminality or of violence to project onto them, so when trying to understand and unravel these crimes people drew from much more complicated, or perhaps more run of the mill everyday narratives in seeking to explain and understand what was going on. So I used this very small lens to understand much bigger narratives of change that these two cities were going under, at the same time but also in quite different ways. Sarah Burdett: I asked Anna to elaborate on the proportion of female perpetrated murder, to male perpetrated murder. AJ: Female homicide in the eighteenth century, particularly in London and Paris, was about 10 percent of male homicide. I found about 2000 cases of male perpetrated homicide in London in the period 1715-1789, and for that same period about 200 cases of female perpetrated homicide, and the same in Paris. The Parisian court is much larger so I found about  500 cases of female perpetrated homicide and 5000 cases of male homicide. So in both cities it's about a tenth, which interestingly is the same proportion as today. So it is a much rarer crime. But I think what is interesting about the urban context is that you often find in historiography and in writing about female homicide in this period quite a lot of stereotypes of female homicide as being something that is very polarised. When women are treated in the court,

What is the scorecard for President Donald Trump after the first 100 Days?  "C minus overall," says Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Trump said he was going to shake up Washington, and he has, but on the legislative front he has done little of what he promised in his first 100 days. Alex Burd  (@alexburd) talked to Professor Trubowitz last year during the presidential race, now he returns to get the Professor's view on the new President's first 100 days...... On January 20th Donald Trump became the 45th president of the United States. April 29th marks his 100th day in office. They honeymoon period has been short, however: he has already clashed with the media, the courts and his own people. Despite running on a platform of isolationism and non-intervention, President Trump has become increasingly active in the area of foreign policy. Last August I met with Professor Peter Trubowitz, an expert on US foreign policy and the director of the United States Centre at the London School of Economics. Today I returned to find out what the professor thinks of the new president’s actions on the world stage in his first 100 days of power - but we started by grading the opening stages of the Trump administration. Professor Trubowitz: I think I could probably get myself to a C- minus, using the American grading scale of A to F. He came into office saying he was going to shake things up in Washington and that he was going to pass a raft of legislation, he laid that out in his 100 day contract with the American people - he ran on that. I'd say he has shaken things up in Washington, but on the legislative front you'd be hard pressed to find one item on his list, it filled the full page, that document was a two page document. I have it open on my computer right here, I looked it up just to make sure and go back over it, and none of those things have passed. He put one of them forward, repealing and replacing Obamacare, which went down in flames. There is a lot of talk about bringing it back, you know, zombie-style and perhaps it comes back. But I think overall he's made good on the promise of shaking things up, but in terms of accomplishments the record is pretty thin and I think that's why you’re seeing all this last minute activity, where he'll announce tax cuts or at least to lay out his principles because he realises he is likely to get hoisted on his own petard by the mainstream media over this. Alex Burd: Do you think the 100 day marker is a useful one for US presidents or is it kind of a little more of a media invention? PT: It is not a media invention. It dates back to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first 100 days where he passed 15 major acts. That’s a tough act to follow and every president ever since has shied away from the 100 day bar. I think the media makes a big deal about it. It is a big story - you can rate people, you can ask them what kind of grade are you going to give the president. I think it’s important only in the sense that what you can expect in the first 100 days from a president is; you have reason to expect some sense of the tone and the style of an administration and what their aspirations and principles are and an agenda and really even a time table about how you're going to get there. So I think that is fair to compare him against that: nobody stacks up well against President Roosevelt. Trump is saying no president has been as successful as he has. FDR was a Titan. AB: When we last spoke, you spoke about how foreign governments would be concerned that America would withdraw from the world with Trump’s election. Do you think that’s come to pass, or do you think we've seen a more active US than we expected. PT: I'm reminded of that old line from Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong's premier.

What is the scorecard for President Donald Trump after the first 100 Days?  "C minus overall," says Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. Trump said he was going to shake up Washington, and he has, but on the legislative front he has done little of what he promised in his first 100 days. Alex Burd talked to Professor Trubowitz last year during the presidential race, now he returns to get the Professor's view on the new President's first 100 days. Listen to Alex Burd's earlier podcasts with Professor Trubowitz:  The Rise and Rise of Donald Trump (July 2016) and Clinton and Trump (August 2016) Photo by Gage Skidmore (Transcript to follow)

"A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on," said Winston Churchill.  If that was the case then, how much more valid is it today.  The explosion of social media and its ability to circulate and generate misinformaton has completely changed the political landscape. And it has led to a whole new branch of journalism - political fact-checking. This interview was first posted on the New Books Network and was conducted in the heat of the 2016 US Presidential Election campaign.  In it, Lucas Graves, assistant professor in the school of journalism and mass communication at the University of Wisconsin Madison talks to James Kates about the emergence of fact checking as a necessary, if often maligned , attempt to get at the this elusive thing called 'truth'. As George Orwell said, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable...." Lucas Graves book,  Deciding What’s True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism came out in 2016 from Columbia University Press  

Why and how should we interpret visual art? With a vast historical sweep - from early medieval art on the walls inside the Basilica of San Vitale to Banksy's 2015 stencils of shipwrecked refugees on walls in Calais,  by way of Caravaggio, Nevelson and Rothko - author, artist and film maker  Gillian McIver looks at various theories of art criticism and helps us understand how to approach visual art. This lecture was part of series on Thinking put on by the IF Project, the free university in London.  IF is an innovative project offering free humanities courses to young people who have been priced out of today's higher education market.[We have another podcast from the IF lecture series, looking at the relevance of studying history: here.] Gillian McIver starts from the premise that "The most important mechanism  for interpreting visual art is your own eyes and your ability to really see and to really look.....Go, stand in front of the work of art, literally, physically,  look at it. Walk around it, look at its texture, look at its colour..." She goes on to explore how different approaches in art criticism can inform what and how we look.  She considers traditional ways of looking at art (eg the historical approach, looking at historical periods)  looking at influences and techniques, artistic movements, looking at the artist, and looking at the times in which the artist lived, the cultural and social environment in which the artwork operates. Artworks considered are: Basilica of San Vitale    Medieval Hans Memling:  Virgin with the child and angel  (National Gallery, London)  Late Middle Ages Titian:  Bacchus and Ariadne  (National Gallery, London)   Renaissance Claude:  A Seaport  (National Gallery, London)   Baroque period. David:  Oath of the Horatii (Louvre, Paris) John Singleton Copley  The Death of Major Pierson 6 January 1781  (Tate Britain, London)  History Painting Also mentioned Henry Osawa Tanner - first major black artist in European tradition Caravaggio: The Supper at Emmaus  (National gallery London) Caravaggio Supper at Emmaus (Milan) Mark Rothko:  Black on Maroon (Tate Modern, London) Louise Nevelson: Black Wall (Tate Modern, London) Also mentioned Robert Rauschenberg (forthcoming Tate Modern exhibition December 2016 - April 2017) Nazeer Tambouli - site specific art on housing estate    

