Podcasts about Hooke

What a lot of fun I had talking to Zena Hitz about Gulliver's Travels. As well as discussing Swift, slavery, genocide, rationality, Christianity, and science, Zena told me that good philosophy is like a box of cake mix and that a liberal education requires you to be freed of false expertise. I also took Zena on a detour to discuss Iris Murdoch, the Catherine Project, and modern philosophy. TRANSCRIPTHENRY OLIVER: Today I am talking to Zena Hitz. Zena is a tutor at St. John's College. She is a philosopher, the author of Lost in Thought. She runs the Catherine Project. She's famous on Twitter. We don't know how she does it all. Zena, welcome.ZENA HITZ: Thank you, Henry. It's great to be here.OLIVER: And we're talking about Gulliver's Travels because it is 300 years since it was published, and it's a book that you love.HITZ: A book that I've loved for a long time.First Encounter with Gulliver's TravelsOLIVER: So tell me, when did you first read it?HITZ: Well, it was an important moment for me. I was in high school, and I was admitted to a scholarship summer program which offered college courses at different campuses. There were some normal-looking college courses at normal-looking colleges. And then there was this course at St. John's called Science as Literature, Literature as Science. [laughs] It had this description that was just unbelievable. And I thought to myself, “This is the one, obviously the one to go to.”So I went, and we read books that no one in their right mind would assign to high school students now, and maybe not then. The fragments of Parmenides, Plato's Timaeus, selections from Aristotle's Physics, Gulliver's Travels. After reading a number of—preface to Ptolemy's Almagest, geocentric astronomy. And we read Gulliver's Travels after reading selections from Hooke's Micrographia, so the inventor of the microscope, and Galileo's Starry Messenger, which is one of the great first uses of the telescope to discover the nature of the moon and the satellites of Jupiter.So then we read Gulliver's Travels. We also read Emma and Flannery O'Connor and various other things. And one of the faculty who was running it said at one point, “Well, we thought we'd throw a bunch of things together and see what you could do, what you could make of it. We didn't actually have an idea of how these all fit together,” which I think was probably true.At any rate, I think I came to Gulliver's Travels thinking about these scientists who were looking at very large things and very small things, and thinking in general about the follies of human perception, whether that was shown in literature or philosophy or what have you, the ways in which human perception and knowledge don't work very well. And I think Swift is still one of the best people to—Gulliver's Travels is still one of the best books about that because it's in the mode of a travel diary, an eyewitness account.Gulliver is trained as a surgeon, by his own account. He at one point says he was a bit of a projector in his younger days, someone who undertook scientific projects. And he's a terrible observer, the worst imaginable observer, and Swift so brilliantly lets us see through his eyes, lets us see all the things he doesn't see. And I think it's not just about seeing and knowing. It has a very profound, I think, moral and political set of commitments. So it's a very humane book. It's social criticism, but from a point of view of a very deep humanity. So I've always loved the book for these reasons since then.I came back to it more recently because it is part of the curriculum at St. John's. So when I came back to teach there, I began to reread it. The other experience I had was that I wrote a long essay on it when I was an undergraduate. So those are my—I'm not any kind of expert. My knowledge of the historical context of the book is limited. It's not zero, but it's limited. But I have always loved it as an account of human understanding and its failures and the way that might impact how we live and how happy we can be.The Houyhnhnm ProblemOLIVER: Have you changed how you think about it as you've taught it?HITZ: I have not really changed the way I think about it. It gets more—like all of these books, the more you read them, the more comes out of them, the more details come up. Hilarious. The more jokes you get, the more . . .I think the one more recent insight I had was, I hadn't understood the full horror of the Houyhnhnms in the last book until relatively recently. I think that took me some time to really take on. It's one of the cases where Gulliver's misperceptions are a bit harder to see, and I think many readers just assume that Swift is endorsing the praise of the Houyhnhnms in some sense or other.OLIVER: There are some very serious critics in the past who have called them Swift's ideal beings. Which at this point in history seems unthinkable, but it has been a belief among serious readers.HITZ: Yes, yes. And also common among students. Yes, it's absolutely one of the wrongest opinions you could have about anything, I think.OLIVER: Why does Swift allow us to make that mistake? Are we bad readers out of the context, or has he made too good a job of his diversions and concealments and ironies?HITZ: That's a great question, and I'll just take a stab at it. I think that he has hit on a mode of misperception which is very deep to us, and it's something that we're much more guilty of. We could imagine that if we were in a place where everyone was small or everyone was large, we might make mistakes like Gulliver makes. But we all live, I think, in communities that are a bit like the Houyhnhnms. And so we are all very subject to these kinds of deceptions, and I think that's how he gets us.That's not to really excuse the bad readings because, you know, Gulliver does leave the land of the Houyhnhnms with a boat made out of human skin, which should—I think that moment should make you realize, if you haven't yet, that something is very seriously wrong with Gulliver. Gulliver has been kind of destroyed as a person by his travels, and especially by this last trip. But if you pass over that little detail, maybe you think, “Oh, wow, he found some very simple beings.”OLIVER: Well, there's also the great council where they debate the genocide of the Yahoos.HITZ: [laughs] Yes.OLIVER: And it directly contradicts several things Gulliver has come to believe about the Houyhnhnms, about the Yahoos, and about himself. And he's completely unaware of these contradictions and so in awe of the Houyhnhnms that he doesn't quite understand, I think, that he's accounting a genocide.HITZ: That's right. That's right.OLIVER: Even though he uses a phrase from Genesis that's very unmistakable. It's a sort of remarkable moment of—particularly to us, having had the 20th century. I think that's why Swift came back into favor in a way, because people used to say, Swift's unbearable view of human nature . . .This is a great bit in Boswell's Life of Johnson where, when they're traveling through Scotland, they're with a lady, and she says to Johnson, “Is any man naturally good?” And Johnson says, “No, no more than a wolf.” And Boswell says, “Well, sir, what about ladies?” And Johnson says, “God, no, absolutely not.” And this woman says, “Oh my God, this is worse than Swift,” utterly horrific view of human nature.But of course, we can actually say, did he go far enough? [laughter] I mean, Swift clearly understands something very real and deep. The council of genocide is horrifyingly familiar to us. And I think that's much to Swift's credit that he can see that, and to show that Gulliver would blind himself to it. And people still blind themselves to it, right?HITZ: That's right. And I wonder—you would know more about this than me because it is a bit of a historical question, but my understanding is that quite a lot of the savagery, the worst parts of rule over men that we see in Gulliver's Travels are pictures of Ireland in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I wonder if that took some time to reveal itself to the British, and in some ways it's still not really as known as it might be. We think of the colonial project as being something that was directed at India and Africa—OLIVER: Faraway countries.HITZ: —faraway countries where people looked really different. And we're not as familiar with the kinds of things that were done to the cuddly Irish with their nice music, and who we don't think of as being people that you would savagely oppress like that. So I think—OLIVER: So, I think partly the English are not interested in their own history in the way that they are expected to be. And partly the English interest in Irish history has become very focused on the more recent events. And it's very hard to get back past that. And it all becomes very complicated, and it's a sort of different country. So there's some of that, but I think generally we don't want to know what we did, yes.HITZ: Well, and I think in anglophone countries in general, there's going to be a history of something like that. To attribute it to the British is not to say that—I mean, Americans have chattel slavery and the genocide of the natives, and the Australians have their own situation. All of the anglophone countries have something like this on their conscience.I think that obscures the meaning of that final book. I think we don't recognize—and that's really to Swift's credit, to have a social critique that is so real and so deep that you may not even recognize yourself in the picture.Slavery in Gulliver's TravelsOLIVER: Yes. When I read it again—I read it as an undergraduate, but I really was actually more interested in the other parts of Swift's work. And I thought it was brilliant, and then I read it again. And it was more recently that—I didn't understand how I couldn't have seen it, but it's basically a book about slavery, as I come back to it.And in each of the books there is enslavement of a different sort. So, to begin with, Gulliver is the one being kept in a box or kept in a house, or he's chained up by the Lilliputians or Glumdalclitch.HITZ: Right. That's right.OLIVER: She's a very nice sort of master, as it were, [laughter] but he has that box that can be sealed, and the dwarf has him swiping at the wasps. And then the enslavement that the flying island has of the country below is like England and Ireland. And then in the final book, you know, the Houyhnhnms are whipping the Yahoos.HITZ: That's right.OLIVER: The slavery thing gets worse and worse as the book goes on. And one of the things that's clever is that it's funny when Gulliver is enslaved, right? When the wasps are let out and he has to—and Swift sort of does that clever thing where he undermines things by making it a joke at the end. By the book of the Houyhnhnms, there is really very little humor. And the twist at the end is always dark.Gulliver can't see that—he can see that he's a bit like the Yahoos. But he can't see that they've been enslaved in the way that he—the farmer wanted to take him around the kingdom and show him off, and he says, “I couldn't possibly have had children in that condition because I couldn't have it on my conscience that I had begotten a slave, someone born into slavery. I couldn't do that.”HITZ: Right.OLIVER: Then he's in the Houyhnhnms and he can't—it's quite remarkable.HITZ: [laughs] Yes. I don't think it's quite true that in the end there's no humor. I read it with some Catherine Project group a couple of years ago, and one of the readers pointed out that it's not obvious Gulliver isn't leaving his home and sitting out in the ocean and always landing on England every single time; just every time, he lands there.And there's something hilarious about an Englishman that discovers a place where there's all horses, [laughter] and his love of horses overwhelms him, and he becomes persuaded that they're the only rational beings that there are. I mean, that is funny.OLIVER: Yes, I agree. There's a lot of irony and stuff. But I think it's in Lilliput when he describes their manner of writing. And he says they don't write from left to right as we do in England, or from right to left, or up-down like the Chinese, but from one corner to the other, as the ladies do in England. This is very funny, dry humor, and that sort of thing is gone. And the things that surprise you at the end of a sentence or a paragraph are more like, “Oh, and of course I used Yahoo skin to cover the boat.” And you're like, oh my God, this is not a joke anymore.You know, in A Modest Proposal, he makes real humor out of those kind of horrors. And with the Houyhnhnms, I think he actually refuses the joke to make you feel the disgust, in a way.HITZ: Yes, that might be right. That might be right.Swift and PhilosophyOLIVER: What do you think about the idea that the Houyhnhnms are drawn from the Phaedrus and Socrates's idea of the soul with the two horses? And there's the good, rational horse and the vulgar, passionate horse, and the Yahoos are the other horse. You see what I mean?HITZ: Yes, yes.OLIVER: Is Swift showing us the two sides, and Gulliver's mistake is to prefer the one and not the—HITZ: Right, I think I have heard something like this before. I'm a bit skeptical. Swift doesn't strike me as someone who uses philosophy in quite that way. I think he's much more interested in Gulliver's—the Houyhnhnms' self-deception about the kinds of beings they are. They do not say “the thing which is not,” yet Gulliver's master hides from him this conversation about the genocide for quite some time. And maybe we don't know if he tells him quite the whole truth about it. So there's—OLIVER: And he also conceals the fact that the others don't like Gulliver because he's a partial—a reasonable Yahoo, as it were.HITZ: Right. So their self-deception, Gulliver's being taken in by their self-deception, the ways in which they—this is one of the ways that I think it's profound about the nature of slavery. And to cheer us all up, I'll make a Holocaust analogy, as you also did.When I was traveling in Germany some years ago, in one of their Holocaust museums, there was an image from a Nazi-era German newspaper of Jewish people living in complete squalor in the ghetto. And of course, they had forced them into squalor. But somehow they forced them into squalor, and then this reinforces the sense that they're these rat-like beings.And there's something very similar that the Houyhnhnms do to the Yahoos. They force them into this animal state, and then they say, “Oh God, look, these people are disgusting. They just don't know how to act.” That seems to me the kind of level at which Swift is working. He is interested in the nature of a human being, but not in the abstract Platonic sense, I don't think.He strikes me as someone who believes in common sense, common decency, basic freedom, and basic use of reason. And he finds in his time that there's distorting teachings, distorting ways of behavior that have gotten people far off track. To me, that's what it feels like it comes from. It doesn't feel like Plato is in the background to me.OLIVER: Is there an extent to which, though, it's a work of sort of anti-philosophy? As you say, Swift, he likes common sense. He likes ordinary reason, and he likes what he would call the revealed truth of Christianity. So he talks, in his sermons about people, it comes to you from God like a light. It's revealed to you. And he doesn't like this idea that the philosophers can work it all out.And in a way, that's the same sort of mistake that the scientists think they can discover all this stuff, and they go in these crazy ways. And the Houyhnhnms are a bit like that. If you had philosopher-kings, they would end up being perverted examples of rationality because they're ignoring the—so do you think it's anti-philosophy in a way? The book is saying, “No, no, I don't want philosophers”?Criticizing Elite Intellectual CultureHITZ: That's definitely a plausible reading. But it's hard to tell whether it's anti-philosophy or anti a particular style of thinking. It's worth pointing out, in that light, that Gulliver, when he arrives in the land of the Houyhnhnms, before he even meets a horse, he sees a Yahoo who, from what I can tell from the text, is trying to wave at him and say hello, who recognizes him. And he's horrified. He sees him instantly as a monster.So I think immediately upon landing, he sees the Yahoos as monstrous, and that tells me that he must already be off kilter. So he's not just corrupted by the Houyhnhnms; he's been somehow led off track, away from the capacity to recognize fellow human beings before that.And he's come from this—the third book is all about various kinds of inquiry, scientific endeavors, practical endeavors, talking to the greats of the past, necromancy, and various kinds of inquiry into wisdom or things like wisdom. And somehow that's the thing that seems to push him to the point where he can no longer tell what a human being is.OLIVER: One of my favorite parts is when he's with the wizards, and he asks to be shown Homer and Aristotle and all their commentators. And he says that there were vast rooms full of these commentators, endless numbers of them. But Homer and Aristotle didn't recognize any of them because they were all so ashamed of the terrible things they'd said about these great men's works that they kept themselves forever in a different part of the underworld. They couldn't bear the shame of being revealed to having told lies and said second-rate things.It's very, very funny. And I think that's another sort of angle on which the book says, “You're so tempted to make a comment and have an idea and be a philosopher, and you should just accept the revealed truth of what is known. Just stop it. Just stop it.” [laughter]HITZ: Well, I suppose maybe I would also put it this way, that Swift sees the condition of 18th-century Ireland, which is quite poor, very bad. And it's ruled in a savage way by the English, who have a quite flourishing intellectual culture, as it happens, at this time.So I think what he might be is not a critic of philosophy so much as a critic of intellectual culture. Because intellectual culture seems to not only not help with existential concerns like slavery and oppression and savage poverty, but even serves to mask and hide and create illusions behind it.So that's, I guess, how it strikes me, as a book that's hostile to what you'd now call elite intellectual culture. And I don't know how fundamental that critique is, in light of its inability to solve problems for real human beings or to obscure the causes of what's going on with real human beings.OLIVER: I think it's quite fundamental because outside of Gulliver's—I think this comes into Gulliver's Travels, but what he might have said more explicitly elsewhere is, there are people starving in the streets of Dublin. And we've got corrupt politicians and intellectuals saying all these things, but you know, here she is starving. You don't need to work that out. [laughter] There's no question—the reveal—just be a Christian and, like, for goodness' sake . . .HITZ: Yes.OLIVER: And when, for example, he talks to the king of Brobdingnag, and there's that wonderful satire of the English government and everything. And he says, “Those people understood mathematics and poetry and whatever, but I could never drive into their head any sense of the abstract or any of these speculative—they simply didn't know what that was. They didn't know what I was saying.” [laughter]And so in a way, his ideal government is anti-philosophical because it would just look at the human problem in front of it. It wouldn't do speculative science. It wouldn't think of itself as rational, all this Platonic stuff. It would just—she's in rags, she has bare feet, you know?HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: What do we need a philosopher-king? Like, what are you talking about?HITZ: Exactly.OLIVER: The priest understands this because he's there in the city doing it. And is there something of that in the book, that constant resistance of the cleverness of people who cannot see daily life?HITZ: I think that's absolutely true, and I think it's probably one of the things I love about the book, because I think this somehow gets to something in my own heart. Even though I'm a professional intellectual—I have been my whole life—the distance between the concerns of professional intellectuals and the concerns of living, real people in various parts of the world is very large.And it's even worse when, as it was when I was coming up in grad school, there's a ton of explicit concern and various operations underway to improve life for others, which have zero connection with anything that anyone actually does. So I think the Laputans, which is the beginning of the third book, when Gulliver—OLIVER: The flying island.HITZ: Yes, when Gulliver visits the people on the flying island, who have one eye towards the heavens and one eye pointed inward. And they study music and mathematics, and they live in a giant flying saucer, which has the—OLIVER: And the flappers.HITZ: That's right. [laughter] When someone needs to talk to them, someone flaps their ears so that they pay attention. And their wives all run off with working people because they can't bear to be treated the way they are by men like this. And the flying saucer is not just distant. It also has the power to crush the towns underneath it if it judges them to be rebellious.This image will stick with you for the rest of your life. I mean, it's absolutely perfect, and the perfect image of bad government of a kind when intellectual culture is prized. And it's hinted early on in the book in Lilliput, when the rulers in Lilliput have to do these elaborate dances with ropes.OLIVER: Oh, with the king and the chief minister hold the pole, funny angles, and if you get under it, you get a green ribbon or a red ribbon.HITZ: Exactly. [laughter] And they have these athletic contests of grace and various colored ribbons, and that determine how far you get in the halls of power.OLIVER: Yes. Are you a cabinet minister or a junior minister? Yes, yes.HITZ: Exactly. So there, it's all just a funny joke. But it develops, I think, into the Laputans, people who have kinds of expertise that are actually hostile to them doing any kind of humane governing. So yes, that seems right to me.Christianity in GulliverOLIVER: To what extent is it a Christian book?HITZ: That's an interesting question. I've never found a strong Christian element in it myself. There are satires of religious wars, both in Lilliput, where Lilliput's at war with its neighboring city. Oh, wait a second, there's two different disputes in Lilliput. One is about what side you cut your egg on.OLIVER: There are the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians,HITZ: Right. And then there's also one about heel size. So there's two different kinds of disputes.OLIVER: With the marvelous image that the king is a Short-Heeler. But they think that the heir to the throne might be favorable to the High-Heelers because he has one heel slightly higher than the other, and he walks with a wobbly gait.HITZ: [laughs] That's right. This, again, in Lilliput is just utterly hilarious, outrageous, very silly, obviously a parody of religious wars between different kinds of Christians. But it resurfaces towards the end. It's the Houyhnhnms, where he talks to the Master Horse—OLIVER: And the horse sort of pretends to this great rationality, simply can't understand that men would kill each other over the question of whether flesh is bread or bread is flesh.HITZ: That's right. That's right. That's right. So there's definitely disparaging remarks about religious wars. And as you're talking about it, where along with Swift's praise of common sense, there's a kind of basic Christian morality, which is that the poor and the suffering need attention. That all strikes me as Christian. Apart from that, I'm not sure. If you have a religious take, I'd be interested to hear it.OLIVER: I find it very interesting that Swift had quite strict beliefs. He was not in favor of Catholics. He thought Dissenters should be tolerated, but he wanted the Test Act. He was