How To Academy Podcast

Mentored by the late great Douglas Adams, the film and TV producer Arvind Ethan David has made an extraordinary career playing in the universes of other writers. His debut prose novel The Great Game takes this concept to its logical endpoint, as the heroes of Victorian and Edwardian fiction mix with real historical figures in a collision of adventure serial hi-jinks and reflections on the conseque...

What does it actually mean to be beautiful? And where did our ideas of beauty and normality come from? In this episode of the podcast, writer Roisin Kiberd traces the surprisingly violent history of Botox, unpacks why blonde hair carries centuries of loaded meaning, and uncovers the secretive ritual collectors go through to buy a Birkin bag. She also digs into the murky ethics of online shopping,...

What are executive functions and why are they so important? In this episode of the podcast, world-renowned neuroscientist Dr Adrian Owen unpacks how executive functions drive everything over the course of our lives, allowing us to create and retrieve memories, understand our own and others’ emotions, plan our short and long-term goals, and much more. Drawing on gripping case studies and cutting-ed...

On 1 February, 1910, vivacious music-hall performer, Belle Elmore, suddenly vanished from her north London home, causing alarm among her circle of female friends– the entertainers of the Music Hall Ladies’ Guild– who demanded an immediate investigation. They could not have known what they would provoke: the unearthing of a gruesome secret, followed by a fevered manhunt for the prime suspect: Belle...

One of the most remarkable and progressive physicians of the Victorian age, Dr Joseph Bell's incredible powers of deductive reasoning astonished his students -- including the young Arthur Conan Doyle. Oxford-trained medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals what Sherlock Holmes owes to the work of a real life crime-solving surgeon, and how he came, like Conan Doyle, to finally resent his associ...

Author and journalist Naomi Klein and writer and activist Astra Taylor join Historian David Olusoga to explore how apocalyptic visions of the future are working to justify the present-day costs of AI – from energy and water-hungry data centres to job displacement and mass surveillance. Naomi and Astra also trace the links between religious end-times movements, ethno-nationalism, climate anxiety, a...

Sometimes life can feel like a lot. Even on a good day you will experience stress and fatigue. The nature of modern living guarantees it. However, the problem is not that we think too much, but that our nervous systems are too wound up to rest. In this episode of the podcast, leading vedic meditation expert and founder of London Meditation Centre, Jillian Lavender, discusses how meditation is the...

Why is liberal democracy losing public confidence—and what would it take to renew it? Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu joins Financial Times chief economics commentator Martin Wolf to discuss. Liberalism offered a glittering promise of shared prosperity, equality, democratic values and the free pursuit of knowledge. Once a tantalising beacon of hope, today it has begun to erode and dec...

From an early age we learn to stop asking questions,  judged and rewarded for the answers we give, not the questions we ask. In this episode, Lani Watson traces the hidden life of the question – from school, to therapy, to dating. Drawing on research across psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, Lani explains why we start questioning long before we can speak, how the act of asking fires up...

David Duchovny has spent three decades refusing to stay in one lane. Two-time Golden Globe winner, four-time Emmy nominee, New York Times bestselling novelist, musician with three studio albums, filmmaker whose directorial debut premiered at Tribeca: the range is, by any measure, unusual. What connects it all is a preoccupation with the things that resist easy articulation. Grief, fathers, time, t...

This week we have a guest appearance from our friends at John Murray, who have curated a curated a collection of some of the best historians, memoirists, academics, critics and national treasures publishing on their 2026 non-fiction list to introduce and share clips from their current and upcoming books. You’ll find some recognisable names and be introduced to some new voices. Listen to Miria...

In this episode, Louisa Young joins journalist and editor Natasha Poliszczuk to discuss the making of The Golden Hours, the sixth Cazalet novel. Louisa explains what it takes to inherit half a million words and fifty-five characters, why some of them had unfinished business she felt compelled to go back for, and how to write the sixties as they actually arrived. She will also discuss the rapid dec...

Having worked with top athletes and sportspeople, leading tech and finance corporations, and the World Health Organisation, Ben Crowe is one of the world's most in-demand mindset coaches. In this episode of the podcast, he reveals simple-yet-profound perspective shifts that will change the way you see the world and yourself. Showing how these perspective shifts are relevant to everyone, Ben demons...