They say a fish can fall in love with a bird, but where would they live? However, when it comes to fluid dynamics, birds and fish come from more similar neighbourhoods than you might think.  This podcast is about the physics of fish schooling and bird flocking and how these animals use their fluid environment - and each other - to get around.  That's schooling and flocking. Dr Hassan Masoud is Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Nevada, Reno and he recently co-authored a paper on the hydro dynamics of collective locomotion.  Birds fly in flocks and fish swim in schoools - so why?  It turns out that fluid dynamics can go a long way to answering that question. Dr Masoud talks to Meg Rosenburg in this podcast which first appeared on Physics Central, the 'physics buzz blog' of the of the American Physical Society.   Photo: Starlings and sunset, Brighton by Joe Flintham

Always on our smartphones and other digital devices, we live in an expository society, says Prof Bernard Harcourt.  The landscape described in his new book is a dystopia saturated by pleasure. We do not live in a drab Orwellian world, he writes. We live in a beautiful, colourful, stimulating, digital world a rich, bright world full of passion and jouissance–and by means of which we reveal ourselves and make ourselves virtually transparent to surveillance.  This is digital exposure, exposing a great deal about our lives. This podcast is an edited version of a longer interview which first aired on the New Books Network. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2015) guides us through our new digital age, one that makes it so easy for others to monitor, profile, and shape our every desire. We are building what he calls the expository society a platform for unprecedented levels of exhibition, watching, and influence that is reconfiguring our political relations and reshaping our notions of what it means to be an individual. Other actors from advertisers to government agencies can compile huge amounts of information about who we are and what we do. Whether they use it to recommend other products to buy or track our movements, Harcourt argues that the influence and interests of other actors is often hidden from us. Despite leaks of classified materials about the extent of this surveillance, public outrage is limited and mild. The scale of data collection and tracking is not a national let alone a global scandal. According to Exposed, our appetites are too well satisfied and our attentions too distracted. Harcourt prods us to practice digital disobedience, to tackle this digital exposure, lest we will remain in a digital mesh that will only continue to restrict our privacy and anonymity underneath its beautiful, shiny suit. Watch 'Damn, Daniel' here. Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age Photo:  Smartphones by Esther Vargas You may also like......... http://podacademy.org/podcasts/digital-breadcrumbs-our-data-trail/ You

This is the second in our series on the 2016 US Presidential election, in which Alex Burd talks to Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs. [ The first podcast, on Donald Trump can be found here.] With the Democrat and Republican conventions now complete and the candidates confirmed, attention turns to the general election. Donald Trump, the self-appointed outsider, faces Hilary Clinton, the first female Presidential nominee in the history of the two main parties. Clinton is no stranger to government however, having been the First Lady of the United States, Senator for New York, and Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in a career of public service that spans three decades. The campaign has been vitriolic from the outset with Trump dubbing Clinton ‘crooked’, while Democrats and been quick to argue that Trump is unfit to hold the office. To predict that battle ahead I’ve been speaking Professor Peter Trubowitz, director of the US centre at the London School of economics. He explains why the he expects the upcoming election to be one of the most negative in history. ProfessorTrubowitz: I've written and I think this, that this election is going to be about war, sex, and work. Both of these candidate have very high negatives. Both are up in the 50-60% ratio. It may not be unprecedented, maybe the 1968 campaign with Nixon, Wallace and Humphries was similar. It's very unusual and what it means is that both sides are going to hammer away at those unfavorable. And for Clinton what means is that she's going to go after Trump after on something where he scores very low which is a sense that he's in command on the issues, that he's reliable, and his ratings there are unbelievably low. She's going to focus on who's got the finger on the nuclear button. That may not be as salient as it was in the 1964 election when Lyndon Johnson and when people were worried about Barry Goldwater because he talked very loosely about nuclear weapons and using them and I think she's going to hammer that very hard and she's going to get a lot of traction. What Trump is going to do very hard is go after her husband. He'll be able to do two things there, he'll be able to raise issues about the Clintons and whether they can be trusted and where they've taken the country before, but it's also a way to remind the public that Hilary Clinton is not new and she's part of the establishment. By drawing the connection with the husband and the presidency in the 1990s. Alex Burd: Hilary Clinton has built her campaign on the promise of being a solid, reliable hand on the tiller – in contrast to the erratic and unconventional Trump. With over twenty years experience her time in public life has not been mistake-free and she will not be able to ride the same wave of optimism and hope that carried Barack Obama to power. Her judgement and honesty has been called into question by her opponents following terrorist attacks in Benghazi in 2012 and her use of a private email server when secretary of state. PT: The way this game is played is that you look for the other sides vulnerabilities and you go after your opponent’s strengths. She comes across who's someone who's much more calculating and steady and she'll really try to play on her experience but I think he'll go after that and say experience doesn’t equal judgment and so forth as Bernie Sanders has done in the Primaries. I think both of them have room to go after the other way and to play on the others unfavorable. Her weakness, especially with young people is that she's not viewed as trustworthy. And whether that's fair or not you can see it in the poll results. While Trump as that shortcoming as well, he'll go after her on that dimension. He'll try and driver her negatives higher, it's also a way to solidify his base support.

"The American dream is dead.  I will bring it back and we will make America great again....." In nine months Donald Trump has stunned the political establishment, brushing aside other contenders to become the Republican nominee in the race for the White House. How has the man made famous for saying 'You're fired' come so close to landing the biggest job in the western world? To find out, Alex Burd went to talk to Peter Trubowitz, Professor of International Relations and Director of the US Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Associate Fellow at Chatham House, Royal Institute of International Affairs, who has been trying to untangle the secrets of the rise of Trump. Business magnate and reality TV star Donald J Trump announced his intention to run for the Republican presidential nomination on 16 June 2015. His announcement was met with bemusement and ridicule. Within nine months he had stunned the political establishment and forced his final opponent, Ted Cruz, into withdrawing from the race. In that time, he’s announced his intention to build a Great Wall on the border with Mexico, ban all Muslims from entering the United States, and to Make America Great Again. Prof Trubowitz started by discussing the moment at which he feared Donald Trump had a chance at becoming President.   Prof Peter Trubowitz: First you know my reaction was that he was just looking for air time and publicity. But it became clear pretty early on that he was getting some political traction, but the reason that I took him seriously early was because I thought the Republican field was weak. I never thought that Jeb Bush was going to get a lot of traction inside the party, he just had too much baggage given his brother's presidency and the legacy within the Republican party, let along the body politic in general. Ted Cruz I felt was too far to the right and Marco Rubio too inexperienced. There were some other possibilities, some other people that could get traction and I will say that I always thought that the candidate that would be strongest for the Republican party was not trump, but was Jon Kasich. I think that he would have done very well with independents and conservative democrats and would've posed a serious, serious problem to Hilary Clinton. Alex Burd: The Republican Party has long valued experience and proven leadership in its Presidential candidates but involvement in Washington politics became a smear in many of the recent Primaries. Much of this is down to the development of the Tea Party movement which began in response to Barack Obama’s election and inauguration in 2009. The group combines social and fiscal conservatism with an embedded distrust of authority and government. From small beginnings it has become a key contingent of the Republican party and an increasingly important factor in determining the GOP’s direction. PT: You can't understand in a sense Trump's rise without understanding the level of anger and resentment inside the Republican Party. You know the rise of the Tea party and its frustration with it's won leadership and the Washington establishment - especially the Democrats, but not only. And that is one of the things that made Donald Trump so attractive to many inside the party, simply because he's viewed as untainted by the political and Washington establishment and the political process. Of course the irony there is this is somebody that has worked the inside of the Republican and Democrat party for years, nevertheless he's never held elected office, he's not party of the Washington establishment. He kind of came up, not self made by any means but pursued an independent trajectory separate from politics. But I think that so many of them were painted with that brush and I think because of he Bush name he just couldn't disassociate himself from that even though he's never held office in Washington DC.   AB: Trump’s rise from novelty to viable candidate confounded the p...