very particular about all these things. And in his other works, he's quite direct about that. But in this book, he achieves a kind of high ambivalence. And he's not a Little-Ender or a Big-Ender.HITZ: That's right.OLIVER: And he says the religious text on which this is based simply says that you must break the egg at the most convenient end.HITZ: [laughs] That's right.OLIVER: Now, of course, in reality, he's a Little-Ender, and he's very committed to the Reformation, and he thinks it's all terrible that they're not. And it's interesting that someone with such angry, insistent beliefs on the Anglican Church would take this ambivalent position.And he satirizes so much. But the anti-slavery stuff, the description of the Laputans bringing the island down, and then he says, “I've never seen so much want and misery, and there's a wild look in their eyes, and they're wearing rags.” I mean, this is Dublin, right? This is just, along with the slavery, this basic Christian concern for the oppressed, the poor, the suffering.HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: And so I don't quite know. It's almost like the book is saying, again with this anti-intellectual thing, all these doctrinal disputes and which church this and who believes that. And here we have slaves and poor people and beggars and starving people.HITZ: Right.OLIVER: Christianity should deal with that first. So is the implicit criticism of his fellow Christians, in a way, that they're more interested in these disputes than in the fact that there are enslaved people and suffering people and—you see what I mean?HITZ: Yes, that's right.OLIVER: And Gulliver—the Houyhnhnms are highly rational but not Christian, which is a significant omission. And by the end, are you supposed to wonder if Gulliver actually isn't very much of a Christian? Because he can see this suffering and not respond to it at all.HITZ: Right, when maybe the—is the best person in the book the King of Brobdingnag? Does that seem right? The person with the—at least who says the best things?OLIVER: He says the best things. I think the best person is Glumdalclitch. She shows real charity and real love towards him.HITZ: What about the Houyhnhnm, the one who likes him, who says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo”? It's tear-jerking—OLIVER: Oh, the sorrel nag.HITZ: The sorrel nag. I can literally weep at that moment when she says, “Fare thee well, gentle Yahoo.”OLIVER: That's true. That's true. She and Glumdalclitch are maybe more similar characters. Yes, yes, yes.HITZ: They're similar characters. Okay.OLIVER: And they have that basic, you don't need to call it Christian. You don't need—it doesn't need theology.HITZ: Humane. I would call it humane. Yes.OLIVER: They have that basic love of their fellow. You know, Glumdalclitch doesn't say, “Oh, how amusing this little man is, or how entertaining, or I can make—” She says, “He must be cared for. He looks a bit like me. He must be cared for.”HITZ: Right.OLIVER: And the sorrel nag, again, has the love of the fellow creature.HITZ: That's right. That's right.OLIVER: So I think Swift might be bringing in this, what he thinks of as the revealed truth of Christianity. Like, you shouldn't need telling, you shouldn't need to argue. It's there.HITZ: Right. This is just me making things up, which is what I'm here for. We're podcasting. Yes.OLIVER: Yes, of course. Also, is that not what the philosophers would do? That's what Swift would say.HITZ: But if I was going to make something up, what I would say is something like this: that Swift to me, from the testimony of Gulliver's Travels, which is the book of his I really know the best. I don't know much about the rest of it. He has a level of self-awareness and sophistication. So, he knows that that religious difference is being used as a pretext. He knows that it is obscuring the suffering of these people. So, for the purposes of the book, he says, “Look, if you're a smart person, if you're a smart ruler, if you're an actually humane, intelligent, commonsensical ruler, you know that the fact that they have the wrong religious views is not a reason for them to be enslaved and oppressed and starved.” So that would be my suspicion.And that's why I think, to me, the religion is so light, because it's not really a religious problem. It's actually just a human problem and a political problem that is, how do you run your country so that these subject peoples are allowed to be free and develop themselves and be full human beings? That would be my made-up guess.Students' Views of GulliverOLIVER: What do undergraduates think? What is it that they find interesting in the book, and what do they like or dislike?HITZ: It's been a couple of years. I think they like this idea that—we all think travel is very broadening, a great way to think about the world. You know, you can learn so much about one's fellow human beings. And whatever else is going on in Gulliver's Travels, travel does not necessarily produce enlightenment.So I think they like the attention to the ways in which, even when we are trying to learn, we fail to learn. And the ways in which structures of learning, like traveling or studying science, might actually make you worse and not better, things like that. But it's not a book—I think it's fair to say it's not one of the favorite books of the undergraduates.OLIVER: Okay.HITZ: I think they find it a little bit distant, and I'm not sure why that is.OLIVER: Is it because it sort of looks like a novel, but it's not what we have come to expect a novel to be? And it sort of has that—HITZ: I think that's right.OLIVER: The pre–Jane Austen novel is kind of weird to us now.HITZ: Well, they love Don Quixote.OLIVER: Okay.HITZ: And that is a challenge of a similar kind. It's a novel which doesn't quite read like a novel, and the humor is kind of old. I mean, it's also true—undergraduates, in my experience, in general—I hope they'll forgive me for saying this on a podcast—they're not always good at comedy. They tend to think that serious things must be tragic.OLIVER: You can't get an A by making a joke.HITZ: Well, more that they have a sense that an intellectual life is something serious. It's serious.OLIVER: Oh, yes. Okay. And the syllabus slightly reinforces that, doesn't it?HITZ: Well, it's sort of self-reinforcing because we used to read more Aristophanes. We used to read Rabelais.OLIVER: If you do Shakespeare, it'll be the tragedies.HITZ: No, no, we do Shakespeare comedies.OLIVER: Oh, you do? Okay.HITZ: Yes. We have As You Like It and The Tempest. And do we have more tragedies? Maybe one more tragedy than comedy, but not a terrible imbalance.OLIVER: Well, that's good.HITZ: It's not Shakespeare-type comedy that's—maybe, correct me if I'm wrong, a Shakespeare comedy is something that ends in a marriage, more or less.OLIVER: More or less.HITZ: It's things that are funny—they don't necessarily think that humor is a way of thinking.OLIVER: Do they struggle with irony?HITZ: No, not usually. As long as it's serious irony, Anyway, I'm not sure why. I think I'm making things—I'm going too far out of the grounds for drawing conclusions.Favorite Parts of the BookOLIVER: Sure. Do you have a favorite passage?HITZ: One of my favorites is the part—is it Balnibarbi where they have people who try to speak with objects?OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes.HITZ: And they have to carry around wagons full of things because they never know what you might want to talk about. [laughter] That's so weird. Because I think I spent a lot of time studying with philosophers, there's a bit of—something's on the nose about this.OLIVER: Yes.HITZ: You know, it's like, “No, you've got to say exactly—no, that's too imprecise. You have to say exactly what you mean.” Bernard Williams, the great philosopher, has something complaining about how contemporary philosophers are very controlling of their readers. They don't want anyone to make the slightest mistake about what they mean by a particular word. That's how the people who speak by objects strike me.OLIVER: Do you think that is a problem of contemporary philosophy?HITZ: Oh, sure. Yes, absolutely. Yes. The way Williams puts it is that when you write something, it should be like a cake mix, and the reader should be able to put their own egg and bake the cake themselves.OLIVER: Oh, I see. You mean like a box of mix, yes.HITZ: Yes, yes, exactly. It's like a box of cake mix. Whereas making the cake painstakingly and force-feeding it bite by bite to the reader is not actually an—OLIVER: Telling them how it tastes.HITZ: Telling them how it tastes is not an educational endeavor.OLIVER: When does this become too dominant in philosophy?HITZ: It's a feature of 20th-century analytic philosophy to be very careful with the meanings of words. And it's by no means universal; it's just a natural vice to the territory.Iris MurdochOLIVER: Is this a problem for someone like Iris Murdoch, or is it more the A. J. Ayer type?HITZ: No, it's the A. J. Ayer type, not Iris Murdoch. No, Iris Murdoch is heterodox outside of the—OLIVER: Do you like her philosophy?HITZ: I do, yes.OLIVER: What do you like about it? Platonic?HITZ: Now, see, I came here to talk about Swift. [laughter]OLIVER: I know, but you made such a good point about the satire of philosophers.HITZ: I like her writing for a more general educated audience, her not making assumptions about the philosophical training of her readers, and her use of Plato for sure, which is quite interesting and creative. She sort of ingests Plato and does something with it that I think is very interesting.OLIVER: Is she properly appreciated as a Platonist, or do you think there's more attention to be paid?HITZ: There's probably more attention to be paid, but she gets some attention. She gets some attention. I also don't think it was particularly helpful, these two books that came out a couple of years ago about Murdoch, Foot, Midgley, and Anscombe.OLIVER: Oh, yes, yes, yes. I only read one of those. It was quite good.HITZ: It might be quite good, but those four women are quite different from one another. So it's an example of where attention to identity could obscure as much as it—OLIVER: Well, one of the books was more about the ideas—they were both obviously about the ideas—and one of them was more about the fact that they were together in Oxford. And that they benefited from hanging out, talking, doing different sorts of work, sleeping with each other's husbands, et cetera.HITZ: Yes, all the good stuff.OLIVER: And from the more sociological point of view, it was very interesting to see that, actually, a lot of what Murdoch did was bound up with her friendships and relationships, in that the argument basically is, A. J. Ayer and the others get sent away because of the war. So these four women are actually—they've been banned from this seminar and told they're not allowed.Well, now they can sit around and do what they want to do. And it worked, and they all produced very interesting things. So from that point of view, I think it was—but I agree with you, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch are not the same. [laughter]HITZ: Not even particularly similar. I also feel like I've read enough of Murdoch's novels to have a sense of what the sociological situation was like.OLIVER: You like the novels?HITZ: I do like them, yes.OLIVER: Do you have favorites?HITZ: I can't remember the name of my favorite because I haven't read them for years. It's one of the things I read years ago, the one—I'd remember it if I saw the title. There's an LSD trip at the beginning of it.OLIVER: Oh, The Good Apprentice. I love that book.HITZ: The Good Apprentice, yes. I think that was my favorite. But I never fell in love with it. I just liked it, and I found it interesting, and I found the sociology interesting. Okay, this is what academics at this time period were doing.What to Pair with SwiftOLIVER: We got diverted.HITZ: “We” got diverted. [laughs]OLIVER: We did. If Swift is on a great books syllabus, what is it good to pair him with? If people are reading Swift, on or off a syllabus, do you think there are other—Hooker, you said, which I think would be interesting.HITZ: No, Hooke. It's Hooke.OLIVER: Hooke. Hooke. That's a very good point.HITZ: The guy who wrote Micrographia, who has the enormous picture of the flea.OLIVER: Yes, yes, yes. So that would be good. But any other? Is it worth reading Plato alongside him?HITZ: Well, I like to—he's on the list for something we called Life of the Mind Seminar at Catherine Project, which is our introduction to the life of the mind.OLIVER: And just to tell people, the Catherine Project—this is not a university. Anyone can join a seminar.HITZ: That's right. It's an open online readers community. Consists of small, high-quality conversations, mostly on Zoom, some in person.OLIVER: You could be some kid, an accountant, a dentist, whatever, and you come and do a—you've got a PhD running a seminar, and you get that experience.HITZ: Right. Some of them are peer led, so they're not necessarily PhDs running them. The reading groups are not necessarily run by PhDs. But the core program in which the Life of the Mind Seminar is—either a PhD or an ABD [all but degree] or someone with some academic experience is usually leading that. We have it there, and we have it there with a set of books that are meant to disorient rather than to orient.So one of the difficulties with reading great books with more or less random selections of adults is that people feel uncertain, out of place. And they bring expertise, real or fake, to the table, which makes it very difficult to have a conversation. It's usually fake expertise, for what it's worth.OLIVER: Give us an example of what you mean by fake expertise.HITZ: Well, so someone will have—we'll be, say, reading Hamlet. Someone will have taken a class on Shakespeare in college, and they'll say, “Actually, we're asking this question. But what I learned, my professor told me, is that Hamlet actually symbolizes—he has an Oedipus complex and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then this is what this means, and this is what that means.” And then your conversation's over, because you need to focus just on the text that's shared between the—OLIVER: It's not a crossword puzzle.HITZ: Exactly. It's not a crossword puzzle, and it's not something where—or the other—people often, again, they feel a bit on their back feet. So they'll google a bunch of stuff about the author, and they'll start tossing out random facts about the book or about the author, about the context. And again, you don't get really into the meat of the book that way.So, Gulliver's Travels is there to help us think about ways in which we might not be expert in things we're expert. Ways in which we might think we understand something and not understand it. And ways in which people who, with every appearance of seriousness and scientific principle, can just say unbelievably stupid things.So it's a very, very good book for that, where in that sense, it's I think very good for any liberal education program. It's liberating that way. One of the things we need to be liberated from is false expertise.OLIVER: You're talking really about these secondhand opinions that you haven't interrogated and come to understand yourself.HITZ: Exactly. Exactly, exactly, exactly.OLIVER: This is what Mill says. Everything is new to someone, and the real genius is that you find it out.HITZ: Exactly.OLIVER: You don't get taught it. Yes, yes.HITZ: Exactly, exactly. So real learning is things you find for yourself. Anyway, that's what I like it with. As for pairing it, yes, I think it would just depend on what you were—I don't have a clear thought about that. I think it'd be good to pair it with Galileo's Starry Messenger and preface to Hooke's Micrographia.But you could also pair it with Emma. Be quite good, actually, because Emma is also about someone who really doesn't know what they're doing and has no idea. Thinks they know what's going on; they really have no idea what's going on.OLIVER: Yes. Hamlet as well, in fact.HITZ: I guess so. Does he not know what's going on?OLIVER: Who's diverting now? [laughter] Well, there's an interesting question, isn't there, about whether Hamlet has legitimate doubts. So he says, “This ghost could be a demon. I should be careful. I don't know what I'm doing. I'm going to pretend to be mad. I'm going to find out.” Or whether he just doesn't want to see the truth in front of him, and he quote-unquote “delays” because of that. I don't know if you have a view.HITZ: I don't think he's deluded. I think the problem is something different, but I haven't thought enough about it recently to know what his volitional obstacle is. But I don't think he's deluded. I think he sees what's going on, but there's something about acting that doesn't work for him.OLIVER: An internal—HITZ: Something internal. Something internal. In a way, I find the play very hard. I don't know what, for instance, what does that obstacle have to do with Ophelia? What's going on with that? Anyway, he's very mysterious, but I don't—yes, that'd be my sense, is that he's not—OLIVER: Do you buy this idea that he's a nihilist?HITZ: No, although he's definitely faced with something like nihilism. He has to look at it. And of course, the play does end with everyone dead, [laughs] so it's not obvious that he's wrong.Sympathy for GulliverOLIVER: This question hangs over Gulliver as well. Is the problem by the end that he's basically become a nihilist? His response to the Yahoos is to deny meaning, deny the possibility of meaning, to shut himself away.HITZ: He is a true misanthrope. He hates human beings and refuses to interact with them and in that sense, in some way, removes himself from any further mistakes. In another way, the mistake that he's in is so massive that that hardly seems like a consolation. But yes, he's definitely stuck, and he's stuck in a place where who he is—because he's a human being. We have to remember that.So he's in a place of total self-hatred and the hatred of his neighbor, what you'd call from the Christian perspective a total loss of charity. Is that nihilist? I don't know, but it's definitely bad. It's not a good state to be in. Maybe I don't know what you mean by nihilism exactly.OLIVER: Are we supposed to disapprove of him at the end or sympathize with him?HITZ: Disapprove, I think.OLIVER: Yes? You don't feel sorry for him?HITZ: I do a bit.OLIVER: But not much.HITZ: Well, should I?OLIVER: I have come to believe—yes, this is what I've come to feel in subsequent readings, is that Gulliver, as you say, is very mistaken. He thinks he understands things that he does not understand. He has the sort of pretense of rationality, but he lacks any sort of meta rationality to see what his limits are.And he becomes, therefore—he doesn't advocate genocide, and he doesn't take any pleasure in using Yahoo skin, but he's just completely null to it. There's a sort of void there where human feeling ought to be. And it's tragic for him. It's a tragic ending that he is so isolated. And we can't sympathize with him, as it were, but we can feel sort of awful that he's shriveled into this state rather than judging or blame.I think one of the persistent themes of the book is, as I say, this kind of basic love of fellow creature, the Glumdalclitch or the sorrel. And if you take that from the book, you will wish you could bring Gulliver back.HITZ: Right. What you're saying reminds me that there is an interesting parallel in Plato's dialogues that I hadn't thought of before, Plato's Parmenides, which is perhaps the most difficult Plato's dialogue. So it's a conversation between young Socrates and the philosopher Parmenides. The first third of it is relatively clear, some arguments against what people think of as Plato's theory of forms.Then there's an extensive, insane dialectical process where various theses about the connection between being and oneness are both argued for and then refuted, and argued for and then refuted, pages and pages and pages and pages of it. So this seems to be—it's Parmenides and Zeno who are running Socrates through this ringer.And the person at the very beginning of the dialogue who they have to go find, to tell him the story of how Socrates met Parmenides, used to study philosophy. But now he just trains horses. [laughs] One of my teachers pointed this out to me, and I've never been able to get over it, that he spent this time doing philosophy, and he's like, “You know what? I'm going to work with horses for the rest of my life. If I never hear another human voice, that's fine with me.”So I think that is an interesting parallel. And I think it is not really that uncommon to see people who are totally disillusioned with relating to humans, who then relate to animals instead, like they devote themselves to animals.OLIVER: But on that reading, it might be a disillusionment with philosophical humanity. It might be philosophy that's killed Gulliver's human feeling.HITZ: That's right. Well, I think that's one possibility, one very strong possibility. That's why I think the Houyhnhnms come after the Laputans. Going to the furthest reaches of his intellectual interests just destroys his humanity.But it doesn't seem like exhaustion in the same way that whoever, I can't remember his name, the character who relates the Parmenides, where you just think he must be exhausted from having heard more than one conversation like this. [laughter] And just in the stable with the horses eating oats, I mean, it's just delightful. It's just so peaceful, you know?OLIVER: Bucolic, pastoral, yes.HITZ: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Maybe you're right that we should be more sympathetic to someone in that situation.OLIVER: Well, next time you read it, you can tell me if you change your mind.HITZ: All right. I will tell you if I change my mind.OLIVER: Very good. Zena Hitz, thank you very much.HITZ: Thank you very much, Henry Oliver. This is a public episode. 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Artificial intelligence is no longer a future concept in policing. Agencies are already using AI-assisted tools to analyze digital evidence, identify crime patterns, process body-worn camera footage and accelerate investigations that once took days or weeks to solve. But as adoption spreads, law enforcement leaders are also confronting major questions about transparency, policy, cybersecurity and the risks of overreliance on automation. In this episode of the Policing Matters podcast, host Jim Dudley speaks with Fairfax County Police Major Brendan Hooke about where AI is delivering real operational value, where agencies need guardrails and why human oversight remains critical as policing enters a new technological era. Hooke, commander of Fairfax County Police Department's Cyber and Forensic Division, says AI's biggest impact is helping investigators manage overwhelming volumes of digital evidence. From analyzing jail calls and surveillance video to identifying vehicles through distinctive features beyond license plates, AI tools are helping agencies surface critical leads faster while keeping investigators focused on higher-value work. He also discusses Fairfax County's use of real-time crime center technology, AI-assisted report writing, predictive analytics and live translation tools, while emphasizing that AI should serve as a force multiplier — not a replacement for human judgment, investigative rigor or community trust. About our sponsor This episode of the Policing Matters podcast is sponsored by Oracle. Today's public safety professionals face new and evolving challenges every day. The expectations of the communities you serve have never been higher, and your duties have never been more complex. Oracle recognizes the importance of the work you do, and has set out to make a meaningful difference in how you deliver on your oath to service. Oracle's unified public safety hardware and software suite provides first responders with the advanced tools to boost efficiency and enhance real-time situational awareness, which can help improve issue resolution. To learn more, visit oracle.com.

