Assorted Podcasts

The Wisdom of Whores

The Post American World- Fareed Zakaria

Skills, Rights and Resources in the East Asian Path to Development
Professor Kenneth Pomeranz

Why Civilisations Can't Climb Hills: a political history of statelessness in Southeast Asia

Fixing Failed States

McMafia: Crime without frontiers

The Uses and Abuses of History
The philosopher George Santanyana said that "those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it".
But how much does history really teach us? Can we draw clear lessons from the past when so much of what has been written is coloured by political agendas and the interpretations of previous generations?
A new book by prize-winning Oxford University historian Margaret Macmillan explores the way nations use - and abuse - history to shape their decisions and justify their actions.

Climate Change Policy & the Garnaut Report

Evangelical influence: myth and reality

Black Liberation Theology

The economic costs of spelling
English-language countries have higher rates of dyslexic failure in literacy than those where languages have more consistent spelling. That's just one of the many costs of the unnecessary difficulties in English spelling which the UK Spelling Society tried to quantify at its centenary conference earlier this month.

Join the British Army and learn to read
Some of those joining up to the British Army these days have less than adequate literacy skills, some as low as those normally expected of five- to seven-year-olds. So it falls to basic recruit training to bring them up to the literacy levels of nine- to 11-year-olds required in order to pass out.
Jill Kitson interviews Martin Rose, Basic Skills Development Officer for the British Army, about how the Army succeeds after schools have failed.

Apes, legal personhood and the plight of Nim Chimpsky
In Austria, animal activists have taken the case of a chimp called Matthew as far as the European Court of Human Rights. Controversially, they're fighting for his right to legal personhood. And, the incredible saga of Nim Chimpsky. A landmark effort to teach a chimp sign language and raise him like a human child. Project Nim became a scientific soap opera of epic proportions. More links here

Michael Gazzaniga: Split brains and other heady tales

Where We Stand On the Financial Crisis

The Book of Dead Philosophers

Egalitarianism and fairness

The jury that played Sudoku

Perfecting PowerPoint and presentation

The Origin of the Dalai Lama
The institution of the Dalai Lama - the Buddhist 'Pope' of Tibet - has a history that goes back at least to the 12th century, but Buddhist myth traces the origin of the Dalai Lama to a Brahmin boy who met the Buddha under the Bodhi tree. Professor of Buddhist Studies at Columbia University, Robert Thurman, traces the unusual history of the Dalai Lama.

Sexual Abuse in Religious Contexts

The People's Republic of Capitalism