"We always write - and read - history thought the prism of our contemporary concerns," So why study history?  What do we mean by 'history'? This podcast is a lecture by Dr Richard Barnett, which was part of a course on Thinking run by the IF Project, the free university in London. "We always write - and read - history thought the prism of our contemporary concerns," says Dr Barnett.  "There is no such thing as an objective reading of history.  This doesn't render history completely subjective, what it means is that history is always coloured, always brought to light, and sometimes distorted, by our present preconceptions, our own concerns, our political concerns and identity where we stand in our own societies, where we want to go.  So history in some ways always serves the needs of the present.  That doesn't make it worthless, in some ways it can make it even more valuable." Drawing on the story of John Snow - seen as the father of epidemiology because of his work on cholera - Dr Barnett explores history, heritage, historiography, and historical sources (whose voices are heard and whose voices are absent).  He starts with a visit to the John Snow pub in London's Soho........ Pictures: Skull: dncnh John Snow pub by Ewan Munro

How does life work? How does nature produce the right numbers of zebras and lions on the African savanna, or fish in the ocean? How do our bodies produce the right numbers of cells in our organs and bloodstream? Biologist Sean B Carroll talks to Craig Barfoot about his latest book, The Serengeti Rules.They explore  how life works at vastly different scales. We find out how wolves can change the physical shape of rivers and why, on the plains of the Serengeti, 150kg is the number which determines whether you will likely get eaten or not. This is a thoughtful and at times humorous conversation about the state of our world's wildlife areas and the rules which determine how nature operates. Reviews of the book: "In The Serengeti Rules, the author goes from E. coli to elephants to lay out the basic rules that shape so much of what’s around us and inside us."--Brian Switek, Wall Street Journal "In this remarkably engaging book, Carroll . . . persuasively argues that life at all levels of complexity is self-regulated, from the inner workings of cells to the larger relationships governing the Serengeti ecosystem. . . . Carroll superbly animates biological principles while providing important insights."--Publishers Weekly "The Serengeti Rules is one of the best biology books for general readers I've ever encountered. It should be required reading for every college student, regardless of major."--Andrew H. Knoll, Harvard University "A compelling read filled with big, bold ideas. . . . Through compelling storytelling, key insights of distant, isolated biologists are brought to life. . . . I suspect that many will find new insights and inspiration here… Carroll has made a strikingly clear case that ecology is a science on a par with molecular biology and genetics. In many ways, this book is an homage to Charles Elton. . . . Building on his vision, Carroll provides a passionate motto for the twenty-first century: ‘better living through ecology.’ Are the Serengeti Rules a panacea? No, but Carroll convincingly reveals them to be a sturdy foundation for the future of biology, for human well-being, and for conservation and management."--Brian J. Enquist, Nature "A thought-provoking challenge to complacency."--Kirkus

Once upon a time, in the land of Great Britain, Amanda woke up to the sun shining on a bright Monday morning. Before she got out of bed, she opened the BBC weather app on her phone  to check the weather for the day ahead.  She had started leaving her trail of digital breadcrumbs....... She took a shower, made some breakfast, brushed her teeth and left the house.  Amanda used Facebook to send a message to her friend telling him she was almost at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, United Kingdom. Her friend replied:  “No you’re not!  Your message location says you’re still at home!” Oops. Amanda was busted! She tapped her Oyster Card at the Underground Station and read the news on The Guardian app using the Wifi available underground. Arriving at Russell Square Station, she bought coffee at a cafe using her contactless card and made her way to SOAS for her first lecture of the day. Amanda was blissfully unaware that her morning schedule had created a trail of “Digital Breadcrumbs.”  This means, she can be traced and tracked through the apps she accessed and the technology she used.  But what does that really mean?  Who has access to this information? And can it be used against us? Are we all blissfully unaware like Amanda?  And should we be worried? Welcome to Digital Breadcrumbs by George Philip, Jennifer Anne Lazo, Rooham Jamali and Rudy Al Jaroodi. Our podcast explores the digital trails or digital footprints we create in our daily lives.  The majority of applications we use require our location information. We willingly tag ourselves in specific locations through social media platforms, and freely use contactless cards and debit cards, which give retailers, banks and various other organisations information about our daily movements.  We are constantly monitored on CCTV and everything we research online is data being collected or stored.  In this episode, we’ll be talking to lecturers and students to discover the real cost of our digital footsteps. So first of all, what is a digital trail?  We interviewed Dr. Elisa Oreglia, a lecturer in Global Digital Cultures at SOAS, to find out more about our digital footprints. Dr. Elisa Oreglia: A “digital trail” is a trace you leave behind you. It’s almost like Breadcrumbs. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes unintentionally when you use a mobile phone; but also when you use a computer, or when you use really any kind of technology that has a chip in it. Basically, when you have a phone, you have a series of censors and you have this constant background communication between the phone and the cell towers, but also if its connected online between the phone and the internet so there are all these apps that are getting information about your phone, about your environment.  Narrator: Dr. Oreglia tells us that all this communication is sent elsewhere, it doesn’t just stay on your phone.  And it’s constant.  It accumulates over time.  But where is it being stored? According to Dr. Oreglia, it is going to several different places. The signal on your mobile phone tells your mobile phone network where you are. EA: But then you have (you know) your GPS, that might be signals that go through a satellite, so it's a system to position your phone. Narrator: She goes on to tell us about how information in your apps is stored locally and via the internet to the app's creators. The information can be dispersed through Wifi, or through your phone’s operator.  Basically, there are a lot of apps, a lot of background processes and often, we don’t know exactly what they’re doing. We then proceeded to ask Dr. Oreglia about what happens to data we have researched. EA: When you do a search on google, that information goes through Google Servers. First of all it has to travel to a variety of internet service providers and then it gets stored into Google Servers. And they can really be anywhere in the world.