In this episode of Eat Sleep Wine Repeat, the wine podcast dedicated to wine education, Janina Doyle dives deep into the world of Australian Shiraz with one of the country's most respected wine critics, Huon Hooke, lead reviewer for The Real Review. Together they explore the diversity of Shiraz across Australia's most famous wine regions - from the powerful wines of Barossa Valley to the savoury elegance of Hunter Valley and the peppery character of Grampians. They also discuss the oldest Shiraz vines in the country, how soil and climate influence style, which regions offer the best value today and where the future of Australian Shiraz is heading. If you want to learn about wine, explore different wine grapes (with a few mentions of other varieties along the way, even though this episode focuses on Shiraz) and understand how climate and terroir shape flavour, this episode offers a fascinating journey through one of the world's most iconic varieties. It's also packed with insights for anyone planning wine travel in Australia or wanting to better understand the country's diverse wine landscape. Whether you love bold, plush Shiraz or cooler-climate, spice-driven expressions, this episode is a perfect introduction to the remarkable range of Australian Shiraz. Shownotes 02:44 – What makes Australian Shiraz so distinctive and why it remains one of the country's defining grape varieties. 04:18 – Huon Hooke shares how he first became interested in wine and how his career in wine reviewing began. 05:17 – The oldest producing Shiraz vineyards in Australia (Langmeil Vineyard) and what makes these historic vines so remarkable. 07:49 – The most expensive Australian Shiraz currently on release (Henske Hill of Grace) and the experience behind ultra-premium wines. 08:28 – A discussion about Torbreck, one of the most famous producers of Barossa Valley Shiraz. 09:41 – The oldest vintage of Australian Shiraz Huon has personally tasted and how Shiraz evolves over decades. 10:55 – Introducing the core theme of the episode: exploring Shiraz across Australia's different wine regions. 13:45 – Which Australian Shiraz region may currently be the most underrated. 15:39 – Which regions may deliver the best value for money when buying Shiraz. 17:20 – If opening a bottle for a special occasion, which style or region Huon Hooke would personally choose. 18:55 – A closer look at Barossa Valley Shiraz and its signature bold fruit and rich structure. 21:12 – Comparing Eden Valley Shiraz and Barossa Valley Shiraz and how cooler conditions influence Shiraz style. 25:11 – How soil composition and geology shape the flavour and texture of Shiraz. 27:33 – Understanding the intensity of Shiraz and how different regions express power differently. 28:49 – Where Heathcote sits geographically within Victoria and its growing reputation for Shiraz. 30:49 – The role of Shiraz in Australian wine statistics and production. 33:51 – How Clare Valley Shiraz fits into the broader Australian Shiraz conversation. 36:00 – Grampians Shiraz and its distinctive spice-driven style and how it has evolved. 37:48 – The Canberra District and the effect of altitude and climate on Shiraz. 39:05 – The best wine regions to visit from Sydney for a weekend wine trip. 41:30 – Other emerging or lesser-known regions that deserve attention for Shiraz. 43:13 – The future of Australian Shiraz: trends in winemaking, blending and oak usage. 46:14 – How Huon Hooke's wine reviewing career has evolved over the last two decades and how the Australian wine scene has changed. 49:01 – What wine lovers can find on The Real Review, including top wine lists and best-value bottles. 50:36 – Why Shiraz remains such a joyful and versatile grape variety and why we should all be drinking more of it. 53:56 – Next week: Janina heads to Sicily to explore Cerasuolo di Vittoria DOCG.   Wineries Suggested for a comparison tasting Torbreck Shiraz (Barossa Valley) Mount Langi Ghiran Shiraz (Grampians) Tyrrell's Shiraz (Hunter Valley)

