Little Atoms

Sarah Churchwell is Professor of American Literature and Public Understanding of the Humanities at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, writes regularly for the Guardian and the New Statesman, and often appears on television and radio talking about the arts, culture and all things American. In this podcast, Sarah discusses Careless People: Murder, M...

In this episode of Little Atoms from 2009, Noam Chomsky examines the Obama administration and asks what has really changed. Chomsky describes the first term of the Bush administration as “off the spectrum” in both aggression and arrogance. US international prestige sank to the lowest point since measured. It is hardly surprising therefore that the next candidate should have moved towards the centr...

458: George Saunders & Kathryn HughesGeorge Saunders is the author of nine books, including Tenth of December, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short-story collection). He has received MacArthur and Guggen­heim fellowships and the PEN/Malamud Prize for excellence in the short story...

A journalist, aviation blogger, documentary producer and crash investigator, Christine Negroni has more than fifteen years' experience observing and participating in the international effort to create safer skies. She currently reports for the New York Times, ABC News and Air & Space. Christine is the author of The Crash Detectives: Investigating the World’s Most Mysterious Air Disasters. Hosted o...

Brenna Hassett is an archaeologist who specializes in using clues from the human skeleton to understand how people lived and died in the past. She has worked on excavation sites all over the world including Roman-period burials near the Giza pyramids, remote Greek islands, a Buddhist monastery in northern Thailand, and the famous central Anatolian site of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. Brenna is one-quarte...

Mark Stevenson is a writer, broadcaster, futurologist and founder of The League of PragmaticOptimists. He has written for Radio 4, The Times, Wall Street Journal, Guardian and New Statesman,and is the author of the critically acclaimed An Optimist’s Tour of the Future. He lives in London and is an adviser to (among others) The Virgin Earth Challenge, Civilised Bank and The Atlas of the Future. Mar...

Sheena Kamal has been a stunt double (for children), a stand-in (most notably Archie Panjabi) and a film/TV extra. She has been a producer’s assistant and most recently, a researcher for a gritty TV crime drama series set in Toronto. Sheena’s debut novel Eyes Like Mine is inspired by one issue that kept cropping up during her research- the plight of the missing and murdered indigenous women in Can...

Cordelia Fine is a Professor of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of much-acclaimed A Mind of Its Own (Icon, 2006) and Delusions of Gender (Icon, 2010), described as ‘a truly startling book’ by the Independent, ‘fun, droll yet deeply serious’ by New Scientist and an ‘important book … as enjoyable as it is timely and interesting’ by the West Aus...

The third and final Little Atoms Two Cultures in Conversation events took place in London on 17 January 2017, when Little Atoms’ Neil Denny was joined by novelist Naomi Alderman and science writer Adam Rutherford. Neil began by asking Naomi about her latest book, The Power. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. Her work appears in numerous publications, including the Guardian, Observer, New Statesman, Frieze and New York Times. She's a Yaddo and MacDowell Fellow and was 2014 Eccles Writer in Residence at the British Library. Her first book, To the River, was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of t...

Peter Swanson's debut novel, The Girl With a Clock for a Heart (2014), was described by Dennis Lehane as 'a twisty, sexy, electric thrill ride' and was nominated for the LA Times book award. His follow up The Kind Worth Killing (2015), a Richard and Judy pick, was shortlisted for the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and named the iBook stores Thriller of the Year. His latest novel is Her Every Fear. He li...

Chibundu Onuzo was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1991. Her first novel, The Spider King's Daughter, won a Betty Trask Award, was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize, and was longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Etisalat Prize for Literature. She is completing a PhD on the West African Student's Union at King's College London. Her latest novel is Welcome t...

Laura Cumming has been the art critic of the Observer since 1999. Previously, she was Arts Editor for the New Statesman, presenter of Nightwaves on BBC Radio 3, and arts producer at the BBC World Service. Her previous book, A Face to the World: On Self-Portraits received widespread critical acclaim. Laura’s latest book is The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/p...

Luke Dormehl is a journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film. He writes and has written for Fast Company, Wired, The Observer, Empire, SFX, The Sunday Times, Politico and Cult of Mac. He is the author of The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems (And Create More) and The Apple Revolution. Luke’s latest book is Thinking Machines: The inside story of Artificial Int...

Recorded live at Waterstones Piccadilly on 1 December 2016, here's the last Little Atoms of 2016. Neil Denny chats with comedy legend Michael Palin about his book A Sackful of Limericks, followed by an audience Q&A. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Raoul Martinez is a writer, artist, and award-winning filmmaker. Creating Freedom is his first book. It is informed by over a decade of research and is accompanied by a documentary series of the same name. Episode One, The Lottery of Birth - produced, written and co-directed by Raoul - premiered in 2012. It was nominated for Best Documentary at London's Raindance Film Festival and went on to win t...

With performance, presentation, music and discussion, Lucie Green and Simon Barraclough look at the different ways of understanding "a thing so simple a thing as a star".Poet Simon Barraclough, whose series Sunspots is the culmination of four years of writing, travelling, researching and obsessing over the Sun, and Lucie Green, author of 15 Million Degrees: journey to the centre of the Sun, and Pr...

Helen Czerski is a lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. As a physicist she studies the bubbles underneath breaking waves in the open ocean to understand their effects on weather and climate. Helen regularly presents BBC programmes on physics, the ocean and the atmosphere – recent series include Colour: The Spectrum of Science, Orbit, Operation Iceberg, Su...

Tim Marshall is a leading authority on foreign a­ffairs with more than 25 years of reporting experience. He was diplomatic editor at Sky News, and before that was working for the BBC and LBC/IRN radio. He has reported from forty countries and covered conflicts in Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Israel. He is the author of the Sunday Times bestseller Prison...

Dr Adam Rutherford is a science writer and broadcaster. He studied genetics at University College London, and during his PhD on the developing eye, he was part of a team that identified the first genetic cause of a form of childhood blindness. He has written and presented many award-winning series and programmes for the BBC, including the flagship weekly Radio 4 programme INSIDE SCIENCE, THE CELL...

Simon Ings began his career writing science fiction stories, novels and films, before widening his brief to explore perception (The Eye), 20th-century radical politics (The Weight of Numbers), the shipping system (Dead Water) and augmented reality (Wolves). He co-founded and edited Arc magazine, a digital publication about the future, before joining New Scientist as its arts editor. Out of the off...

Recorded live at the first London Podcast Festival at King’s Place, Guardian writer Hadley Freeman brings us her personalised guide to American movies from the 1980s – why they are brilliant, what they meant to her, and how they influenced movie-making forever. Growing up in New York in the 1980’s Hadley learned everything she knows from films like Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, Top Gun, The...

Naomi Alderman is the author of four novels. In 2006 she won the Orange Award for New Writers, and in 2007 she was named Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year, as well as being selected as one of Waterstones' 25 Writers for the Future. All of her novels have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime. In 2013 she was selected for the prestigious Granta Best of Young British Writers. Naomi's l...

Mike Massimino served as an astronaut for NASA between 1996 and 2014, going on two Space Shuttle missions to service the Hubble telescope, spending more than 30 hours on spacewalks. He has appeared as himself on The Big Bang Theory and is now a professor at the University of Columbia. Mike is the author of a new memoir Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe...

Thomas Frank is the author of Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, and What's the Matter with Kansas? A former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and Harper's and a regular contributor to The Guardian, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler. His latest book is Listen, Liberal or, Whatever Happened to The Party of The People. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.