When the gun is replaced by the melody: how does music resist? ‘Even if they don’t have a message, the act of actually playing music itself is resistance,’ says Dr. Sara McGuiness, senior teaching fellow in Music at SOAS. Classical Thai musician Luang Pradit Pairoh fought through the melodies of his songs surrounded by oppression; Ahmed Maher signed petitions to bring down the Morsi government in Egypt whilst at concerts around the country, and the melody of an old Catalonian song travelled almost a century of different resistance movements. This is a podcast of musical adventures. It features conversations with musicians, writers and academics with special guest appearances from random people pulled off the street. ------------------- The podcast was produced by Lara Şarlak, Fino Patanasiri, Diego M. Mosquera and Kelly O’Donovan, students on  'Digital broadcasting', an MA course taught  as part of the skills training options offered to MA students studying within the school of arts (which combine music, media and history of art and archeology) at SOAS, University of London. This course exposes students to the latest thinking in digital podcasting, social media research and social entrepreneurship. During the course students make a group podcast on a theme related to research at SOAS and are encouraged to disseminate them as widely as possible using digital platforms. Pod Academy is involved in the teaching on the course. ------------------- Ahmed Maher: Listening to the concert on a CD and attending one on the street, in the middle of everything cannot be compared to one another. Esteve Sala:  They were trying to mobilize a society against the dictatorship with their songs. Fino Patinasiri:  So instead of fighting back actively, he chose to use music as a weapon of hidden resistance.   Vox Pops E contare e camminare insieme, lo sai fare? Sì, penso di sì... Allora forza. Conta e cammina. Dai. Uno, due, tre, quattro, cinque, sei, sette, otto.. [Song: Modena City Ramblers (I Cento Passi) ] Vox pop: My resistance song is “i cento passi.” It is the story of the son of a mafia boss who resisted against his father and go killed in Italy, and no one ever spoke about it for a long time. [Song: Chuck Berry (Roll Over Beethoven)] Vox pop: “Roll Over Beethoven” is a protest song because it was a sort of protest against almost a sort of your parents’ culture, your grandparents’ culture. [Song: Ton Steine Scherben (Live on TV)] Vox pop: “Ton Steine Scherben” [Song: Bob Marley (Exodus)] Vox pop: Umm, “Exodus”? Bob Marley. [Song: Victor Jara (Los Estudiantes)] Vox pop: “Los Estudiantes” by Victor Jara. [Song: I Solisti Dell’Oltrepo Pavese (Bella Ciao)] Vox pop: This guy called Deniz Gezmiş. He was executed by the Turkish army. He was whistling this song. “Rodrigo’s Guitar.” [Concierto De Aranjuez For Guitar And Orchestra: II - Narciso Yepes] Vox pop: My favorite resistance song is “Bella Ciao.” It’s about the partisan movements and resistance to fascism in Italy. [Song: Shehzad Roy(Ham Aek Hein)] Vox pop: In Pakistan there is a growing tradition of songs about unity. There’s one called “Ham Aek Hein”, which in Urdu means “We are one.” [crowds cheering ‘’Azadi song] Vox pop: Kashmir is a conflict zone, so there are many resistance songs. People sing against the Indian state. Azadi. “Azadi” means freedom. So they always chant, “What do we want? We want freedom.” [Song: N.W.A.(Fuck the Police)] Vox pop: Particular song, ummm. I don’t know. N.W.A., “Fuck the Police.” That’s kind of a guess. But I’m quite into like hip hop. I guess that’s kind of a form of resistance, kind of voice of the oppressed working against oppression. Yeah. Interviews [Song: Okay Temiz (East Breeze)] Dorian Lynskey:  I’m Dorian Lynskey. Music journalist, and author of 33 Revolutions per Minute: A History of Protest Songs.

Class is not only one of the oldest and most controversial of all concepts in social science, but a topic which has fascinated, amused, incensed and galvanized the general public, too. But what exactly is a ‘class’? How do sociologists study and measure it, and how does it correspond to everyday understandings of social difference? Is it now dead or dying in today’s globalized and media-saturated world, or is it entering a new phase of significance on the world stage? In this podcast, first published on Ideasbooks.org, Craig Barfoot talks to Dr Will Atkinson, author of the book Class  to explore these questions.  They take us through theoretical traditions in class research, the major controversies that have shaken the field and the continuing effects of class difference, class struggle and class inequality. Class:    Class is published by Polity Press and is part of their Concepts in Social Sciences series. You may also be interested in our BookPod on Tony Atkinson's book Inequality- what can be done? in which Prof Tony Atkinson talks to Fran Bennett.

The internet has long been seen as a force of global connection,  But this notion of a global internet has never been entirely accurate. Language barriers, access limitations, censorship and the human impulse to stay within your own social circles contribute to us staying local.  And then there is the larger architecture of the internet.  This podcast looks at at how this architecture, specifically the Domain Name System (DNS) has been used and developed in China to localize control there. In this podcast, Adriene Lilly talks to Séverine Arsène, a researcher at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China in Hong Kong and Chief Editor of China Perspectives – a journal dedicated to cultural, political and economic trends in China. She is also author of the recent article Internet Domain Names in China: Articulating Local Control with Global Connectivity part of a special feature of China Perspectives 'Shaping the Chinese Internet' The internet has long been seen as a force of global connection, bringing together people of different cultural, political and economic backgrounds. Understood as a horizontal network and a community that is structurally decentralized. But this notion of a global internet has never been entirely accurate. Language barriers, access limitations, censorship and the human impulse to stay within your own social circles contribute to us staying local. Beyond social constraints, there is the larger architecture of the internet to take into account. Essential structures that hold the internet in place, yet remain mostly unknown. Today, we're looking at how this architecture has been used and developed in China to localize control there. Understanding the Domain Names System is a big step in understanding the architecture of the internet. The Domain Names System, or DNS, is the global addressing system for the internet. You can think of the DNS like a phonebook. It takes numbers (IP addresses) and attributes them to names (domain names). When you type in an address in your browser (i.e.podacademy.org) your using the DNS to look up and call the number in this global phonebook. This global system is coordinated by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers or ICANN. China was a major pioneer in using the DNS as a political tool, creating a vast web of regulation, censorship and blocking. This has been an evolving system since the early days of the internet, and continues to change to this day. Only last month,a new draft law was reported that could force website owners operating in China to apply for China-base domain names – this means websites ending in .com or .net must also register with .cn or Chinese character domain names like .中国(meaning “.China”) or .公司 (meaning “.Corporation”). Like many similar regulations, the draft of this law is vague in its wording and its exact implications are yet to be seen. In this episode Séverine discusses how laws like this have evolved over time and what they might really mean. “The very point of using the DNS to block particular websites, or using keyword filtering, is to have a selective blocking or a selective connection to the global internet. It enables the Chinese state to have the best of both. The best of the global internet: access to trade, to fashion trends, to self-expression in a certain way - it helps people to vent off, express their identities, their wills, without necessarily being critical about the state of their own country. And, at the same time is allows a certain amount of political control...” This selective access has become known as 'The Great Firewall of China.' The term can be misleading, implying an internet that is structurally isolated from the rest of the world when, in reality, it is more a 'selective' access. “...the term “Great Firewall” was invented at the end of the 1990s/2000s, it is a very powerful image to represent a separated network that would be really very different than the rest of the...