What a pleasure it was to talk to Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, about the great man himself, who was born four hundred years ago this month. Aubrey is best know for his splendid Brief Lives but he preserved a huge amount of knowledge which historians still rely on. There are many things we only know because of Aubrey—things about people Hobbes and Hooke, Stonehenge, architectural history. We also talked about Janet Malcom, the genre of biography, and modern fiction.HENRY OLIVER: Today I'm talking to Ruth Scurr. Ruth is a fellow of Gonville and Caius College in the University of Cambridge, where she specializes in the history of political thought. But more importantly, she is the biographer of John Aubrey, one of my favorite writers, who is celebrating 400 years of his birth this year. Ruth, hello.RUTH SCURR: Hi, Henry.OLIVER: Can you begin by giving us a brief life of John Aubrey?SCURR: So born in 1626, 17th-century antiquarian, collector, early fellow at the Royal Society. Well connected to scientific and the literary circles of his day. Someone who sees himself more as a whetstone: a person who could help sharpen other people's ideas. As a recorder, someone who treasured the details, the minutiae of the lives he encountered, and pass those details on to posterity.He's nonjudgmental, witty, kind, inventive. Very, very sociable. Very good friend. But he's hopeless at self-advancement. Begins his life as a gentleman, but he inherits debts from his father and he can never really achieve financial stability.Never marries, ends up homeless and worried about being arrested for his debts. And he has to sell his precious collection of books periodically through his life to raise some much-needed cash, but he keeps his manuscripts safe. And he does this at the end of his life by putting them into the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, afterwards known as the Bodleian, and where they still are today.OLIVER: So how many manuscripts did he save for us?SCURR: Of his own manuscripts or other people's manuscripts?OLIVER: Other people's. Because he was collecting all sorts of precious things.SCURR: Oh, absolutely. He was the person who, when someone died, would go round if he could to their house and ask what was happening about the manuscripts. He's particularly concerned, obviously, with his friends. So he had a close relationship with Robert Hooke and he wanted to make sure that Hooke's many inventions and scientific contributions were recorded.And he has this wonderful line in the life of Hooke where he says, “It's so hard to get people to do right by themselves.” And in his childhood, he had seen the fallout from the dissolution of the monasteries. He'd become very troubled by the habit of using manuscript pages which had been displaced in the dissolution. He saw them being used in schools to cover textbooks. He saw them being used to—or he heard about them at least being used—to wrap up gloves or to create stoppers in bottles. And this really troubled him from, from a very early age.And I think he has another beautiful line where he says after the dissolution of the monasteries, whereas these manuscripts had been kept safe, they flew around like butterflies. And he wanted to catch them and preserve them and to stop people letting the papers and the precious manuscripts of their relatives do the same. So he was very instrumental in rescuing manuscripts, other people's manuscripts. And then fortunately with his own, he knew Ashmole and they had the shared astrology interest.Ashmole was a very different sort of person who basically said to Oxford, look, I'll give you my collections, but there has to be a museum for them. And luckily Aubrey was able to use that museum as a safe place for his own manuscripts.OLIVER: So we know things about Robert Hooke and Thomas Hobbes and all these other luminaries of the 17th century, thanks to Aubrey. What else do we know, thanks to him?SCURR: We know what Stonehenge looked like in his day because he was a very good draftsman. He drew pictures of Stonehenge. He'd grown up in Wiltshire, he'd known those stones from childhood. He understood that Avebury nearby was a comparable monument, and he took Charles II to see it, and persuaded the king to get the locals to stop breaking up the stones, to reuse the stones, which was the practice.He also made drawings of windows because he was possibly the first person as a historian of architecture to realize that you could date buildings by the style of their windows. So we have those drawings. He was also interested in the history of costume. He did a survey of Surrey, of Wiltshire.So these are all sort of focuses in his manuscripts and people who've used them come to really appreciate how pioneering Aubrey was. But of course he doesn't finish them. He doesn't publish those manuscripts. So it's very easy really to overlook the innovation and the contribution and the wonderful imagination that he had.OLIVER: You mean if he'd published a book, he would have a much bigger reputation?SCURR: Well, I think there's two things. Yes, but in a sense, you know, the Brief Lives have been published after his death in various forms. But I think one of the most engaging things about Aubrey is that he's a modest and self-effacing person. And I already mentioned the idea he had of himself as a whetstone to other people's talents.There aren't that many people—certainly not in my life, maybe there are in yours—but who would effortlessly describe themselves as a whetstone to other people's talents. Most people want to be at the center. They're happy to have clever and literary friends, but they want a place there at the table as well.And Aubrey really was very, very invested in helping other people to do right by themselves, as he said about Hooke. And he very movingly—this is one of the inspirations really for my book that I wrote about him—he spent all that time collating the information about other people's lives. And for his own life, he puts down a few lines, a couple of facts and everything.He says, well, this could be used as the binding of a book. You know, it's sort of waste paper really. So he doesn't write his own life. Other people's lives he's going to convey to posterity. He doesn't see his own life as really being at that level of needing the attention that he gave, for example, to Milton or to Harvey or Hobbes, as you mentioned.OLIVER: He's born the year after Charles I comes to the throne. So he obviously lives through a fairly terrible period of history and very tumultuous, changeable in lots of different ways. The new world, the new learning, new religion, new politics, everything is changing. And he's obsessed with the old ways. How did these historical events—is he reacting against his time? Is he just born in a lucky time in a way?SCURR: So he was a student in Oxford during the Civil War. And you are right. The upheaval is very disturbing for his generation. It means he gets called back from Oxford by his father because it's dangerous to be there. And he's really, really upset by that because, it's like us, when we were students or our students today. You finally get away from your family and there you are in this place with all these exciting peers and access to books that you've never had before or at least to that extent, libraries, et cetera.And suddenly there's a war on and you've got to go home. So there's that disturbance. Then there is the fact that actually he was close to Hobbes. Hobbes actually was a Malmesbury man, so Wiltshire, very near Aubrey. And had come back to visit the school where Hobbes had been, which was where Aubrey was at school. And so they had met in Aubrey's childhood, and then he would've been aware of Hobbes having to go into exile. And then Hobbes coming back, of course. And that's a very important time in his life.And it's not an accident that Hobbes asks Aubrey to write his life because Hobbes knows how careful Aubrey is. And he knows that Aubrey has information that he can convey in the life. So that is really the first life that he writes. And it's different from the others. There's a different sort of origin. And it's after he's done that, that he starts to think, well, actually, you know, I can think of at least 50, 55 other people's lives. And now I've got my hand in, I might start on those as well.So in that period of upheaval there are wonderful stories. Maybe we'll look at some of the Brief Lives, but there's this amazing story that he captures in the life of William Harvey, which is a description of Harvey having been at the battlefield in Edgehill and recording one of the people who had been fighting and wounded, surviving by having the good sense to pull a dead body on top of himself, to keep himself warm on the battlefield. Things like that, which make the war very much alive. This is brutal, this civil war. It's a long time ago and we think we passed over it, but the really brutal reality of war is captured in the Brief Lives through the anecdotes and the stories of that generation that Aubrey preserves.OLIVER: How English is he?SCURR: Well, as opposed to what?OLIVER: Welsh.SCURR: Okay. Well he goes to Wales often and is very interested in Wales. I think he sees himself as English. I think he's very invested in English customs and stories and people. He's not nationalistic in any sense like that. What he's interested in is the inherited ways of living.And he's very interested in language and different dialects. That's one of the other things; he starts to collect different words. He was very aware of the Cornish dialect, for example. So I'd say it's a very decentered England that's rooted in customs, traditions, inherited stories.And there's a big place there for both the future and the past. Huge excitement about The Royal Society, English science, what can be achieved through the sharing of knowledge. But again, Aubrey's not an insular person in that respect. So, he wished he could go on the Grand Tour when he was a student. He would really have loved to have done that. It's one of the things that he actually talked to Harvey about, going and traveling as his contemporaries, for example, John Evelyn did.But Aubrey actually says—this is very typical of Aubrey—that his mother persuaded him out of it. His mother didn't want him going off on the Grand Tour. She was afraid for him. And he regretted it later in life. But it's so typical of Aubrey that he would pay attention to his mother and her anxieties.OLIVER: This interest in the present and the past—so he loves all the history, but he's in the Royal Society. One thing I like in your book is the way he talks about, oh, my grandfather still dresses in the old ways, like he's an Elizabethan, but at the same time he's doing a very sort of Baconian project. He's influenced by Bacon. Is Aubrey a sort of paradox? Does this make sense in a way?SCURR: Only in so far as lots of other people are as well. I was just looking at the Harvey life, and there's a story there about how when Harvey was a student he was meant to be setting sail with some friends. And he's stopped and told, “No, you can't get on this boat. You have to wait.” And he says, “Well, what have I done wrong? Why can't I get on this boat?” He said, “No, honestly, we need to have a word with you. You are not going on the boat.” And then the boat sinks, everyone dies. And this is apparently because the guy who stopped him had a dream that he needed to stop Harvey going. Harvey told Aubrey that story.Harvey also is—as Aubrey sort of slightly inaccurately puts it, is the inventor of the circulation of the blood. And you think, well, that's going a little bit far, perhaps not actually the inventor, but certainly the first person to discover, to understand about circulating blood.So there's another example of someone's life includes, I wouldn't be alive unless somebody had had this premonition and dream that I was about to die. Which is from a completely different world, from the rational, scientific understanding of the body or the other scientific advances that are going on at the time.OLIVER: And Aubrey's happy to just sort of coexist with both of those because of his interest in astrology?SCURR: And not just astrology. He's very interested in astrology and nativities, as he called it. In some of the Brief Lives, you see the sort of recording of the information that would be needed to cast an astrological shape for the life.But he is also interested in the fact that people believe in fairies and ghosts. He doesn't look down on those beliefs. Nor does he say that he necessarily believes in the presence of fairies or the interventions of the supernatural. But he's got a very open mind in relation to that. And certainly being simultaneously interested in early astronomy and astrology together is, to us, very striking. But then I think it was much more normal.OLIVER: Why do you think he resisted ordination?SCURR: Because he said the cassock stinks. He considered ordination several times because he knew it would be a living, it would be a way of being able to have some income, probably not very onerous duties. Some of his friends say to him, “Come on, Aubrey, it really won't be that much work. You'll just get a curate who'll do it all, and you'll get the living, and then you won't have to be worrying all the time about your paycheck. You haven't got a paycheck. It would be a living coming to you.”And on one occasion, one of the reasons he gives for not doing that is he thinks well, what if there's another religious upheaval and I have to change sides again? What if Roman Catholicism comes back and I ended up on the wrong side of it?And, again, would it really have been that difficult to go with the flow? But I think, in his own way, he had found his way of living, which was intensely sociable. And perhaps he didn't want that constraint of being a member of the clergy around him.OLIVER: Do you think he was a nonbeliever?SCURR: Well. I don't know the answer to that. I don't think so at all. I think he probably was a straightforward Christian believer. I think perhaps he'd seen enough of the religious conflicts and wars to be afraid of fanaticism on both sides. And that would fit certainly with his relationship with Hobbes.I don't have any reason to think he's an atheist. He's got a beautiful way of writing about death and there's this wonderful line he has when he says, “God bless you and me in our in and out world.” So the fact that we refer to his works as the Brief Lives because they're short, but everybody's life is brief.And even those who live, as he did, into his 70s, it feels brief. And there's these very moving descriptions of him at funerals. I was thinking about this the other day because he often records where someone's buried. And I recently wrote my first entry for the Dictionary of National Biography. I did the one for Hilary Mantel, which was a great honor and extremely interesting.And when I came back to the Brief Lives, I thought, gosh, I wish I'd put at the end of that DNB entry where she's actually buried, that would've made sense to do that. And I didn't do it because the DNB is quite formalized; they've got their formula and you need to stick to it.But maybe I'll add it in. Because it seems to me very moving to record where people are actually buried. That would fit I think with her religious sensibility, with a regard for the afterlife, and with the rites of passage at the end of life.OLIVER: What is it that makes Aubrey such a good biographer?SCURR: So I think the modesty that is in his spirit, the noticing, the minutiae that he both notices and values and his wit. He has a sensitivity to these funny and revealing quirky stories about the people that he knows. Or he finds them in the stories he's told by people who did know them.There's an eyewitness account aspect to it as well. Or at least it's an oral history. “I was told this by . . .” He's extremely precise. He'll try to assemble the facts so far as he can, and then he'll tell you what people's close friends said about them, and he will do so very, very carefully so that you know this is a story that he's been told that he's passing on.And then he doesn't pass moral judgment. He doesn't adjudicate. And finally, he thinks of himself as doing all of this for posterity and that posterity, i.e. us or the people who come after us, will find things there and he's not going to tell them what to find. He's not going to shape the life and say, this is what you should think about it.He will give you the raw materials, he'll give you the stories, he'll give you a flavor of the details of the life, and then posterity can look there and can see, for example, the disagreements between Hobbes and Isaac Newton. There are people who've written lives of Hooke and Newton. And there are people who've written lives and you can be team Newton or team Hooke. Interestingly, Aubrey is team Hooke. He doesn't write a life of Newton. And he wants, as I said, to do well by Hooke. But his way of doing that isn't to say Mr.Hooke was fantastic and Newton robbed him of lots of his ideas. He says, let me show you, let me assemble and make a catalog, if I can, of all these hundreds of contributions that Hooke made.OLIVER: When did you discover Aubrey?SCURR: So I discovered Aubrey because I was reviewing for the LRB, The Biographer's Tale, and I had come across a really interesting—and it's still in the introduction to my book—a really interesting reflection on the difference between Aubrey and Lytton Strachey, a reflection made by Anthony Powell, and I had quoted it or alluded to it in my review. And I had gone and started to read Aubrey as a result of that. So I was led to it through reviewing, via Anthony Powell, and then into the Brief Lives.But then another very strange thing happened, which is I met for the very first time, Janet Malcolm, who is someone who became very important in my life. And because she knew or had been told that I'd written this review, she read the review before we met. And she said to me, she said, “Ruth, I read your review”—and I doubt Janet Malcolm was a massive fan of A.S. Byatt, to be absolutely honest. We never really discussed that further, but she said, “I read your review and I was really interested in this Aubrey. I was so interested in what you quoted about Aubrey and the difference between his biographical approach and Lytton Strachey.”And then it sort of stuck in my mind and suddenly as I was coming toward the end of my first book, which was a totally different book on Robespierre and the French Revolution, I just knew I wanted to write about Aubrey. And I think at the time my then-husband really thought I'd gone mad actually, because you're not supposed to do that, are you?I mean, you're supposed to stick in your period and certainly build on it. So, you know, a book on Marra or even Napoleon would've been okay, that would've made sense. But to circle back to the 17th century and write about Aubrey seemed extremely eccentric.OLIVER: Well, what was Janet Malcolm like?SCURR: Oh, Janet was absolutely wonderful. She has this reputation of being sort of terrifying. And, of course, I was extremely interested in her forensic examination of biography which we had very interesting conversations about. She was a deeply kind person, extremely nurturing of younger writers, and extremely funny as well.That's the other thing that you don't associate with her sometimes from this sort of public image of a very austere interviewer, The Journalist and the Murderer, In the Freud Archives, et cetera. Actually, she was a really warm and extremely witty person.OLIVER: A lot of historians don't think biography is real history. Why do you take biography seriously?SCURR: Well, Michael Holroyd writes Works on Paper—and I love Michael Holroyd so much. And he has this wonderful line—I won't remember it exactly—but it's about biography being the b*****d offspring of history and the novel, and both are ashamed of it.And I think some of those distinctions actually have broken down. I know lots of historians who are very interested in biographical writing. I think it depends. There are certain historical schools that maybe are not so interested in lives.And to be fair, the history of ideas is—which I belong to, and in a sense I'm a rebel from—is one of those. I remember there coming a point where I had spent so much time thinking about the constitutional ideas for the representative republic in the middle of the French Revolution, that actually the French Revolution could have been happening on Mars for all it mattered about the actual sequence of events. What mattered was the structure of the ideas.And it's difficult because the school I belong to in Cambridge wants to put the ideas into context all the time. But again, by context you don't really mean people's lives; more the discourses and the conversations and the ideas of the time that are the landscape, the intellectual landscape, if you like.So I rebelled at a certain point and I was like, well, you know, I'm actually going to go through the revolution day by day because that period is short. And I think it really matters, the lived experience there. I think many, many history books quote Aubrey with enormous respect and say, “as Aubrey says,” or, “according to Aubrey,” and pull those details forwards.I suppose some history is quite instrumental in its use of biography, so it wants to draw the reader in with a few anecdotes and a little bit of what does somebody wear on their head? And who was their first love, that kind of thing. But it's perhaps not very engaged with the real work of trying to capture the shape or the feel of a life.OLIVER: And of a temperament, right? I think one thing biography gives us is that sense that a lot of these big decisions or events in history are quite temperamental. As well as being based in ideas and events.SCURR: Oh, yeah. Absolutely.OLIVER: Your life of Aubrey, at one point you tried to write as a novel.SCURR: Yeah. I had to stop that quite fast.OLIVER: Why?SCURR: Because Aubrey is too important. I didn't want to make up things for him. As someone who's come right up to that line of the history and the novel, I do think it's very clear to be on one side or the other. And again, going back to Hilary Mantel, she wrote those wonderful Reith Lectures on historical fiction.And, like her, I think that it's not about ignoring the facts or embellishing the facts. It is about the gaps. It's about imagining what isn't in the record and should have been, and trying to reconstruct that inside the novel. But at the time, I felt that the gaps with Aubrey didn't actually matter that much.There was so much there that I could pull together to give a sense of him and his sensibility. Now actually, scholars in this field will all be very, very keen to advance our knowledge of those gaps. And that's wonderful. You know, what exactly was Aubrey doing when he visited France? You know, at the time I wrote my book that seemed very unclear.I think my colleague in Oxford, Kate Bennett, knows that now and will write her own biography. And she will fill in many of these gaps that I sort of happily included in the form that I'd found for his life because giving him that first person voice, I was able to focus on the evidence that I thought had been very underused at that point.OLIVER: Now Kate Bennett did a wonderful edition of the Brief Lives with lots of excellent footnotes and investigations. And you wrote that it gave us a new understanding of Aubrey.SCURR: Absolutely. And of the lives themselves. And Kate and I got to know each other and became friends while we were both writing our books. And people we knew before we met were very keen to sort of set us against each other. So they would wind us up. I would meet someone and they'd say, “Ruth, there you are. You've written a book about the French Revolution and now you are going to write a book about Aubrey. But don't you know there is a scholar in Oxford who spent her entire academic life working on Aubrey?” And it built up a picture of fear that you shouldn't trespass on somebody else's ground.And then people would do a sort of reverse thing to her that they would say, “Oh, Kate, gosh, you've been working a long time on Aubrey and where is your Clarendon edition after all? And did you know there's somebody in Cambridge who's going to write this popular book about Aubrey?”Anyway, finally we met at a conference and we really actually just liked each other and we decided it's fine. I was doing my thing. She's doing something very different. And we became friends, and I see that as a triumph over a sort of more traditional, maybe even dare I say, male and territorial approach to academic life and to knowledge in general actually.OLIVER: Yeah. Because the two books are great complements to each other. They're not rivalrous in that sense.SCURR: Absolutely not. Kate's book, it's not just an addition. It's as much as you can ever do. It's a reconstruction of the manuscript as Aubrey left it and intended it with all the gaps and the notes to himself to fill this in. And his changes of mind and his deletions and all of that. And so it's an astonishing thing. Because it's not just a copy of it. It takes you in, it helps you understand what he was intending with those collections, as you called them, my pretty collections.And so that edition that she had been working on for a very long time came out in 2015, the same year as my book came out. And it felt like an amazing year for Aubrey. And now, we'll be celebrating the 400th anniversary of his birth. But that year, 2015, was a very special, obviously for us, but I think for Aubrey more broadly.OLIVER: How much of an influence has Aubrey had on English biography?SCURR: As we know, there's the huge influence in terms of “Aubrey says.” Open any book on the 17th century, and it will be “Aubrey says,” “according to Aubrey,” et cetera. So a huge influence in that respect. With regard to the actual form, I think it's very, very pervasive and important, and we have to look at it very carefully.I mentioned earlier the very important difference between what Aubrey does and what Lytton Strachey did. There are some similarities in so far as Strachey will go for the vivid detail. He give you these powerful anecdotes. But actually he spins them as well.And that's what Anthony Powell so brilliantly showed. And the example was of Francis Bacon, the life of Francis Bacon who Aubrey has a description of Bacon right at the end of his life, the circumstances leading up to Bacon's death where he is on Highgate Hill and he decides to conduct an experiment to see if snow will preserve a chicken or a hen as well as salt. So he is stuffing this carcass of the hen with snow. Catches a cold, ends up having to stay with a friend, sleeps in a bed that hasn't been aired for a long time, and dies. And that's the end of Lord Bacon.So Aubrey gives us all this, and then along comes Lytton Strachey. And he takes it, and he says an old man disgraced, shattered, alone on Highgate Hill, stuffing a dead foul with snow, which makes it sound like he's lost his mind at the end of his life. And then Anthony Powell examined that and he said, look, the story of stuffing the hen with snow is Aubrey's.Bacon was certainly an old man at the time of the incident. He was disgraced. He may have been shattered. No doubt at times he was alone. But Aubrey's story of stuffing the foul on Highgate Hill shows Bacon accompanied by the king's physician, conducting a serious experiment to test the preservative properties of snow and, on becoming indisposed, finding accommodation in the house of the Earl of Arundel.And so you take that same story and, as Anthony Powell says, you combine the story, the fragment preserved by Aubrey with some epithets, and you convey an oblique point. It's a biographical method for actually building up a picture of the person. And it really matters what you do with those fragments.So I think the fact that Aubrey is pretty pure about this, he gives you the fragments and another biographer might come along and think, okay, what's going on here with Venetia Stanley and dying in her bed after drinking Viper wine? Let's build up a story about that. And there was a rumor at the time that her husband had murdered her, et cetera. Aubrey doesn't comment. He just gives you the fragment. And I think afterwards, people have not only used the fragments in their own work, but they've also developed a technique of working up those fragments into whatever picture you decide as a biographer you are going to draw.OLIVER: Now as well as a historian, you are a literary critic. You review novels. You are a Hilary Mantel admirer. Who else among the modern fiction writers do you admire?SCURR: Amongst the modern fiction writers? I'm getting quite old, Henry. Lots of my people are dead now. Alice Monroe is someone I'm extremely interested in. Hilary Manel, obviously, Beryl Bainbridge, Penelope Fitzgerald. And I love the fact Penelope Fitzgerald was a biographer simultaneously with becoming a novelist.And I was thinking back to this actually, that Charlotte Mew and Her Friends—that's the title. And then the Anthony Powell is John Aubrey and His Friends. And I was thinking, is there something about these people who have a lot of friends and the biographical genre? It's interesting.In terms of younger people writing, I just read a wonderful short story by Gwendoline Riley in the latest Paris Review. “A–Z” it's called—very disturbing. Very, very good story. And Gwendoline has a novel coming out later this year, which I shall read with enormous interest. It's going to be called Palm House. I absolutely revered George Saunders, although I haven't yet read Vigil. I'm only on Substack for George Saunders and you Henry. That's it, basically.OLIVER: That shows very good taste.SCURR: Very good taste. Yeah. And a couple of others. My friend Danielle Allen's The Renovator, I also subscribe to, but very few. But George Saunders wrote a wonderful post on his Substack about maybe a year and a half, maybe more even ago, about how he found the solution to the beginning of Lincoln in the Bardo. And he wanted to find a way to tell the story of the death of Lincoln's son. It's so typical of him—and I love this—he said he didn't want the ghosts. He knew it was going to be narrated by the ghosts in the morgue. And he couldn't have them coming home one evening saying, “Oh, you know, I just popped over the wall and had a look in through the White House window. And guess what I saw?” So how was he going to get the voices in?And then he said he'd got these extracts from the letters and from the literature that he needed. And he ended up putting them all on the floor and thinking, what order shall I put them in? And that reminded me of when I was struggling to find a way to write about Aubrey. I suddenly had the idea that I could just put them as diary entries without comment.I would sort of curate these entries and things like that. So, that was a very interesting moment for me about sort of the construction and the choices that go in both to writing a novel and to writing, in my case, a sort of experimental biography.OLIVER: So Hilary Mantel, Lincoln in the Bardo, Penelope Fitzgerald, Beryl Bainbridge—there's a lot of historical fiction here. This is the genre you most enjoy. It's been a sort of golden age for historical fiction.SCURR: But those people aren't just historical fiction writers. It's very important. They have all written historical fiction, but actually they write other novels as well. It doesn't matter the order in their careers, they go in and out of it. So I would say that actually it's those people as writers and sensibilities that attract me.Anita Brookner is another example. I love Anita Brookner's novels. I also love her book on David, the revolutionary painter, that she wrote—Jacques-Louis David—that's a fantastic book. So there's a sense in which I see them as writers and the genre of historical fiction, you are right, it does cut across, but I don't think that's what I'm following. I think I'm following what I find on the page from a particular sensibility and of course a command of language, which is in all of those cases, absolutely extraordinary.OLIVER: Because they're all quite innovative as historical novelists as well. And it's not the main part of what is recognized as their achievement in a way.SCURR: No, no.OLIVER: It's been quietly a second great period of the historical novel. It seems crazy to say Hilary Mantel is our Walter Scott, but that is quite high praise.SCURR: So I think you deal much more definitely than I do with these sort of epoch-defining ideas. I think I'm just more intermittently focused on particular things that I like. I used to do an enormous amount of reviewing. I've had to stop it because—talk about being the whetstone.I was constantly reviewing when I was in my 30s and much of my 40s actually. And I don't regret it in the least. And one of the reasons I don't regret it, especially with novels, was because I would never have read all those novels if I hadn't been reviewing them.And even some of the nonfiction, I wouldn't. But here's an example: Because I'd been reviewing so much, I ended up quite early 2007, becoming a Booker judge. And part of that process is that anyone who's been on the list before they automatically get entered by the publisher—McEwen and Barnes, et cetera. Fine.And then the publisher can put forward two books they choose and they can be anything. And then they assemble a list of so-called call-ins. And those are the books where the publisher says, “Oh, please, please call this in. I mean, we didn't make it one of our two, but we think it's absolutely amazing and you must read it.” And you think, well, if it's so amazing, what were you doing not making it one of your two. But anyway, whatever, we call it in. And on that call-in list there was actually, Anne Enright's novel, The Gathering, and that ended up winning the year I was a judge.And I knew Anne Enright's writing because I had reviewed several of her earlier books, especially one called What Are You Like?, which is quite obscure. It's not the book people think of when they think about Anne Enright. But I knew because I'd done all that time in the reviewing trenches, as it were, how extraordinary Anne Enright is as a writer. And we were able to say, well, absolutely go ahead and call this in. And then sure enough it won.OLIVER: What about biography? Modern biography? You like Michael Holroyd?SCURR: Well, we've already talked about Janet Malcolm. She's a sort of anti-biographer in some respect, sort of subversive of the entire genre. I very much like and respect Antonia Fraser's historical biographies and especially her one of Marie Antoinette which, again, came out very close to when my Robespierre book came out. And it's like seeing the other side of the story and that was absolutely extraordinary.And one of the biographies I go back to over and over again I'm extremely interested in Virginia Woolf. You are obviously a fan with The Common Reader. I was looking at it, preparing for this, that she's got this absolutely hilarious short biography of John Evelyn, and it is called Rambling Round Evelyn. Do you know it?OLIVER: Yes.SCURR: It's so beautifully constructed. It's got the butterflies landing on the dahlias pretty much throughout the actual text of the short biography. But then it's got this brilliant bit where she sort of makes fun of John Evelyn. And she says, the difference between then and now is, if we saw a red admiral, we would admire it, but we wouldn't—and this is very mean of her—we wouldn't rush into the kitchen and get a kitchen knife in order to dissect the red admiral's head. Right? It's so ridiculous and it so makes fun of Evelyn.I was listening to the podcast you made with Hermione Lee. And Hermione was saying that she thought what made Woolf such a good critic was that she was very empathetic. But I also think she's capable of that kind of sharp, wicked distance as well, where she goes, I see you, John Evelyn, you are so proud of your garden, and you're actually—looked at from my point of view—a bit of an idiot in some respects as well.OLIVER: I like her because she's so judgmental, which is not a very popular thing to say, but she is. She is really capable of saying that, you know, as long as prose will be read, Addison will be read. But on the other hand, he's boring and rambling and not very good in many ways. Absolutely cutting.SCURR: No, totally, totally. Yeah.OLIVER: What about some of the sort of big names: Richard Holmes, Claire Tomalin?SCURR: Yeah. Oh, Claire, absolutely. I mean, goodness, they've been such influences on me, both of them. Absolutely Richard and his Footsteps and then of course, and those other books, The Ratters of Lightning Ridge and then The Age of Wonder. That's so important, so wonderful.Claire, I revere, I loved and still recommend to my students her book on Mary Wollstonecraft. I also, by the way, love Virginia Woolf's essay on Mary Wollstonecraft. I think that's a different sort of thing where Woolf describes Mary Wollstonecraft pursuing her lover like a dolphin. She won't let him go. He thought he'd hooked a minnow. He wasn't expecting a dolphin to come after him. It was Mary Wollstonecraft. So, Claire Tomalin, her Peyps, Hardy, absolutely hugely important books and deeply, deeply humane actually.And that's the other thing, I think biography, by definition, you do get the sharpness of Woolf or Strachey, but I think to put someone else's life at the center of your book, that's a humane act. It's to say, no, I'm going to spend this number years of my life preserving and communicating this other person's life. And that's a very wonderful thing to do.OLIVER: What do you think of the sort of standard criticism of biography, that it's just not accurate enough? So, for example, Austen Scholars will point to various things in the Tomalin biography where she's deleted the facts or said things to make the narrative flow, but it's just not really accurate enough. The novelistic tendency overwhelms the historical one or whatever. You've obviously avoided that with various decisions you made in the Aubrey book, but as a genre.SCURR: I'd never say that. That would be a real hostage to fortune, wouldn't it?OLIVER: Well, you know what I mean?SCURR: And saying, look at, look at this—OLIVER: Page 28.SCURR: —at this piece of nonsense you introduced. Well, accuracy is extremely important. What I think about that is it all contributes to knowledge. If someone comes along and finds a mistake or wants to bring in some other evidence—And actually Kate Bennett, she does this with Aubrey as well. She says that, oh, Aubrey's really got this wrong, or he's gotten in a muddle about that. She's not saying, and therefore let's just chuck it out because it's inaccurate. You need to see this as well as that. So I think of it more as a collaborative relationship about adding to knowledge and if somebody corrects a previous book or previous claim or something, or point something, then that's fine actually.Again, going back to Holroyd, he thought that that biography was an art form constrained by the facts. So he's got a place for art in it. And I know what he means by that. And I think ultimately that's probably why I couldn't write a novel about a biographical subject because of being constrained by the facts. And yet Hilary Mantel has written many historical novels that are absolutely constrained by the facts. It's just what they're doing besides the facts, alongside the facts. So perhaps some people are going to come along and contribute other information and other people will come along and contribute some imaginative answer to the whole. And both are fine. I think we should be liberal broad church here.OLIVER: Is the genre dying?SCURR: Not so far as I'm aware. We are always doing this about genres dying, aren't we? Those things are always dying.OLIVER: People talk about biography dying a lot.SCURR: Well, perhaps they do. I haven't been listening to that. Why do they say it's dying?OLIVER: Because you can't sell these 700-page lives of people.SCURR: We can't sell most books. I mean, if we're going to go buy sales . . .OLIVER: This, yeah. Well, this story in The Times recently as well, that all the nonfiction that sells now is trash and that the serious books aren't there. And the whole civilization's dying routine.SCURR: Well if it is, we just have to carry on doing what we are doing.OLIVER: Yeah. What do you think is going to be the future of biography? Because I think more than a lot of other nonfiction genres, it's so changeable, it's so flexible. If you look at any decade, you see so much variety in structure and form. What do you think is coming next?SCURR: I'm like Aubrey; I think that's going to be for posterity to decide. As long as there are human beings, we will tell stories and we will want to tell stories about ourselves, and we will want to tell stories about the people we have loved and or hated, or the people who we think matter, for whatever reason, in science, in art, in literature. There will always be a need for the story of the human life.I think it will inevitably change enormously in ways that we couldn't possibly imagine. Just as Aubrey knew that he couldn't possibly imagine what posterity was going to make of the information that he had collected, and he didn't think that was something that he should be constrained by. He thought it was about passing it on.OLIVER: And what will Ruth Scurr do next?SCURR: I'll ask her. I think she's supposed to be writing about Rousseau and is very excited about that, but has been massively distracted by the Royal Society of Literature and becoming chair of that. So, I'm trying to pull myself back into my project. And I was very excited actually, because again, when I was looking at The Common Reader I saw Woolf refer to the Montaigne, Pepys, and Rousseau as people who had provided these spectacular portraits of themselves. And I was very excited by that. So I'm going to write a book about Rousseau and his time in England.OLIVER: Very exciting. I look forward to it. Ruth Scurr, author of John Aubrey: My Own Life, thank you very much.SCURR: Thank you, Henry. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Episode: 1538 In which the various centuries show their faces.  Today, we ask what a century looks like.