The central figure of the New Weird, an unofficial movement fusing science fiction, fantasy, and horror with a literary sensibility, China Mieville is equally known for his award-winning, internationally bestselling novels, which include Perdido Street Station, The City and the City and The Last Days of New Paris, and his work as activist, historian, and scholar of the Marxist Left. He joins us fo...

A scholar, author, artist, and musician, Amy Jeffs is a polymath of British mythology, bringing the greatest stories of the Middle Ages to life in extraordinary books including Storyland, Wild, and Old Songs. She returns to the podcast to share a new life of King Arthur -- drawn not from Mallory's Morte d'Arthur, as most modern adaptations of his story are, but from older, darker, stranger, and mo...

Zahra Joya grew up under the first Taliban regime, when girls were banned from school. For years she dressed as a boy to access the basic rights denied to her. She became a journalist in Kabul, and founded a news organisation reporting on the lives of Afghan women. In 2021, when the Taliban took over power once again, she was forced to flee the country. In this episode of the podcast, Zahra discus...

When Kimon de Greef began an investigation into the smuggling of white sage, a Californian herb popular in the wellness movement, he could not have foreseen that the story would lead him into the dark heart of the psychedelic renaissance and one of its most prominent advocates, Dr. Octavio Rettig: a Mexican physician dedicated to spreading the practice of smoking the secretions of the Sonoran Dese...

What if the present moment – the ‘now’– isn’t just a tick of the clock? We feel that the present is everything; all we can know, yet physics finds no universal 'now'. So where does that leave us – and what is the 'now' we experience? Science journalist Jo Marchant draws on state-of-the-art discoveries in neuroscience, psychology, cosmology and quantum physics, to show how we each carve out our liv...

“People have lost hope that peace is possible. Talking about peace seems too vulnerable, too naïve, too dangerous. We have resigned ourselves to this unending war as the only way forward. But we have tried this. We have tried war. The only war that is won is one that leads to peace.” On paper, Maoz Inon and Aziz Abu Sarah should not be friends. Aziz's brother was killed by Israeli forces. Maoz los...

As conspiracy theories, political polarisation and the blurred boundaries between truth and misinformation continue to shape our public life, Naomi Klein's prize-winning book Doppleganger (2023) feels more relevant than ever before. In this fascinating episode of the podcast, Naomi joins journalist Moya Lothian-McLean to explore the strange world of far-right conspiracy theories, wellness inf...

In an age of uncertainty, renowned historian Yuval Noah Harari joins Ritula Shah to make sense of a world in crisis and help us better understand the perils we face. In this episode of the podcast, bestselling author of Sapiens and Nexus Yuval Noah Harari joins Ritula Shah to explore the forces shaping our uncertain future: from the rise of AI and the changing nature of information, to nationalism...

Cambridge Professor Mary Beard has done more than anyone to bring the world of ancient Rome to life again. Comedian David Mitchell once studied history and won’t let it off the hook for the mess it’s made of everything. In this special episode of the podcast, they join forces to tell the epic story of our rulers – from the emperors who ruled Britannia under the Roman occupation to the kings and qu...

After experiencing multiple miscarriages and the societal shame that comes with it, recently married Alejandra fakes a pregnancy. What starts as an elaborate lie turns into a complex charade that threatens to upend her life and relationship, and ultimately unleashes a media scandal that shakes the entire country. In this episode of the podcast, Oscar nominated documentary filmmaker Maite Alberdi w...

Today's computer scientists play the same role as the oracles of the ancient world and the astrologers of the Middle Ages. Modern predictions not only advise on war, crop output, and marriages, algorithms and statisticians now determine whether we can get a loan, a job, an apartment, or an organ transplant. And when we cede ground to these predictions, we lose control of our own lives. In this pow...

Today, in our clock-bound, screen-immersed world, most of us rely on machines to mark the hours. Past generations, however, would tell time by shadows shrinking, the midday glow over a mountaintop, the crowing of the rooster in the darkness. They noticed the flowers that close at noon, sensed how the quality of light changes at dusk, and marked time at night by the motion of the stars. Artist and...