Autism is a condition that affects about one in a hundred of us.  But few people understand or can recognise it.  This can have serious implications when people with autism encounter the criminal justice system. Recent research by City University and the University of Bath suggests that most people with autism, and about 75% of their parents,  are left very upset after dealings with the police.  April is Autism Awareness Month, and Pod Academy's Lee Millam  went to talk to Dr Laura Crane of City University London, to find out more. Lee Millam:  Autism is a complex condition for which there is no cure.  The main features are problems with social communication and interaction. Laura Crane:   Everyone with autism is very different, but people with autism all show the same key features - impairment in interacting with people socially and repetitive behaviours, interests and activities. These really vary so you could have one persion with autism who is very verbally and intellectually able, whereas others may not speak, they may have intellectual disabilities and may need full time care to meet their needs. Autism can affect anybody, we don't know what causes it and it is sometimes quite hard for people to be diagnosed because some signs can be very subtle.  But it can affect anybody.  One in a hundred means 700,000 people in the UK. Because we don't know what causes autism there are no treatments, but there are lots of interventions available to enable people with autism to lead rewarding and fulfilling lives - in schools, in the community - to help people with autism get jobs or help them learn in the classroom. But there is no cure.  If you have autism you live with it throughout your life. There have been lots of high profile cases in the media where  people with autism have come in contact with the police and the outcomes haven't been very positive. We wanted to see whether these experiences were rare, but actually they were very common.  It wasn't just these extreme cases we hear about.  We did a survey of 400 police officers and 100 member of the autism community (parents and autistic adults) and we asked them about the experiences of autism within the criminal justice system - what they think worked well and not well. The police were generally fairly satisfied with how they worked with individuals with autism but the autistic adults and their parents were not.  69% were dissatisfied.  It shows there is a disparity between the views of the police and the view of people with autism themselves. That is something that needs to be addressed. One of the key problems is that the police often direct their resources towards people with quite classic signs of autism - difficulties with language, intellectual impairment, very clear social impairments.  And on the other end of the spectrum you have individuals who are very articulate, very verbally and intellectutally able and they're often termed as having 'high funtioning autism' or Asperger's syndrome.  When the police come into contact with someone with a diagnosis of high functioning autism or Asperger's syndrom, they might see that their symptoms aren't very obvious.  They can verbalise what happened and give a fairly good account of what's gone on, but actually they need a lot of help and support as well and I think the police might overlook that because they'll over estimate the capabilities of that person. I think one of the key issues is autism awareness.  Lots of people have heard of autism, they may be aware of a friend or family member who has an autism diagnosis, but few people know exactly what that means.  They wouldn't necessarily know if someone they met had autism.  It is a hidden condition unlike other conditions (eg Down's Syndrome where people have a characteristic appearance). Training police officers about the characteristics of autism - so when they encounter someone with autism they can identify that this person is vulnerable a...

This podcast is the second in our series on new concert music.   New music can be unfamiliar and challenging - this series, written and presented by composer Arthur Keegan-Bole, is designed to present new music in a non-scary way or at least to explain that composers are making logical music - not trying to make weird, 'difficult' music to confound the listener. The sublime music in this podcast, I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spiritum Meum’, is a newly composed piece by Benedict Todd relating to the lost sounds of a ninth century Iberian liturgy.  It was composed as part of Bristol University's exciting Old Hispanic Office project. Now over to Arthur to introduce this podcast....... Arthur Keegan-Bole:  Hello, you’re listening to I will Pour Out My Spirit, ‘Effundum Spritum Meum’, a podcast about how a newly composed piece of music relates to the lost sounds of a unique liturgy called the Old Hispanic Office which was first sung on the Iberian Peninsula before the 9th Century. Hold on, stay there, stay with me. It’s not as niche-an-episode as you might think. No working knowledge of early medieval Spanish church-going is necessary… I promise. My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer the purpose of these podcasts is to explain ways that new music relates to music of the past. In this episode we are going way back to music first written down in the Tenth Century and how musicological research into this repertoire has directly inspired the piece of music you’re hearing. The piece was written in 2015 by Benedict Todd (hello Benedict!). You’ll hear much more from him as we discuss then interaction of music and text and how the medieval notation greatly influenced his piece of music. We’ll also hear from Dr Emma Hornby who leads the cross-disciplinary research team investigating the Old Hispanic Office and whose project spawned the call for new works. All this to come, but for now lets just enjoy this really good bit… Before getting onto the new stuff, lets explore what the Old Hispanic Office actually is by first hearing what it is not. It’s not the familiar sound of Gregorian chant which forms the Roman Catholic liturgy and which could be said is the genesis of the entire Western tradition. Emma Hornby:  The old hispanic office is what was sung across most of Iberia until about the year 1080 when there was a big suppression of it by the pope. [AKB] This is Dr Emma Hornby, an early music specialist and reader in music at the University of Bristol. She heads up the Old Hispanic Office project. [EH] It’s a Western, Latin, Christian church but it’s not the Roman liturgy - that’s the Gregorian chant. [AKB] Okay, so brass tacks - ‘liturgy’ we’re talking about how the church goes about structuring services through the day [EH] Exactly so, yes. So the Office is the way that monks and clerics go around and around singing the Psalms, singing chants, readings, prayers and the shape of how they do that in medieval Iberia was unique, different from anywhere else in western Europe. It’s not just that the melodies are different and that the texts are different, it’s that the whole shape of the liturgy is different, so you get through the day in different ways and it’s almost entirely un-studied. [AKB] Interesting stuff to an early musicologist or historian maybe but what has this got to do with composers? That stems from Emma’s novel response to a problem with the sources for this music - the notation does not give enough information for the sound to be fully recreated. We can’t know what it sounded like. [EH] As I was planning this research I kept coming against the sticking point that I want to share my research with the widest possible audience and that’s not just… I mean, there aren’t many other scholars interested in Old Hispanic chant before you start. There aren’t even that many scholars interested in Gregorian chant, it’s a niche interest.