Episode Description: When the Time Radio malfunctions, Max and Molly accidentally jump to the wrong time and place — landing on a volcanic island moments before the historic Krakatoa eruption! To fix their device, they explore buoyancy, density, and the physics of springs using Hooke's Law. With time literally running out, teamwork and Math become their only way home. Math Concepts: Density and buoyancy; Volume and displaced water; Unit comparison and real-world measurement; Hooke's Law (F = –kx);History/Geography Concepts:  The Krakatoa volcanic eruption (1883); Indonesian geography (Sumatra, Java, Rakata Island); Early scientific observation of sound waves and pressure.

durée : 00:41:49 - Live à Fip - La chanteuse et multi-instrumentiste vient présenter en session live son deuxième album "Hooke's Law". Vous aimez ce podcast ? Pour écouter tous les autres épisodes sans limite, rendez-vous sur Radio France.

Send us a textWine scoring systems have proliferated, leaving many consumers confused about who to trust when choosing their next bottle. We break down the differences between wine shows, critic ratings, classifications, and journalistic approaches to help you navigate the complex world of wine recommendations.• Wine shows use panels of expert judges who taste wines blind, scoring on a 100-point scale• Judges award bronze (85-89), silver (90-94), and gold (95+) medals based on technical merit• The Real Review groups wines by variety for comparative tasting, with critics having freedom to taste non-blind• Halliday Wine Companion uses regional specialists who focus on terroir-specific excellence• Langton's Classification is data-driven, ranking wines based on auction performance and collector demand• Wine writer Max Allen avoids scoring altogether, focusing on storytelling and context• Regional wine shows offer valuable insight into local specialties• Personal preferences should ultimately guide your wine choicesTo find wines you'll truly enjoy, consider which approach aligns with your own preferences and use these systems as helpful guides rather than definitive judgments.Follow us on instagram @winewithmegandmel

On today's music show on Arts24, Jennifer Ben Brahim sits down with Chicago-born, New York-based singer, songwriter, and producer KeiyaA. Known for her gossamer vocals and genre-blending sound – mixing jazz, soul, and electro – KeiyaA made waves with her debut album Forever, Ya Girl, earning critical acclaim and fans like Solange, Jay-Z, and Moses Sumney. Five years later, she returns with her sophomore album Hooke's Law, a deeply personal journey of self-love that serves as a musical diary of one of the most challenging periods of her life.

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Isaac Newton est l'un des noms les plus connus de toute l'histoire des sciences. Mais derrière la légende du savant solitaire et de la fameuse pomme, il y a un homme bien plus complexe. Dans cette vidéo, on remonte au XVIIe siècle pour comprendre son époque, ses obsessions, et la manière dont il a posé les bases de la physique moderne.De ses débuts à Cambridge à son isolement pendant la peste, des expériences sur la lumière et les couleurs jusqu'à l'invention du calcul différentiel, on suit pas à pas le parcours d'un esprit obsédé par l'idée de relier le ciel et la Terre sous les mêmes lois. On explore aussi ses côtés méconnus : sa fascination pour l'alchimie, ses rivalités féroces, et sa quête presque maladive de contrôle et de reconnaissance.De la gravité universelle aux Principia Mathematica, de ses conflits avec Hooke et Leibniz à son rôle à la Royal Mint, Newton n'a pas seulement découvert des lois : il a inventé une manière de faire de la science qui nous accompagne encore aujourd'hui. Et si Einstein a redéfini certains de ses concepts, l'ombre de Newton plane toujours sur tout ce que nous calculons, prévoyons et comprenons de l'univers.

This episode, we're revisiting the recording with Ken Hooke, who also agreed to do a segment for the Falconry Follies series. As many of you now know, per the announcement during this episode, as well as previous announcements, the decision has been made to discontinue the Extras Membership for extra content, so from here on out, the Falconry Follies series will be mixed in as a change of pace from time to time. For those who were members, those previous episodes will remain active via the link that was given and will remain exclusively available to you. I hope you have fun with this new installment in the Follies series before we start getting to more current content next week that was recorded recently with falconers from Kansas! Ken has some more pretty funny stories! Support at buymeacoffee.com/falconrychroniclesSpecial thanks to the organizations and businesses who've kindly helped support the podcast!The Archives of Falconryhttp://www.falconry.orgMarshall Radio Telemetryhttp://www.marshallradio.comMasters of the Skieshttp://www.mastersoftheskies.orgBaba Yaga Craftshttp://www.instagram.com/babayagagoshawkNorth Mountain Goshawkshttp://www.northmountaingoshawks.comNew Mexico Falconers AssociationArizona Falconers Assocationhttp://www.arizonafalconers.comTexas Hawking Associationhttp://www.texashawking.orgNorth American Falconers Associationhttp://www.n-a-f-a.comFalconry Fundhttp://www.falconryfund.orgPursuit Falconry and Conservation Magazinehttp://pursuitfalconry.co.ukThe Specialist Falconhttp://www.thespecialistfalcon.comCape Falconry Clubhttp://www.capefalconry.co.zaEast Coast Falconshttp://www.eastcoastfalcons.comBlackhawk Falconry Dachshundshttps://www.facebook.com/blackhawkdachshunds

Carry your mat • Picture this: A crowded house. People packed in every corner. No room to squeeze in—not even at the door. Then suddenly, the roof starts coming apart. Dust falls. Sunlight breaks through. And a man, paralyzed and helpless, is lowered

Carry your mat• Picture this: A crowded house. Peoplepacked in every corner. No room to squeezein—not even at the door.