How did we transition from candles to kerosene? or kerosene to electricity? What and when were the conditions ripe for energy transitions of our past? and what lessons do they have for us in the 21st century as we make a transition from high carbon intensity fossil fuels to renewable energy.. In this podcast Chaitanya Kumar from Sussex University talks to Roger Fouquet from the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics. The podcast was first broadcast on The Shift, a great new on-line platform for conversations on energy and climate This is a short version of the transcript Chaitanya Kumar:  What are the key patterns that you've seen emerge from your study of historical energy transitions? Roger Fouquet  Under every single energy transition like biomass to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas etc, is a disaggregation of a number of sectors and services. Services like heating, lighting and every sector like transport, housing etc; each one of those needs to make a transition of its own. The technology needed for this transition potentially differs from each sector and service and the result of which is a very slow transition. In energy transitions, technology or new energy sources that emerges and eventually becomes dominant always start as a niche product. There are a small group of consumers who are willing to pay a premium for the energy services attached to the new technology. Economies of scale subsequently improve the technology and drive down its cost, making it competitive with the incumbent energy technology/source. For instance, kerosene was used for lighting in the late 1800's largely by the poor population that couldn't afford gas lighting. But it never dropped cheap enough to compete with gas lighting. C. What was the trigger for energy transitions and what parallel can we draw to the modern energy transition that we need? R. First people used candles, gas lighting came in in early 1800's which involved the infrastructure of pipes and was originally available to the wealthier populations. 1860's introduced kerosene which was able to compete and was much cheaper to candles. Gas for the rich and oil for the poor was the way things were for decades till electricity came around. Electricity became a competitor for gas at which point gas companies became alert and started providing the poor population with gas to capture a greater market. Companies in this case invested in piping infrastructure and charged consumers later for gas. Electricity therefore was subdued by market forces and took over 6 decades to compete with gas lighting and in the 1930's we saw the explosion of electricity provided lighting. C. What were the infrastructure support structures to make this transition happen? R. It was very much led by industry and which we are partly anticipating today. But it is important to note that the state played the role as an observer and as a regulator for energy pricing etc. There are more lessons to draw from that regulation aspect than suggesting that Government's encouraged a certain technology or energy source. C. What are the key differences between the modern day transition and past energy transitions? R. We are currently concerned about environmental pollution and climate change. We are now looking at the public paying a premium for a public good i.e. improvement in environmental quality and climate stabilisation and there is a market failure here. Unlike previous transitions where people adopted new sources of energy for better energy services for private benefit as opposed to public good. Ultimately we are seeking Governments to create the incentives for a valuation of that environment quality and climate stabilisation through regulation and influence prices. C. How do you factor the use of information in energy transitions? R. I think information can be helpful. Make people more aware, smart technologies help improve efficiency but I suspect that will allo...

The films of truly outstanding director Spike Lee take a special niche in American cinema. More than that, they especially enrich so-called Black cinema. Lee’s oeuvre includes a great number of films. To mention just some of them: She’s Gotta Have It (1986), Do the Right Thing (1989), Jungle Fever (1991), Malcolm X (1992), He Got Game (1998), Love & Basketball (2000), Bamboozled (2000), Red Hook Summer (2012), finally, his recently released Chi-Raq (2015). This podcast is presented and produced by Tatiana Prorokova a Doctoral Candidate in American Studies at Philipps-University of Marburg, Germany. Lee’s works have received a lot of acclaim from their audience as well as from film critics due to the issues raised by the director and the way these problems are formulated and presented to us. African American director Spike Lee manages to present to America racial problems the country has wallowed in in the most authentic and explicit way. Houston A. Baker, Jr., comments: “Lee’s first films are low-budget, minor masterpieces of cultural undercover work. They find the sleeping or silenced subject and deftly awaken him or her to consciousness of currents that run deep and signify expensively in Black America” (166). The scholar continues, shrewdly pinpointing the peculiarity of Spike Lee’s cinema: “Now, it is not that Lee’s films are devastatingly original, telling us always things we do not know. What is striking about his work is that it is, in fact, so thoroughly grounded in what we all know, but refuse to acknowledge, speak, regret, or change” (167, author’s emphasis). Dan Flory contends that the main goal of Lee’s works is “to make the experience of racism understandable to white audience members who ‘cross over’ and view his films” (40). In this respect, one can even talk about particular types of characters or images created by this director, like, for example, “‘sympathetic racists,’” defined as “[white] characters with whom mainstream audiences readily ally themselves but who embrace racist beliefs and commit racist acts”; or “unsympathetic black characters with whom many audience members might feel little or nothing in common” (40-41). At the same time, Baker singles out another aim that Lee seeks to fulfill in his films: “His [Lee’s] mission is freedom – that monumental and elusive ‘it’ that Black folks have always realized they gotta have” (175). Spike Lee’s new film, Chi-Raq, however, stands out of the long row of Lee’s previous works due to the problems raised as well as the projected urgency of doing something about these issues. The director starts his film reporting shocking details about the death rate in one of America’s largest cities – Chicago. While in its most recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States has lost 2,349 and 4,424 Americans respectively, during the same period, 7, 356 people were murdered in Chicago, which, shockingly displays that it has been safer for Americans in war-torn countries in the Middle East rather than in this American city. Thus, calling Chicago Chi-Raq, Lee claims that it is America’s second Iraq. The film later criticizes U.S. foreign and domestic policy that arguably led to the criminal activity in Chicago. For example, when a priest, being overwhelmed by the numbers and age of the recently killed people, exclaims: “Where was their freedom? Where was their right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?” He overtly refers to America’s mission in the Middle East to liberate the oppressed; however, he implicitly argues that while fighting far away, the United States does not notice the growing problems on its own territory, among its own citizens, specifically among “young black males”. The issue is later touched upon again by one of the heroines (Angela Bassett) who openly blames America for what is happening in Chicago: “The U.S. spends money on the Iraqi people – to train them, govern them, help them build an economy.

Science Fiction can often help us understand realpolitik in the real world. Is Tyrian Lannister a realist or a liberal? What would Mr. Spock have to say about rational choice theory? And what did Stanley Kubrick read to create Dr. Strangelove? Stephen Dyson is the author of Otherworldly Politics: The International Relations of Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Battlestar Galactica(Johns Hopkins University Press 2015) and associate professor of political science at the University of Connecticut. In this interview with Heath Brown (originally made for the New Books Network) he takes on these questions with an enjoyable exploration for how the classic theories of International Relations have been played on our television and movie screens. Heath Brown: Even those of us who don’t study International Relations know about the classic divide between ‘realists’ and ‘liberals’.  You look to the fictional world of Game of Thrones to explain this.  So, who are the realists and who are the liberals in the world of Westeros? SD:  I think the whole first season of Game of Thrones is an excellent illustration of this whole liberal/realist divide.  The liberals are the idealists, of course, people who believe politics should be about values and ethics, and human nature is fundamentally good, and the way you promote peace in the world – and peace is achievable – is that you act in accordance with your values and you trust other people.  I think they were represented, especially in the first season, and later, by the Starks in Game of Thrones, the Guardians of the North.  People like Ned Stark, an extremely stubborn individual, very moralistic, someone who always wanted to do the right thing, but who was (as many liberals are, as idealists are) pretty bad at the down and dirty work of politics.  In Game of Thrones Ned is doing well in the North, he is among his own people, and he understands its politics and is able to make a virtue of his idealism.  Then the king, his old friend, comes to see him and says, ‘I need you in the South’.  But Southern politics is very different, the realm of Real Politique, the realm of the Stark’s great antagonists the Lanisters, who represent the realist point of view. Ned, very unwisely, follows his friend down south.  It is the right thing to do, he gave his word to his friend, he owes duty to his friend, the king, and he meets a sticky end in the south because he is out manoevered by realists. HB: And we can say, for those who haven’t watched the show….. SD: ……yes, spoiler alert….. HB: that you haven’t yet been spoiled!  You write in the book about Star Trek, Game of Thrones, Battlestar Gallactica, but not about Star wars - so no Star Wars spoilers, either! One of the central concerns of scholars in lots of fields is the extent to which rationality is an abstract idea, or something that really drives decision making.  Trekkies have their own ways to express this debate…..how does Star Trek use Mr Sock’s rationality? SD: Mr Spock is probably the greatest fictional representative of what is, in academic circles, in danger of being the pretty boring and bloodless theory of rational choice.  When you try to explain it, eyes glaze over but if you can dramatise it in the figure of someone like Mr Spock you can keep them interested.  Spock, on Star Trek, was a Vulcan, someone committed to making decisions from a logical standpoint calculating the costs and benefits.  The greatest example was in the movie The Wrath of Khan, my favourite movie.  Again, spoiler alert if you haven’t seen it, Spock applies his utilitarianism, his rationality throughout the movie to help his friend Kirk (the embodiment of feeling and emotion) – Spock is cool and Kirk is hot – and when they work together they can be really successful.  And they ARE successful.  They beat Kirk’s nemesis, Khan, and it is Spock’s rationality and Kirk’s emotion that work together, but at a huge cost!

‘Lock them up and throw away the key!’ is something that is often heard.  But does locking someone up for committing a crime really work to punish an individual? What about having them come back into society a changed person, asks presenter and producer Lee Millam in this podcast. Prisons, why do we send people there?  Does it work?  Should it work?  This was the subject of a recent lecture at Gresham College in the City of London.  It is one lecture from a series on Law and Lawyers at Gresham College, presented by Professor Sir Geoffrey Nice QC.  He explains why we lock up criminals….. Geoffrey Nice:  …..for a range of reasons, many of them not fully articulated.  You could look back and say thata there are some coherent lines of justification – deterrence, retribution, rehabilitation (those are the standard ones).  But does it really explain our attitude towards imprisonment.  I rather doubt it. Not only are people complex, but our reactions to people are complex too.  Take those who, on some objective calculation, would be less culpable but get more opprobrium and heavier sentences than those who are in one sense guiltier but get lesser sentences.  The most obvious examples are those who really cannot control themselves because of their upbringing - such as sex offenders who have themselves been formed by childhood, have been victims of sex offences and may become sex offenders themselves. They draw the maximum opprobrium from society, and not the understanding that they themselves are victims. So we are complicated in the way we respond to crime. There is no great political dividend in rehabilitating people, at least there doesn’t seem to be in our country. Interestingly there are changes around the world. Norway is rather leading the way.  Its prisons are so shockingly liberal that people from America and England can’t probably recognise them as prisons at all!  Their purpose is to enable people to rejoin society.  And these prisons have a recidivist rate of 20% whereas the US and England have recidivism rates of about 70%.  Why aren’t we spending more time looking at that/ Lee Millam: If other countries are more successful at rehabilitating prisoners, then there must be lessons to learn from other systems in other parts of the world.  But there are some crimes where prison is the only answer. GN: There are some people who are so dangerous they do have to be restricted so that is one justifiable expense – though whether it has to be done in this way, given modern technology, is another issue. I think it is really a desire to punish people that justifies what we do.  I may not be on that wing of public opinion, but what is clear is that you have to carry public opinion with youon an issue like this.  Change from where we are to something more humane, or rather more liberal (as it would now be described) is going to take some time. It is also going to be more difficult to do that in a society where so many of the other structures, in their own way, almost require punishment and offenders.  The rich need the poor, the good need the bad, the apparently lawful need criminals. You could argue, in a rather nasty way, we don’t actually want to live in a crime free society.  So if you’ve got an aggressively capitalist society with great divergence of wealth, it is probably inevitable that you are going to want to punish, or will punish, those who offend the implied values of such a society.  Maybe as long as you’ve got a society that , since the 1960s has believed in all aspects of sexual liberalism, it is in some curious and perverse way particularly hard on those who transgress what is left of the law on sexual control.  Mary Whitehouse may well be shown, in due course, to have been right.  More and more people may be thinking it wasn’t quite so good to create a sexually liberal society, one of the consequences of which is that people had to do more thing to temper it.

This is a podcast about music.  A podcast about Nocturne.  A podcast of a Nocturne inspired by the BBC's nightly Shipping Forecast.  Produced and presented by composer, Arthur Keegan-Bole A K-B:  Oh dear, I crashed the pips. In the world of radio, crashing the pips - that is, talking over the six sine tone beeps that mark the hour on BBC radio - is a serious faux pas. So, please, let me start again. Hello you are listening to Nocturne, a podcast about music, its relationship with the night. My name is Arthur Keegan-Bole and I’m a composer. The music you’re hearing is a piece I finished at the start of this year. It is called Nocturne and Nocturne is what this podcast is about. In it you will hear about the music’s materials and meaning, especially the role of radio extracts in the sound-world of the music which includes the BBC pips and, everyone’s favourite sedative, the Shipping Forecast. The piece was written and premiered in America so we will also discover how a non-U.K. audience without knowledge of these niche British sounds might understand this music. Let’s start by thinking about what a nocturne is. This is musicologist David Fay… David Fay:  As you can probably tell from the words relationship with the English adjective ‘nocturnal’ a nocturne is a piece of music suggestive of the night. Although the Italian form of the word ‘notturno’ had been used frequently in the 18th Century as a name for pieces that were designed to be performed at night, it was Irishman John Field who first coined the French word ‘nocturne’ to describe a particular musical genre in a set of piano pieces published in 1815. Thereafter the Nocturne became a popular genre of composition for romantic pianist-composers most famously Frederick Chopin whose twenty-one Nocturnes remain the pinnacle of the genre. Field’s Nocturnes and many of those composed by others subsequently are lyrical in nature, with the pianist’s right hand playing a graceful, singing melody over broken chords in the left. The relationship with the night in these piano Nocturnes is usually in their evocation of a tranquil atmosphere which can be associated with the nocturnal ambience of a calm, still night… presumably in the countryside. However, despite the quietly lyrical, pianistic connotations of the word ‘Nocturne’ it has been used as a title for pieces written for other instruments and ensembles particularly from the Twentieth Century onwards. Some of these explore other aspects of the nocturnal environment - whether the natural sounds we hear at night or the world of dreams, or, perhaps, nightmares to which we succumb nightly. A K-B  I hope my piece simply has the sound of a nocturne - unspecifically yet unequivocally conjuring night-time. However, we all like a story to guide us, and a narrative of some kind helps the composing process a great deal. So, let me ask you… have you ever fallen asleep to the sound of the Shipping Forecast? Between 12:40 and 1:00am a magical series of sounds are broadcast on BBC Radio 4. This is Closedown. A tune called Sailing By kicks it off, this is what is known in the trade as an ‘identifier’ so those trying to tune in can easily find the station, it is also a ‘buffer’ filling time so that the Shipping Forecast (which follows) starts exactly the scheduled time. I’ve always wondered why they use Ronald Binge’s light orchestral tune. Would it not be clearer to continually repeat the name of the station? Perhaps, but that is certainly not good radio. So, to an extent at least it’s an aesthetic choice. For a long time I struggled to sleep, from time-to-time I still do but I can always count on this bit of radio to help me drift. It is about drifting between one state and another all sorts of strange, ‘in-between’ landscapes and seascapes. This is the narrative behind the first half of this music. It is a strange lullaby, drifting between the real and the unconscious, lingering in a penumbral state.