Simon Nash is joined by Huon Hooke for a great chat about the 2025 Real Review awards including the Top Wineries list won by @winebyfarr and 8 new awards @therealrvw@thewineshowaustralia

In this episode of ListenABLE, hosts Dylan Alcott and Angus O'Loughlin speak with Peta Hooke, a podcaster and disability advocate living with Cerebral Palsy. As the creator and host of The I Can’t Stand Podcast, Peta brings a practical perspective to disability representation, drawing from her personal experiences and conversations within the disabled community. Peta discusses what it’s like to live independently with a physical disability, the ongoing role of support workers, and the reality of navigating healthcare systems that often lack accessibility. The conversation also covers the complexities of fertility treatment for disabled people, including access to IVF and the ableism that can shape medical experiences. "Unfortunately, I had massive issues, particularly around ableism. And it took 313 days to get approval". Peta shares her thoughts on parenting as a disabled person and why disability is simply one part of her life—not something to be overcome. In addition to her podcast work, Peta is an accessibility consultant and recently launched Eggs, a limited-series podcast focused on fertility and disability. Want to support Peta? Check our the links below! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/petahooke/ The 'I Can't Stand Podcast': https://tr.ee/kcSeq-lNJ4 The 'Egg's Podcast': https://tr.ee/tnkRdoeiOZ Watch the Full Episode with Captions Here: https://youtu.be/J-kRHBrRimGrab our first merch release at our website Session in Progress.https://fromyourpocket.com.au/work/listenable/merch Recorded, edited and produced by Angus' Podcast Company: www.sessioninprogress.com.auSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

After getting a hood from Ken for my Harris's hawk, I thought it would be good to have him on remotely to discuss hoodmaking, his history flying accipiters, longwings, and eagles, and what his falconry has looked like over the years living in Canada. Since this recording, he has since decided to retire from hoodmaking again, so if you haven't been able to get a hood from him, you might still be able to pick one up at mountainstatefalconrysupply.com. Don't sleep on it though, they're great hoods!  Support at buymeacoffee.com/falconrychroniclesSpecial thanks to the organizations and businesses who've kindly helped support the podcast!The Archives of Falconryhttp://www.falconry.orgMarshall Radio Telemetryhttp://www.marshallradio.comMasters of the Skieshttp://www.mastersoftheskies.orgBaba Yaga Craftshttp://www.instagram.com/babayagagoshawkNorth Mountain Goshawkshttp://www.northmountaingoshawks.comNew Mexico Falconers AssociationArizona Falconers Assocationhttp://www.arizonafalconers.comTexas Hawking Associationhttp://www.texashawking.orgNorth American Falconers Associationhttp://www.n-a-f-a.comFalconry Fundhttp://www.falconryfund.orgPursuit Falconry and Conservation Magazinehttp://pursuitfalconry.co.ukThe Specialist Falconhttp://www.thespecialistfalcon.comCape Falconry Clubhttp://www.capefalconry.co.zaEast Coast Falconshttp://www.eastcoastfalcons.comBlackhawk Falconry Dachshundshttps://www.facebook.com/blackhawkdachshunds

Che fine ha fatto il quadro che ritrae Robert Hooke?Per sostenerci: https://associazioneatelier.it/Per sostenere il progetto su Berlino:https://associazioneatelier.it/in10cities/Sound design: Matteo D'Alessandro

En nuestro anterior podcast grabado precisamente el 21 de abril, fecha en la que oficialmente murió el papa Francisco les empezamos a hablar de los constructores de números. No encontramos casual que el papa falleciese exactamente ese dia, ya que no es un día cualquiera. Es el Natalis Romae, el aniversario fundacional de Roma, ciudad que desde hace más de dos mil años ha sido el epicentro del poder político, religioso y simbólico de Occidente. Y precisamente hoy, en esta fecha cargada de ritual y resonancia, muere el Papa Francisco. En plena resurrección de Jesucristo, uno muere y el otro renace. ¿Casualidad? En este podcast, ya sabéis que no creemos en ellas. Hoy, en Buscadores de la Verdad, vamos a descifrar lo que muchos pasarán por alto: la profunda e inquietante importancia del número 8 en la vida, el legado y la muerte del Papa. Francisco fue el primer Papa jesuita, el primero procedente de América, el Papa de la Agenda 2030, de las vacunas, de la simplificación de los rituales. Un Papa atípico. Y, como veremos, un Papa marcado por el 8 desde el principio hasta el final. Nació un 17 de diciembre de 1936. Fallece un 21 de abril de 2025. 88 años y 125 días después. Un doble 8 y un 1+2+5 = 8. El símbolo del infinito. El equilibrio kármico. El reinicio del ciclo. Pero no acaba ahí: convertido en el octavo Papa enterrado en Santa María la Mayor, bajo un escudo papal alterado misteriosamente para exhibir una estrella de ocho puntas, su historia está plagada de estos guiños numéricos que parecen trazados por una mano invisible. En este episodio vamos a hablar de arquitectura oculta, de rituales milenarios, de cómo la elite que gobierna entre bambalinas utiliza los números y los símbolos como herramientas para construir la realidad. Y en este caso, el número 8 aparece como la clave de todo. Porque cuando entiendes el lenguaje oculto de los que mandan, sabes que todo está diseñado. Desde las fechas, hasta los funerales. Desde los escudos hasta los silencios del Vaticano. El 21 de abril, Roma celebra su nacimiento... y el Vaticano entierra a su Papa más simbólico. La era de Francisco se cierra en un ciclo perfecto, sellado con un 8. ¿Qué se abre ahora? ¿Qué nuevo paradigma se está gestando en la sombra? Prácticamente desde el principio de este podcast, en el UTP8 Universo fractal ya tratamos la importancia de los números y como estos crean la realidad que vivimos. Son, como dijimos en el anterior podcast, los ladrillos del universo. Leere unos pasajes de la tesina “Los conjuntos numéricos a través de la historia” de Veronica Valdez: “En el pasado la matemática fue considerada una ciencia relacionada directamente a las cantidades, en relación con las magnitudes (desde la geometria); a los números (desde la aritmética) o a la generalización de los dos (desde el álgebra). Las primeras nociones de número y la acción de contar datan de la prehistoria. La causa que originó el desarrollo de este conocimiento en el hombre primitivo fue su necesidad de proteger sus bienes, la adaptación a los ciclos que la madre naturaleza le imponía le aseguraban su alimentación. El hombre prehistórico plasmó los primeros indicios matemáticos en sus vasijas (dibujos geométricos) y sus primeros sistemas de cálculos se basaron en el uso de los dedos de las manos o la utilización del cuerpo, este método resulta evidente al ver que muchos de los sistemas de numeración son de base 5 o 10.” Fueron los egipcios en el tercer milenio antes de cristo los que desarrollan unas matemáticas más avanzadas llegando a plantear problemas complejos como el calculo de superficies, lo cual era vital para el reparto de la tierra fértil fecundada por las crecidas del Nilo. La tierra se movia y cambiaba ligeramente de aspecto y era imprescindible para que reinase el orden que dicho reparto fuera lo mas ajustado a derecho posible. Luego los romanos mejoraron hasta cierto aspecto el uso de jeroglíficos de los egipcios por simples letras. En ese momento se seguía utilizando todavía el sistema babilónico que consistía en escribir en tablillas de arcilla utilizando un palito en forma de cuña. Una cuña apuntaba hacia abajo y la otro hacia la izquierda. El problema consistia en que era un sistema con solo 60 números, lo cual limitaba mucho el calculo mental. Los babilonios utilizaban, eso si, la forma en que cada dígito tenia un valor disitinto dependiendo de la posición que ocupase. El primer sistema matematico que utilizo al mismo tiempo el principio posicional y el cero fue el sistema de los mayas. “En este sistema 1 kin (sol) representa un día, 20 kines forman un huinal. Como 20 huinales representan 400 días, lo cual es mucho mayor que la duración exacta del año (este sistema fue utilizado para cálculos astronómicos), los mayas llamaron tun a 18 huinales, o 360 días. Excepto por este nivel, el resto del sistema es vigesimal.” “No se tiene conocimiento con exactitud cómo surgió, pero se sabe que fue un sistema de numeración mejorado por los hindúes y los árabes lo llevaron a Europa. De esta forma a las cifras se las llamó árabes debido a su origen, de la misma manera que escribirlas de derecha a izquierda (unidad, decena, centena, etc.) Hacia el año 976 Gerberto Aurillac (futuro Papa) conoce las primeras cifras en España, que ya estaba influenciada por la cultura musulmana, pero su influencia fue limitada. En el siglo XII se conoce las primeras traducciones al latin de las obras de un matemático árabe al- Jwarizmi, de quien se conocen los términos algoritmo y guarismo; de esta forma las cifras árabes comienzan a introducirse en el círculo culto europeo. En el año 1202, Fibonacci publica el "Libro del ábaco" que acopía y amplia las cifras y los procedimientos de cálculo utilizados por los árabes. Durante este siglo se consolidó la aritmética decimal sobre todo en los concerniente a las actividades comerciales. Sin embargo el método árabe y sus ventajas para calcular debieron sortear varios inconvenientes por parte de los calculistas de la época que ante la amenaza de un nuevo método mucho más sencillo, que atentaba supuestamente a su fuente de trabajo, recurrieron a estrategias bajas como hacer correr el rumor que el sistema de cálculo árabe tan sencillo, debía tener algo de magia o un cierto poder demoníaco. Esta acusación fue astutamente utilizada en la época de la Inquisición. Recién a fines del siglo XVI con Montaigne comenzó a abrirse paso nuevamente el sistema de numeración árabe y finalmente se generalizó con la Revolución Francesa. A partir de dicho momento histórico se comenzó a utilizar al 10 como base del sistema métrico decimal.” Con todo este resumen vengo a comentar que el enorme poder de los números estaba en poquísimas manos hasta bien entrado siglo 16 y que para ese entonces muchos de los secretos y la simbología que escondían estos paso a ser solo aprendido en las sectas, en las logias y en las futuras universidades que estaban también creadas por los mismos. LA EDUCACION según Lord Bertrand Russell en su obra "La Perspectiva Científica", 1931, nos dice: "Los jesuitas proporcionan una clase de educación a los niños que han de ser hombres corrientes en el mundo, y otra distinta a áquellos que han de llegar a ser miembros de la Compañía de Jesús. De análoga manera, los gobernantes científicos proporcionarán un género de educación a los hombres y mujeres corrientes, y otro diferente a aquéllos que hayan de ser el poder científico. Los hombres y mujeres corrientes es de esperar que sean dóciles, diligentes, puntuales, de poco pensar y que se sientan satisfechos. Por otro lado, aquellos niños y niñas que estén destinados a ser miembros de la clase gobernante, recibirán una educación muy diferente. Serán seleccionados, algunos antes de nacer, otros durante los primeros tres años de vida, y unos pocos entre los tres y seis años. Toda la ciencia conocida se aplicará al desarrollo simultáneo de su inteligencia y de su voluntad. ….." Y es que para todos la ciencia ha sido creada supuestamente por científicos, ¿no? Uno de los parangones mundiales es la Royal Society fundada el 28 de noviembre de 1660 en Londres. Sus fundadores fueron un grupo de 12 científicos y pensadores, entre los que destacan Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins y William Petty. Lo que no nos cuentan es que el milenarismo y la cábala estaba en los orígenes de la Royal Society. Pero como escribió Boyle, los científicos, "sacerdotes de la naturaleza", habrían de adquirir, durante el milenio, "un conocimiento mucho mayor del que Adán pudo tener del maravilloso universo de Dios". Esta afirmación supone que, en la expectativa de Boyle, la ciencia permitiría alcanzar un estadio más avanzado que el presupuesto por la condición adánica, y acceder, en cierto modo, a la condición divina. Con palabras de la serpiente a Eva, ya había asegurado Bacon en la Nueva Atlántida que algún día los hombres serían como dioses, y ésta habría de ser, decía Lewis Mumford, "la meta final no declarada de la ciencia moderna”. (Noble 1999, pág 88). Dentro de la UNED (la universidad a distancia en España) podemos leer un texto titulado “LA ROYAL SOCIETY Y LA MASONERÍA” que dice asi: “La Royal Society se origina cuando doce hombres cultivados adoptaron la costumbre, poco después de 1640, de reunirse esporádicamente en Londres para conversar y discutir en la residencia de uno de ellos o bien en una taberna próxima al Gresham College. Al poco tiempo, bajo patrocinio del monarca, decidieron crear una asociación para el estudio de los mecanismos de la naturaleza. Para asegurarse de que los dogmas no fueran un obstáculo, desterraron de sus asambleas toda discusión de tintes religiosos y políticos. Y eso a pesar de que los doce fundadores diferían tanto en cuestiones políticas y religiosas, como en experiencia científica y rango social. Entre los nombres de los primeros miembros de la Royal Society se encuentran científicos que dieron nombre a sus descubrimientos; así, la Ley de Hooke, la Ley de Boyle, la construcción de Huygens, las leyes de Newton, el movimiento browniano, y esto sin contar a científicos de menor talla como Christopher Wren, John Eveyn, John Wilkins, Elias Ashmole, John Flamsteed o Edmund Halley. Sin embargo, los hombres que fundaron esta Sociedad no sólo fueron los primeros científicos, sino, al mismo tiempo, los últimos "magos". De hecho, Ashmole pertenecía a una sociedad de rosacruces y practicaba la astrología, Newton estudió y escribió acerca de los conceptos alquímicos de los rosacruces, y Hooke llevó a cabo experimentos con arañas y cuernos de unicornio.” Mucho antes John Dee, el asesor de la reina Isabel I de Inglaterra aunque no participó directamente en la creación de la Royal Society, su legado como defensor de las matemáticas, la navegación y el conocimiento empírico influyó en el ambiente intelectual que dio lugar a esta institución. Su reputación como "mago" y las acusaciones de nigromancia reflejan la percepción de sus prácticas herméticas y adivinatorias, que, aunque controvertidas, eran parte de su búsqueda de conocimiento universal. Recordemos que hoy dia podemos ver en el museo de Londres su piedra de obsidiana negra donde el mismo reconocía que veía a seres de otro mundo con los que decia comunicarse. Dee creo el alfabeto enoquiano, también conocido como el "lenguaje angélico" o "alfabeto mágico" desarrollado por Dee y su colaborador Edward Kelley durante sus sesiones de videncia (scrying) en la década de 1580. Mientras Isabel I valoraba a Dee como consejero (eligió la fecha de su coronación en 1559 basándose en sus cálculos astrológicos), otros lo veían como un charlatán peligroso. Su casa fue saqueada tras su partida a Europa en 1583, y bajo Jacobo I, enemigo de la brujería, Dee perdió ese trato de favor. Su imagen como "mago" inspiró personajes como Próspero en La Tempestad de Shakespeare y perduró en la cultura popular, como en la ópera de Damon Albarn o la canción de Iron Maiden “El Alquimista”. Termino esta entradilla con otro texto de Lord Bertrand Russell extraído de su obra, "El Impacto de la Ciencia en la Sociedad", 1951: "Aunque esta ciencia será estudiada con diligencia, deberá reservarse estrictamente a la clase gobernante. Al populacho no habrá de permitírsele saber cómo fueron generadas sus convicciones. Una vez perfeccionada la técnica, cada gobierno que haya estado a cargo de la educación por una generación, podrá controlar a sus sujetos de forma segura, sin la necesidad de recurrir a ejércitos ni policías. Actualmente, la población del mundo crece a razón de unos 58.000 individuos por día. La guerra, hasta ahora, no ha tenido un gran efecto en este crecimiento, que continuó a lo largo de cada una de las dos guerras mundiales... La guerra hasta la fecha ha sido decepcionante al respecto... pero quizás la guerra bacteriológica resultare más efectiva. Si una peste negra se propagare una vez en cada generación, los sobrevivientes podrían procrear libremente sin llenar al mundo demasiado... La situación seguramente sería poco placentera, pero, ¿qué importa?" ………………………………………………………………………………………. Imagina por un momento que entras en una antigua ciudad del sur de Italia, hace más de dos mil quinientos años. Calles de piedra, templos consagrados a dioses griegos... y una puerta. Una puerta modesta, sin adornos ostentosos, pero con una inscripción grabada con precisión geométrica: "No entre aquí quien no sepa geometría”. Estás ante la escuela de los pitagóricos, una de las sociedades más enigmáticas de la historia antigua. Fundada por Pitágoras de Samos, no era solo una escuela de matemáticas, como a veces se enseña en las aulas. Era una hermandad. Una especie de secta del conocimiento, donde los números eran algo más que herramientas: eran divinidades, principios cósmicos, claves para entender el alma del universo. Los pitagóricos creían que todo en la naturaleza —el movimiento de los astros, los ciclos vitales, incluso la música— respondía a proporciones numéricas. El número uno simbolizaba la unidad, el origen. El dos, la dualidad, lo femenino. El tres, la perfección. El cuatro, la justicia. Y el diez... el número perfecto, resultado de sumar 1+2+3+4. Un número sagrado. Este triángulo tiene cuatro filas y, si las cuentas todas, suma diez puntos. Ese número —el 10— era considerado el número perfecto por los pitagóricos, porque resultaba de la suma de los cuatro primeros números naturales: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 = 10 Pero esto no era solo una curiosidad matemática. Cada número tenía un significado simbólico y cosmológico: 1 representaba la unidad, el origen, el punto de partida de toda existencia. 2 simbolizaba la dualidad: luz y oscuridad, masculino y femenino, arriba y abajo. 3 era la tríada perfecta, el equilibrio entre los opuestos (principio muy común también en filosofías orientales). 4 simbolizaba la estabilidad, los cuatro elementos (tierra, agua, aire y fuego), las cuatro estaciones, los puntos cardinales. Así, la Tetraktys se convertía en un resumen místico del universo: todo lo que existe puede explicarse a través de esta progresión sagrada. No era un simple dibujo. Los pitagóricos juraban sobre la Tetraktys, como otros juran sobre la Biblia o una constitución. Su fórmula era: "Juro por el que entregó a nuestra alma la Tetraktys, fuente que contiene en sí la raíz y fuente de la eterna naturaleza." ¿Lo notas? No están hablando solo de matemáticas. Están hablando de la naturaleza eterna, de algo fundamental que estructura el cosmos. Este juramento era una especie de sacramento, una alianza con la armonía universal. Utilizaban símbolos que aún hoy reconocemos. La estrella pentagonal, también conocida como pentagrama, era para ellos un emblema de perfección y salud. Cada ángulo de la estrella formaba la razón áurea, ese número casi mágico que sigue apareciendo en la naturaleza, en la arquitectura, en el arte… y, para algunos, incluso en el diseño de logotipos de poderosas organizaciones contemporáneas. Y aquí es donde la cosa se pone interesante. Los pitagóricos dividían a sus miembros en dos categorías: los akusmáticos, que solo escuchaban y obedecían sin cuestionar, y los matemáticos, que accedían a las enseñanzas ocultas. Este modelo jerárquico, basado en el secreto y la iniciación progresiva, suena familiar. Muy familiar. ¿A qué otras organizaciones te recuerda? Algunas sociedades secretas modernas —como ciertas logias masónicas— han heredado no solo la estructura iniciática, sino también muchos símbolos y conceptos pitagóricos. La estrella de cinco puntas, el ojo que todo lo ve, el uso de números y proporciones sagradas, la idea de que el verdadero conocimiento no debe estar al alcance de todos, sino reservado para una élite que lo custodia. La Tetraktys no desapareció con la caída de los pitagóricos. Su simbolismo se filtró a través de corrientes esotéricas posteriores. Por ejemplo: En la Cábala judía, el Árbol de la Vida también parte de una estructura numérica y jerárquica del universo. En la masonería, aunque no se usa directamente la Tetraktys, la idea del triángulo sagrado, la progresión simbólica del número y la veneración de la geometría sagrada están muy presentes. En el hermetismo y el neoplatonismo, se reutiliza el simbolismo pitagórico para hablar de los planos de existencia, del alma y del conocimiento secreto. Incluso en el mundo moderno, algunos investigadores creen que ciertos símbolos corporativos y arquitectónicos siguen patrones de proporción y estructura que tienen su origen, directa o indirectamente, en la Tetraktys. La Tetraktys no era un dibujo bonito. Era una clave esotérica. Un mandala numérico. Una representación del orden invisible que rige el universo. Para los pitagóricos, entenderla era un paso hacia la iluminación intelectual y espiritual. Y ahora, volvamos a los números. Porque hay una historia que suele pasar desapercibida en los libros de texto... Se cuenta que los pitagóricos sabían más de lo que enseñaban. Por ejemplo, que ocultaron deliberadamente conceptos como los números negativos. ¿Por qué? Porque esos números, que hoy usamos sin pensar, eran perturbadores. ¿Cómo podía existir algo menos que nada? ¿Cómo explicar al pueblo llano la idea de restar una cantidad mayor a una menor y obtener un resultado real, aunque invisible? La respuesta fue simple: lo escondieron. Evitaron esas operaciones, redefinieron los problemas, o simplemente los consideraron imposibles. Para ellos, un universo perfecto no podía contener números "erróneos", "oscuros" o "negativos". Así de poderosa era su creencia en la armonía matemática del mundo. Y ahora piensa en esto: ¿cuántas cosas damos hoy por verdaderas sin entenderlas? ¿Cuántas ideas nos han sido negadas por parecer “imposibles”? La sombra de los pitagóricos es alargada. Y si miras con atención, quizá todavía la veas en las instituciones que dirigen el conocimiento, en los rituales simbólicos que acompañan actos de poder, o incluso… en las matemáticas que se enseñan en nuestras escuelas. Porque como decía otro sabio antiguo: la ignorancia no es falta de información, sino la imposición del silencio. ………………………………………………………………………………………. Los terrenos donde se construyó Washington, D.C., eran parte de una zona conocida como "Rome" (Roma) antes de que se estableciera la capital de Estados Unidos. Este nombre se debe a que, en el siglo XVII, un terrateniente llamado Francis Pope, quien era propietario de una parcela en la zona, nombró su propiedad "Rome" en un guiño humorístico a la ciudad de Roma, Italia, y al río Tíber, comparándolo con el río Anacostia o el Potomac. Incluso se dice que Pope se autoproclamó "Papa de Roma" en tono jocoso. Cuando se decidió construir la nueva capital federal en 1790, los terrenos de "Rome" fueron parte de las tierras cedidas por Maryland para crear el Distrito de Columbia. Sin embargo, el nombre "Rome" cayó en desuso con el desarrollo de la ciudad planificada por Pierre Charles L'Enfant y la adopción del nombre "Washington" en honor a George Washington. El hombre que recibió el encargo de diseñar la nueva capital de Estados Unidos en 1791 fue Pierre Charles L’Enfant, un arquitecto y urbanista nacido en Francia que había luchado en la Guerra de Independencia estadounidense junto a George Washington. Era un apasionado de la arquitectura monumental y tenía una visión muy clara: la ciudad debía ser una representación del nuevo orden del mundo. Aunque no hay registros definitivos que lo identifiquen como masón —al contrario que muchos de sus contemporáneos como George Washington, Benjamin Franklin o Thomas Jefferson—, su diseño está repleto de símbolos que son clave en la tradición masónica y pitagórica. Esto ha llevado a muchos estudiosos a pensar que, si no era miembro formal de la masonería, al menos estaba fuertemente influenciado por ella. Cuando observamos desde el aire (o en un plano detallado) el trazado urbano de Washington D.C., comienzan a aparecer formas geométricas muy específicas que nos indican el uso de la geometría sagrada en el plano de la ciudad: La estrella de cinco puntas Una de las figuras más debatidas del diseño de Washington es la estrella pentagonal (el pentagrama), que muchos dicen puede verse trazando líneas entre la Casa Blanca, el Capitolio, y varios otros puntos clave como el Washington Monument y el Jefferson Memorial. El pentagrama es un símbolo ancestral que los pitagóricos veneraban como representación del equilibrio, la salud y la proporción áurea. Los masones lo heredaron y lo usan como símbolo del hombre perfecto, microcosmos del universo. La escuadra y el compás Estos dos instrumentos, esenciales en la arquitectura, son símbolos masónicos por excelencia. La escuadra representa la rectitud moral y el compás, los límites que uno debe imponer a sus pasiones. En el plano de Washington, las avenidas diagonales que cruzan la cuadrícula ortogonal tradicional parecen estar trazadas con escuadra y compás. Por ejemplo, Pensylvania Avenue y Maryland Avenue se cruzan formando ángulos casi rituales, como si fuesen dibujadas con instrumentos de aprendiz de logia. El triángulo y la Tetraktys Al unir algunos de los puntos clave de la ciudad se forman triángulos equiláteros y escaleno, que recuerdan tanto a la Tetraktys pitagórica como al Delta radiante masónico, el triángulo con el ojo que todo lo ve en su interior. Washington D.C. no fue construida al azar. Su disposición recuerda más a la de un templo iniciático que a la de una ciudad práctica. Cada monumento, cada calle y cada eje visual parece tener una función simbólica. La ciudad se convierte así en un espacio ritualizado, diseñado para canalizar no solo el poder político, sino el espiritual. Esto concuerda con la visión de muchos de los Padres Fundadores, que eran masones y creían en una forma de deísmo ilustrado, donde Dios no era el dios de una religión concreta, sino el Gran Arquitecto del Universo, la divinidad racional que había creado el cosmos a través de leyes matemáticas y geométricas. Hay quienes consideran todas estas conexiones como meras coincidencias. Pero otros —historiadores, ocultistas, arquitectos, e incluso funcionarios del propio Capitolio— han reconocido que la influencia masónica en el diseño de Washington D.C. no puede negarse. George Washington, masón de alto grado, puso la primera piedra del Capitolio en una ceremonia masónica el 18 de septiembre de 1793, vistiendo su delantal de logia. La colocación de monumentos, obeliscos (como el del Washington Monument) y referencias astrológicas refuerzan la idea de que la ciudad está alineada no solo con principios políticos, sino con principios cósmicos. Washington sigue siendo una ciudad codificada. Muchos de sus símbolos están a la vista, pero pocos los reconocen. El diseño original de L’Enfant fue alterado con el tiempo, sí, pero los patrones geométricos centrales permanecen. Y algunos sostienen que el espíritu de los antiguos pitagóricos, con su amor por los números sagrados y la geometría divina, vive hoy en las estructuras de poder moderno… solo que oculto entre calles, columnas y monumentos. ………………………………………………………………………………………. Bueno y me despido con algunas de mis ultimas Frases_UTP, ya saben, esas perlas que voy soltando de vez en cuando y que tienen agrupadas en Twitter bajo ese hastag: “Somos jockeys ocasionales de almas inmanentes, montando a galope los corceles efímeros de nuestra existencia terrenal, en un fugaz viaje donde el viento del tiempo susurra nuestra impermanencia y la tierra guarda el eco de nuestras huellas pasajeras." “Tanto el sabio como el ignorante pueden tomar malas decisiones, pero solo el ignorante no admite haberlas tomado.” “Si trabajas el presente nunca sentirás vergüenza por el pasado y te sentirás orgulloso en el futuro.” ………………………………………………………………………………………. Conductor del programa UTP Ramón Valero @tecn_preocupado Un técnico Preocupado un FP2 IVOOX UTP http://cutt.ly/dzhhGrf BLOG http://cutt.ly/dzhh2LX Ayúdame desde mi Crowfunding aquí https://cutt.ly/W0DsPVq Invitados Dra Yane #JusticiaParaUTP @ayec98_2 Médico y Buscadora de la verdad. Con Dios siempre! No permito q me dividan c/izq -derecha, raza, religión ni nada de la Creación. https://youtu.be/TXEEZUYd4c0 …. soros triplehijueputa @soroshijueputa2 En contra de un sistema corrupto al servicio de la élite globalista …. José Antonio @jasava7 Mensajero de la Nueva Era. Librepensador y escritor. Ciudadano del Mundo. Derecho Natural. DDHH. Paz, equidad y fraternidad. Jinete en lucha por un Mundo Mejor. …. SirGalahad @Sirgalahad79 Mi honor se llama lealtad. …. LaJessi @LaJessibot Donde hay bromas hay verdades | Qué no te engañen la pena es la novia del pene #NoTeRaye #TweetStar Filósofa del barrio #CBD No me llames cani o #tekillyulabida …. Ernesto @Ernesto22596980 A mi me paga Putin EXPEDIENTE ROYUELA …. Luz Madeleine Munayco @lecabel8 ………………………………………………………………………………………. Enlaces citados en el podcast: AYUDA A TRAVÉS DE LA COMPRA DE MIS LIBROS https://tecnicopreocupado.com/2024/11/16/ayuda-a-traves-de-la-compra-de-mis-libros/ UTP8 Universo fractal https://www.ivoox.com/utp8-universo-fractal-audios-mp3_rf_9991951_1.html El Papa y Roma… https://x.com/ElHiloRojoTV/status/1914235914999521647 Hilo sobre el papa https://x.com/tecn_preocupado/status/1914770003712467453 Féretro de papa Francisco como bandera de España https://x.com/ayec98_2/status/1915421017083711970 Capilla ardiente papa Francisco como sexo femenino https://x.com/ayec98_2/status/1915173455655215303 UTP268 Matematicas Vorticiales: Explorando el Tejido del Universo https://www.ivoox.com/utp268-matematicas-vorticiales-explorando-tejido-del-universo-audios-mp3_rf_121126662_1.html UTP272 Matemáticas Vorticiales: los vórtices de la vida https://www.ivoox.com/utp272-matematicas-vorticiales-vortices-vida-audios-mp3_rf_122197421_1.html ………………………………………………………………………………………. Música utilizada en este podcast: Tema inicial Heros ………………………………………………………………………………………. Epílogo ÚRSULA - AGUA DE LIMÓN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKfs8GIorhc

Thomas Hobbes has been described as 'one of the true founders of modernity in Western culture'. His most famous work Leviathan was inspired by the issues raised by the Revolution, published in 1651 as he came home - and used to support the Protectorate. Meanwhile in Oxford, Wilkins, Boyle, Hooke, Petty, Ward and others were rewriting the rules of Natural Philosophy Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On Episode 544 of Impact Boom, Alex Hooke of Social Traders discusses how social enterprise certification helps government and corporates to invest in businesses driving community impact, and why entrepreneurs must avoid duplicating ideas and instead collaborate with fellow changemakers to spark change. If you are a changemaker wanting to learn actionable steps to grow your organisations or level up your impact, don't miss out on this episode! If you enjoyed this episode, then check out Episode 343 with Tara Anderson on social procurement and a branding campaign to grow the business for good movement -> https://bit.ly/4hDIKw1 The team who made this episode happen were: Host: Tom Allen Guest(s): Alex Hooke Producer: Indio Myles We invite you to join our community on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram to stay up to date on the latest social innovation news and resources to help you turn ideas into impact. You'll also find us on all the major podcast streaming platforms, where you can also leave a review and provide feedback.

0:00 Birthright citizenship: Reagan judge blasts Trump ‘blatantly unconstitutional' order: Niall Stanage 10:49 Egg prices soaring as bird flu spreads; Dems blame Trump?! 21:19 Trump threatens Davos elites with tariffs; confronts Bank Of America over conservative 'debanking' 31:39 Trump orders secret govt documents on JFK, MLK assassinations to be declassified 40:14 March for Life takes place after Trump pardons imprisoned pro-life protesters   50:22 Joe Rogan blasts 'woke' liberals for 'crying wolf;' BMW leaves X : Elon Musk salute 1:01:38 James Carville skewers fmr President Biden: 'Go back to your Rehoboth condo' 1:09:16 Trump abolishes Mike Pompeo, Brian Hooke's security detail; Mike Waltz sends NSC workers home Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Episode: 1307 Pendulum clock escapement: science and technology merging.  Today, we attend the wedding of science and technology.

What are the challenges of gardening on a large, rural property? Today we meet Cass Hooke, garden consultant, to tell us more about her experience about building a new garden from scratch.From her family upbringing to her first paid job with gardener Robert Boyle, Cass has immersed herself with landscaping and gardening. With a passion for conservation and the protection of threatened species, we hear about Cass's journey and the creation of her garden with all the challenges of low rainfall, bore water and a harsh climate.Cass share's her journey of the creation of her rural Riverina NSW garden via her instagram @outbackgardens.Where you can find all things Muddy Boots!Website: https://www.muddyboots.net.au/Instagram: www.instagram.com/muddybootspodcast/ Facebook: Muddy Boots Podcast | Facebook

For a few hundred years, the New World of the Americas was thought to be genuinely new. But in the course of the nineteenth century, Americans became increasingly uncertain about the ground beneath their feet. Canal building uncovered strange creatures like enormous crabs; seams of coal were determined to be fossilized forests. And while no living mammoths or mastodons were discovered in the lands west of the Mississippi, their bones were; and so were the bones of still stranger creatures, some of them just a few miles from Independence Hall in Philadelphia.  These and many other discoveries led to a still greater discovery, not simply of dinosaurs, or geological ages, or even of evolutionary biology, but a concept that lies beneath all of them, what the writer John McPhee has called “Deep Time.” In her new book How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution, Caroline Winterer roams about the continent, from Haddonfield, New Jersey, to Yosemite, uncovering how Americans began to realize that their continent and world was very, very old indeed.  Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies at Stanford University, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science. Her previous books include American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason.    For Further Investigation I note with pleasure that How the New World Became Old has blurbs from past HT guests Marcia Bjornerud, Suzanne L. Marchand, and Adrienne Mayor Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983; repr. 2003). Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (1992). Stephanie Moser, Ancestral Images: The Iconography of Human Origins (1998). Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico (1987)

It's in a peer-reviewed paper, so it must be true. Right? Alas, you can only really hold this belief if you don't know about the peer-review system, and scientific publishing more generally.That's why, in this episode of The Studies Show, Tom and Stuart break down the traditional scientific publishing process, discuss how it leads science astray, and talk about the ways in which, if we really cared, we could make it better.The Studies Show is brought to you by Works in Progress magazine. Their new September 2024 issue is out now, and is brimming with fascinating articles including one on lab-grown diamonds, one on genetically-engineered mosquitoes, and one on the evolution of drip coffee. Check it out at worksinprogress.co.Show Notes* A history of Philosophical Transactions, the oldest scientific journal* Hooke (1665) on “A Spot in One of the Belts of Jupiter”* The original paper proposing the h-index* Useful 2017 paper on perverse incentives and hypercompetition in science* Goodhart's Law* Bad behaviour by scientists:* What is a “predatory journal”?* Science investigates paper mills and their bribery tactics* The best example yet seen of salami slicing* Brief discussion of citation manipulation* Elisabeth Bik on citation rings* The recent discovery of sneaked citations, hidden in the metadata of a paper* The Spanish scientist who claims to publish a scientific paper every two days* Science report on the fake anemone paper that the journal didn't want to retract* Transcript of Ronald Fisher's 1938 lecture in which he said his famous line about statisticians only being able to offer a post-mortem* 2017 Guardian article about the strange and highly profitable world of scientific publishing* Brian Nosek's 2012 “scientific utopia” paper* Stuart's 2022 Guardian article on how we could do away with scientific papers altogether* The new Octopus platform for publishing scientific resaerch* Roger Giner-Sorolla's article on “aesthetic standards” in scientific publishing and how they damage science* The Transparency and Openness Practices guidelines that journals can be rated on* Registered Reports - a description, and a further discussion from Chris Chambers* 2021 paper showing fewer positive results in Registered Reports compared with standard scientific publicationCreditsThe Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thestudiesshowpod.com/subscribe

Fred Campbell is the innovative founder of Hooke, a company dedicated to revolutionizing the outdoor industry. Apart from his jaw-dropping work in film-making, his work with Hooke focuses on developing gear that enhances the outdoor experience. In this episode of Anchored, we discuss some of Quebec's salmon history, the story of Hooke, launching a clothing company, embracing change, our future, parallels in hunting, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. What comes to your mind when I mention the word sacrifice › pause I'm an ice cream person, sacrifice for me could be letting someone have the rest of a favorite ice cream. maybe it is working long days to help provide for your families.