Translational medicine is collaborative science that translates work in the laboratory into practical medical treatments - it is sometimes termed 'bench to bedside medicine'. Because it often includes trials on animals it can be controversial.  So can animal testing be justified? Scarlett MccGwire put on her wellies and met up with Francis Henson to find out. Dr Frances Henson:  I'm Frances Henson, Research Fellow in the Division of Trauma and Orthopaedic Surgery, Department of Surgery, Addensbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge, and I am also Senior Lecturer in Equine Surgery, Department of Veterinary Medicine, Cambridge Veterinary School. What I do is work in the lab with basic scientists to generate treatments for various orthopedic diseases.  I am interested in lame animals and lame people and we use a large animal model - a sheep - to try our experiments before we take them on to use them either to treat human patients or veterinary, animal, patients. Our current research is looking at a novel bio-material.  I have colleagues in Newcastle who have made a brand new bio material, they have put two special materials together and they are going to be using those to treat large surface defects in joints - knee joints in people - that will also be applicable to our veterinary species. Scarlett MccGwire:  You are trialing this on sheep? FH:  Yes, we are.  What we do with these osteochondral plugs, as we call them, is we take our sheep, make little holes in the joints and we fill those holes with our novel treatmentt to prove that treatment is both safe and really offers a significant improvement in the expected outcome.  If you didn't put the scaffold in, the joints wouldn't heal. SM: What are you finding out so far? FH: We are finding that these new products are very good at treating joint surface defects.  Within our group, we have developed a novel way of looking at this.  We don't want these animals to suffer pain, so we monitor their pain, immediately after surgery and through the experiment because we do data analysis, recording the amount of weight bearing on the leg that has been operated on.  Interestingly we can show no difference in the animals we have operated on, compared to animals that have not been operated on, very quickly - within a matter of hours after the surgery.  The surgical procedures are very benign and the osteochondral plugs really allow the joints to heal very well. SM: What does this mean for humans?  Will knee replacement surgery be much easier?  Is this the end of the pain of arthritis? FH: Let's take these in two parts.  First, the early osteoarthritis.  Arthritis occurs when you have a defect in the joint, the joint is very ppor at healing itself and at the current time, if we have pain in our joint, the doctor give us painkillers and we limp around for a while until it is too painful and you go for a joint replacement (which is not a cure, it is amputation and putting in a prosthesis. The joint surface defects we want to cure with the scaffold are big lesions in joint, due to sports injuries and trauma in road traffic accidents. These cause big damage in the joint and currently there is no treatment for that.  Left untreated it will go to arthritis.  We have the ambitious hope that using these scaffolds we can stop osteoarthritis before it starts, cure the joint and get it back to a healthy environment. SM: We are using sheep to make incredible progress for humans? FH: We are using our sheep to make incredible progress, I hope, in curing joint disease in both humans and animals.  I am a veterinary surgeon, I spend half my time in the lab, but the other half in my surgery with animals, particularly horses and the treatments we are developing are all part of a 'one health' agenda. If we can treat joint defects in man, we can also treat them in animals.  So, while the sheep is being used, it is for the benefit of animals in veterinary medicine and in human medicin...

“Originality doesn't mean creation from nothingness.....it can also mean reusing something in a very creative and innovative way... if we took the standards of how people create that are implicit in a lot of copyright law cases, that basically say 'you can't copy', most of what we consider to be great classical works couldn't have been created...” In this episode, Adriene Lilly talks to Olufunmilayo Arewa, Professor of Law at University of California Urwin about her work on musical borrowing and copyright law in the United States. Olufunmilayo, who goes by Funmi, is a law professor at University of California Irvine. Her work on music and law includes: From J.C. Bach to Hip Hop: Musical Borrowing and Cultural Context about the diverse range of borrowing and inspiration in music across history and genre; Copyright on Catfish Row: Musical Borrowing, Porgy & Bess and Unfair Use  focusing on the influences on George Gershwin's work, and his estate's tight hold on it's copyright. She is currently writing a book about the influences of African American music and the business and legal implications of it's global reach. You can find links to some of her other work, and a little more information here. What does it mean for something to be creative? Original? How much transformation must occur before we allow an artists to claim ownership of an idea? Appropriation, inspiration and creative borrowing is common across disciplines and traditions. Existing in everything from science to painting, from cooking to film. Today, we're focusing on appropriation in music. “...There is a conception that some types of music are more original than others, and we often make those determinations in a very de-contextualized way. Originality doesn't mean creation from nothingness, it could mean that (not often the case in music), but it can also mean reusing something in a very creative and innovative way. So I think, originality should not be the opposite of copying. Originality might involve copying and it might not, that depends on genre, composer, [...etc]” (from the podcast) We talk about the history of the idea of originality and creativity in music; The evolution of music copyright; The differences between music and literature; The many meanings of 'musical borrowing'; The role of estates in copyright enforcement; And some of the current trends in copyright cases brought against musicians. We briefly discuss the recent Blurred Lines case (information about the case here, and music here), and the work of George Gershwin (Porgy and Bess, Summertimeand the spiritual Sometimes I feel Like a Motherless Child). Funmi's work considers the historic and conceptual issues that we find embedded in various rulings regarding musical borrowing. In 'From J.C. Back to Hip Hop' she tackles the actual creative practices of classical composers versus the myth of how we often believe they composed. “... if we took the standards of how people create that are implicit in a lot of copyright law cases, that basically say 'you can't copy', most of what we consider to be great classical works couldn't have been created...” (from the podcast) Her works highlights the huge variety of creative practices that exist, and have existed, throughout music history. Beethoven, for example, was known to be a skilled improvisational player and Debussey a commentator on Wagner. Yet, today we see many of these musicians as artists who crafted work in isolation, as if unaffected by their own social context and histories. Her work makes the argument that by recognizing some of these similarities between actual classical practice and contemporary practice, we can begin to embrace the multiple ways that creativity can occur. “...hip hop artists are not the first artists to encounter this reaction to what some might perceive as too much borrowing...” (from the podcast) In Copyright on Catfish Row she discusses the work of George Gershwin and through this exampl...