1. What comes to your mind when I mention the word sacrifice › pause I'm an ice cream person, sacrifice for me could be letting someone have the rest of a favorite ice cream. maybe it is working long days to help provide for your families. 2. The idea of sacrifice is familiar to us […]

In this episode I speak with Cass Hooke from Outback Gardens. Cass is a garden consultant and writer, writing for Graziher magazine.Cass started out in the industry while she was at school working for Robert Boyle before studying in Botany, working in veggie production nurseries and working in conservation for threatened species.Cass is holding a garden event at her property in October 2024 with guest speakers and workshops and a tour of her garden. Details are on a pinned post on her Instagram page.Cass also did a podcast for Graziher which was a great listen, and you can find it here for to listen on Spotify and listen here for apple musicYou can find Cass on Instagram @outbackgardensIf you're wanting to sign up to be on the mailing list for The Landscaping School, you can find the link here.You can follow along with the projects we're currently working on via our Instagram page@instyle_gardens@thelandscapingpodcastYou can view each episode on our YouTube channel

The 17th-century English physicist Robert Hooke was curious about the remarkable properties of cork -- its ability to float, its springy quality, its usefulness in sealing bottles. Hooke investigated the structure of cork with a new scientific instrument he was very enthusiastic about: the microscope.

This week we are joined by Monty Hooke. An entrepreneur from Australia now living in Bali. In this episode Monty reflects on his childhood, entrepreneurial spirit from a young age, and the personal struggles he faced, relating them to his current endeavours and mindset. We cover topics like the importance of inner work, maintaining health and vitality, and creating a harmonious life that combines professional success with personal fulfilment. Monty's story is not just about his ventures into business but about the continuous journey of self-discovery and improvement.In this episode Nick and Monty discuss the following:00:00 Introduction01:29 A Deep Dive into Monty's Life and Entrepreneurial Journey07:23 The Philosophy of Business, Passion, and Purpose22:32 Cultural Perspectives on Happiness and Success29:32 Reflecting on Personal Growth and Business Challenges34:14 Exploring Inner Work and Spiritual Practices34:24 The Impact of Plant Medicine and Spiritual Practices in Bali37:44 The Role of Hypnotherapy and Continuous Self-Improvement38:14 Confronting Societal Norms and Embracing Spiritual Growth39:50 The Beauty and Simplicity of Life in Bali41:58 Reflecting on Business, Success, and Personal Fulfillment46:50 Instilling Values and Self-Esteem in the Next Generation01:02:34 The Journey of Healing and Embracing Vulnerability01:08:34 Closing Thoughts and Reflections on HappinessFollow Monty: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/montyhooke/FOLLOW ► Instagram:   https://www.instagram.com/thebetarproject/Sponsors: Betar Media:  https://www.instagram.com/betarmedia/Support the Show.Connect with Nick:Instagram TikTok YouTube

Episode: 1169 From stacked stone to steel: a shift in structural concept.  Today, we make buildings by stacking stone.

Soon I'll be having an interview about suicide on The IPS Podcast with Rebecca Hooke Oam, a suicide hotline worker. We're going to talk in-depth about how to be there for someone who is suicidal, as well as how to be there for yourself if you struggle with suicidal thoughts and feelings.  If you have a question about suicide or anything you'd like to ask Rebecca, let me know by going to the following link: https://theipsproject.com/guest/ --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/the-ips-podcast/message

Huon Hooke and The Real Review team have just released the Top Wineries of Australia list and he chats with Jill Upton and Simon Nash about some of the highlights. @thewineshowaustralia @therealrvw

Renowned wine writer Huon Hooke previously appeared on the Drinks Adventures podcast way back in Season One, in an episode exploring Australians' love affair with champagne.He's finally back for this full-length chat about The Real Review Wine Classification, which launched in 2022 aiming to highlight the greatest wines of Australia and New Zealand that have an outstanding track record of a decade or longer.Huon and I discuss the fresh approach he's taken to classifying wine versus other established frameworks; and how this helps bring emerging producers to the fore, as well as wine styles and regions that might be less fashionable, but are nevertheless extremely high quality.Case in point, the wineries of Langhorne Creek in South Australia; Bleasdale, Lake Breeze and Bremerton. The latter of those three wineries slipped Huon's mind during our conversation, and he contacted me afterwards to see if this omission could be addressed.The Real Review was launched in 2016 to provide unbiased, independent reviews on wine.I started by asking Huon whether the classification has always been on the founders' agenda.Click here to open episode in your podcast player.

Pedro e Greg discutem se é possível apagar alguém da história, e contam sobre tentativas (falhas) de apagar alguém no passado. Discord! http://discord.gg/cienciatododia Contato: sinapse@cienciatododia.com.br Nosso Twitter: @sinapsepodcast Links do Episódio Imagem com rosto apagado Possível imagem de Hooke

You're in for a treat! Peta is here to spill the tea on her unforgettable trip to Europe, and she's got a surprise for you! Get ready to meet Adelle Clements, a travel industry expert and Peta's close friend. In this episode, we bring you an incredible conversation where Adelle delves into the unique experiences and challenges faced by her disabled friend travelling halfway across the world.  Connect with Adelle:   Instagram: @adellesnaps Connect with Peta: Instagram: @petahooke Website: www.icantstandpodcast.com Email: icantstandpodcast@gmail.com Episode Transcript: https://www.icantstandpodcast.com/post/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Deep dive into high level conversion practices from one of the best in the industry, including scripts and a roadmap to getting a 10X return on every dollar spent on lead generation.The 2023 Digital Summit was THE ultimate event to find out how to grow your real estate business during uncertain economic times. Industry veterans with over 170 years of experience & close to 20 thousand families served shared their secrets & strategies. Now they're yours as well!Guest Bio - Dave Hooke20+ Years in Real Estate With 2,000+ Families ServedThe Dave Hooke Team closed 350 transactions last year with $3M GCI and a 33% profit. Dave hasn't met with a client in over 5 years, and attends one 90-min meeting each week to support the leaders that run that business. Dave succeeds in his business through rock solid systems and great people. He is most passionate about his faith, family and ministry.If you want to continue the conversation, here's what you can do to get started today:1. Subscribe to Real Estate Team Builders Podcast (https://bit.ly/2W9Cc3r)Learn real-world solutions to the challenges we face as entrepreneurs navigating the changing landscape in the real estate industry.2. Join our Private Community on Facebook (https://bit.ly/3i1FG0q)Network with growth-oriented real estate agents and team leaders who are ready to make the shift from agent to business owner just like you.3. Learn more about our NEW Graduate Program (https://bit.ly/3iJoETN)Impact-driven coaching, training, and implementation support to help you scale your business while working fewer hours. No risk. 100% results guaranteed!4. Partner with Real Estate B-School at eXp Realty (https://bit.ly/3x2zoC7)Scale your business, expand your wealth, and build massive residual income by partnering with REBS and eXp Realty.Connect with us on Social Mediahttps://web.facebook.com/RealEstateBSchool/https://www.instagram.com/realestate.b.school/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQb9X4jfexgj83_ms2WRZ7ghttps://www.linkedin.com/company/real-estate-b-school/https://twitter.com/RealEstateBSch1

We all know, keeping in touch with your database is the heart of a big referral based business. In this two-part episode, you'll get the blueprint for a systemized database 60 touch program that can scale your business to net a million.The 2023 Digital Summit was THE ultimate event to find out how to grow your real estate business during uncertain economic times. Industry veterans with over 170 years of experience & close to 20 thousand families served shared their secrets & strategies. Now they're yours as well!Guest Bio - Dave Hooke20+ Years in Real Estate With 2,000+ Families ServedThe Dave Hooke Team closed 350 transactions last year with $3M GCI and a 33% profit. Dave hasn't met with a client in over 5 years, and attends one 90-min meeting each week to support the leaders that run that business. Dave succeeds in his business through rock solid systems and great people. He is most passionate about his faith, family and ministry.If you want to continue the conversation, here's what you can do to get started today:1. Subscribe to Real Estate Team Builders Podcast (https://bit.ly/2W9Cc3r)Learn real-world solutions to the challenges we face as entrepreneurs navigating the changing landscape in the real estate industry.2. Join our Private Community on Facebook (https://bit.ly/3i1FG0q)Network with growth-oriented real estate agents and team leaders who are ready to make the shift from agent to business owner just like you.3. Learn more about our NEW Graduate Program (https://bit.ly/3iJoETN)Impact-driven coaching, training, and implementation support to help you scale your business while working fewer hours. No risk. 100% results guaranteed!4. Partner with Real Estate B-School at eXp Realty (https://bit.ly/3x2zoC7)Scale your business, expand your wealth, and build massive residual income by partnering with REBS and eXp Realty.Connect with us on Social Mediahttps://web.facebook.com/RealEstateBSchool/https://www.instagram.com/realestate.b.school/https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQb9X4jfexgj83_ms2WRZ7ghttps://www.linkedin.com/company/real-estate-b-school/https://twitter.com/RealEstateBSch1

 This is Superlative: A Podcast about watches, the people behind them, and the worlds that inspire them. This week our host and aBlogtoWatch Founder Ariel Adams is joined by Roger Peeters, the Founder and Master Watchmaker of Hooke and Huygens. To start the show Ariel dives into discussing small independent high end watch brands, and their important role in the watch industry. They talk about the mentality behind the modern watchmaker today, and how important having a true artist's touch is important when creating a watch brand or new design. Ariel asks why Roger did not go with his own name when creating this brand, and who exactly Robert Hooke and Christiaan Huygens are. They dive into the brands overall strategy with their relationship with their customers, and they go over their patented Hooke and Huygens ring-shaped semi-skeleton ring movement with 12 positions and 41 jewel bearings. To stay updated with Roger and Hooke and Huygens:Website - https://www.hookeandhuygens.com/ Instagram @HookeandHuygensWatches - https://www.instagram.com/hookeandhuygenswatches/ To check out the ABTW Shop where you can see our products inspired by our love of Horology:- Shop ABTW - https://store.ablogtowatch.com/To keep updated with everything Superlative and aBlogtoWatch, check us out on:- Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/ablogtowatch/- Twitter - https://twitter.com/ABLOGTOWATCH- Website - https://www.ablogtowatch.com/If you enjoy the show please Subscribe, Rate, and Review!

** Please note that this lecture will contain several mentions of early animal testing which some audience members may find upsetting**Christopher Wren was part of probably the first ‘research team' assembled in Oxford in the 17th century, dedicated to better understanding the human body. With colleagues, Wren contributed to: the near-discovery of oxygen; the first human transfusion of blood; the first intravenous therapy and first intravenous anaesthetic; the description of the anatomy of the arteries supplying the brain (the ‘circle of Willis'); and remarkably, the first successful cardiac resuscitation.The lecture will explain the continued relevance of these discoveries.A lecture by Jaideep Pandit recorded on 17 May 2023 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London.The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website: https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/wren-medicalGresham College has offered free public lectures for over 400 years, thanks to the generosity of our supporters. There are currently over 2,500 lectures free to access. We believe that everyone should have the opportunity to learn from some of the greatest minds. To support Gresham's mission, please consider making a donation: https://gresham.ac.uk/support/Website:  https://gresham.ac.ukTwitter:  https://twitter.com/greshamcollegeFacebook: https://facebook.com/greshamcollegeInstagram: https://instagram.com/greshamcollegeSupport the show

See Rogers watches in the flesh at Time To Watches.Tune in to the aBlogtoWatch Weekly Podcast each week for the latest news and reviewsEmail the show with your thoughts and comments Podcasts@ablogtowatch.com

In this episode, Kelli Hooke shows that applying for a job online can indeed result in employment. While stationed at Fort Belvoir, Kelli talks about how she saw an ad for a position with T Mobile in Seattle, for which she was ultimately hired. Kelli shares her thoughts on what it is like to work for a major tech company, and how working as a corporate counsel is a lot like being an SJA. Note: you will hear voices in the background of this interview. It is a testament to Kelli's ability to multitask. As a working woman with a husband and children, Kelli graciously gave up her time to talk to me while she waited on one of her children at an evening commitment. Kelli's LinkedIn profile can be accessed by clicking HERE.

London, 1679. Combining the color and adventure of Alexandre Dumas and the thrills of Frederick Forsyth, early scientists Harry Hunt and Robert Hooke of the Royal Society stumble onto a plot to kill the Queen of England. The Poison Machine (Melville House, 2022) is a nail-biting and brilliantly imagined historical thriller that will delight readers of its critically acclaimed predecessor, The Bloodless Boy. Tune in as we speak with Robert J. Lloyd about his recent novel set in Restoration England, The Poison Machine.  Robert J. Lloyd, after a twenty-year career as a secondary school teacher, has returned to painting and writing, and is now working on the third book in the Hunt and Hooke series. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

London, 1679. Combining the color and adventure of Alexandre Dumas and the thrills of Frederick Forsyth, early scientists Harry Hunt and Robert Hooke of the Royal Society stumble onto a plot to kill the Queen of England. The Poison Machine (Melville House, 2022) is a nail-biting and brilliantly imagined historical thriller that will delight readers of its critically acclaimed predecessor, The Bloodless Boy. Tune in as we speak with Robert J. Lloyd about his recent novel set in Restoration England, The Poison Machine.  Robert J. Lloyd, after a twenty-year career as a secondary school teacher, has returned to painting and writing, and is now working on the third book in the Hunt and Hooke series. Michael Morales is Professor of Biblical Studies at Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the author of The Tabernacle Pre-Figured: Cosmic Mountain Ideology in Genesis and Exodus(Peeters, 2012), Who Shall Ascend the Mountain of the Lord?: A Biblical Theology of Leviticus(IVP Academic, 2015), and Exodus Old and New: A Biblical Theology of Redemption (IVP Academic, 2020). He can be reached at mmorales@gpts.edu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literature

In this episode, Xavier Bonilla has a dialogue with Siddhartha Mukherjee about cellular biology. They define what a cell is and talk about the importance of Leeuwenhoek and Hooke in observing and discovering the cell. They talk about the five basic principles of cell biology and explore the anatomy of a cell. They explain how important B cells and T cells are for the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system for fighting diseases such as SARS-CoV-2 and HIV. They also talk about the potential of stem cells for human medicine and many other topics.  Siddhartha Mukherjee is an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University and a cancer researcher and physician. He has his Bachelors in biology from Stanford University. As a Rhodes Scholar, he has a DPhil in immunology from Oxford University and an MD from Harvard University. He has published articles in journals such as Nature and The New England Journal of Medicine and in mainstream outlets such as The New York Times. He is the author of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winning, The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, The New York Times best-Seller, The Gene: An Intimate History, and the author of the new book, The Song of The Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and The New Human. You can find his work here. Twitter: @drsidmukherjee

Dr. Ruthanna Hooke says, whatever your burdens may be, Jesus' urgent desire is your freedom--freedom to choose God, to follow Christ, to be led by the Holy Spirit, and to be the particular person God has created you to be.

The list is long and, to a lot of people, confusing. We're talking about the language of money. How would you do if you had to define the following: stocks, bonds, private equity, index funds, leveraged buyouts, venture capital, hedge funds and sovereign wealth funds, just to name a few. We asked Jeffrey Hooke, author of "The Myth of Private Equity," to give us some help in understanding the world of investment and finance. Mr. Hooke is a senior lecturer at Johns Hopkins Business School and has spent all of his adult life in and around money.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Listen as we take a deep dive into the world of private equity with Jeff Hooke, author of five books on M&A, including his most recent book – The Myth of Private Equity: An Inside Look at Wall Street's Transformative Investments. Jeff has been the director of a $5 billion private equity firm and an investment banker at Lehman Brothers. In this show, we cover everything you need to know about private equity if you are an entrepreneur and are considering a sale to a private equity firm, including how private equity firms operate and are structured, what investments they prefer to make, and how they acquire companies. View the complete show notes for this episode. Learn More: Business Valuation & Return on Investment (ROI) M&A Guide | The 4 Types of Buyers of Businesses Additional Resources: Download a free copy of The Complete Guide to Selling a Business Are you selling a business? Schedule a free consultation now.