The Middle Way Society

Our guest today is the Australian artist Abdul Abdullah. His interdisciplinary approach is primarily concerned with the experience of the ‘other’ in society. This, and the wider topic of prejudice will be the focus of our conversation today. In the youtube version, there is also a slideshow of Abdul's work.

We are joined today by Tim Jackson who is Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey and Director of the Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP). He is also an award-winning playwright with numerous radio-writing credits for the BBC. Tim is perhaps most well-known for his best-selling book ‘Prosperity without Growth’. He has recently published a revised...

We are joined today by Jacob Dunne. Jacob was jailed for manslaughter after a fatal one punch attack in 2011. He talks to us about his early life, his time in prison and the transformative effect of restorative justice, especially how meeting his victim's parents completely turned his life around.

“We are joined today by Ellen Bialystok, a Canadian psychologist and professor who is one of the world’s leading experts on bilingualism and this will be the topic of our conversation.”

Our guest today is Dr. Dan Siegel. Dan is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA. He is also the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute which focuses on the development of mindsight, which teaches insight, empathy, and integration in individuals, families and communities. Dr. Siegel has...

My guest today is Sugata Mitra, who is professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University in the UK. Sugata is by training a physicist with over 25 inventions to his name in the area of cognitive science and education technology. He is widely cited in works on literacy and education and is perhaps most well known as a proponent of minimally invasive education and his ‘Hole in the Wall’ ex...

Our guest today is Jamie Holmes, a former Research Coordinator at Harvard University in the Department of Economics and a Future Tense Fellow at New America . His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Slate, Politico, the Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic and The Atlantic and he’s here to talk to us today about his new book Nonsense: The Power of Not Knowing.

Our guest today is Guy Claxton. an internationally renowned writer, consultant and academic specialising in creativity, education and the mind. He is the author of more than twenty books including the best selling Building Learning Power. He’s going to talk to us today about his latest book: Intelligence in the flesh: Why your mind needs your body much more than it thinks. In the discussion we exp...

We are joined today by the author and essayist Chuck Klosterman who has written books and essays focused on American popular culture. He has been a columnist for Esquire and ESPN.com and wrote "The Ethicist" column for The New York Times Magazine. Chuck is the author of eight books including two novels and the essay collection Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto. He talks to us to...

We are joined today by the author and book editor Roderick Tweedy who’s here to talk to us about his book The God of the Left Hemisphere. The book explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphe...

Our guest today is Helena Bassil-Morozow , a cultural philosopher, writer, and lecturer in media and communication at Glasgow Caledonian University. She’s interested in ways in which we interact with our society, and particularly how our identities are shaped by our environment. Her books include 'Tim Burton: The Monster and the Crowd' , 'The Trickster in Contemporary Film'. Her latest book which...

We are joined today by Nancy L Morgan, a psychologist at a private practice in Clinical Psychology and Director of Behavioral Health at LifeMoves. Life Moves is an organization that combats homelessness in the San Mateo and Santa Clara counties of California and this will be topic of our conversation.

We are joined today by Igor Grossmann, who is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Wisdom and Research Lab based at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada. His main research interest is the complex processes that enable individuals to think and act wisely. He has also done pioneering work on the development of wisdom in different cultures and was named one of the 201...

We are joined today by Matt Robert. Matt runs multiple "recovery“ oriented groups in the greater Boston area in the US. Some are open to the public, some are in detoxes, psychiatric units, shelters, etc.. He uses the platform of SMART Recovery (Self-Management And Recovery Training), and the thrust of his groups is about helping people examine their intention and motivation to change. The groups i...

We are joined today by Tom Gash. Tom is an advisor, researcher and writer on crime policy and government effectiveness, who helps people to think differently about the big challenges facing governments worldwide. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Government, a Visiting Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics, and an expert adviser for the Boston Consulting Group. He’s going to tal...

In this latest member profile, Jim Champion talks to us about his background, how he became interested in science and his career as a physics teacher. He also talks about why he joined the society and his understanding of the Middle Way.

We are joined today by the religious historian and best-selling author Karen Armstrong who has been described as "arguably the most lucid, wide-ranging and consistently interesting religion writer today" (Wikipedia). She is perhaps best known for her books on comparative religion, including A History of God, A Short History of Myth and The Spiral Staircase. Her work focuses on commonalities of the...

We are joined today by British author and journalist, Tobias Jones. Tobias was educated at Jesus College, Oxford, and then worked at the London Review of Books and the Independent on Sunday. He’s a best-selling author and his books include The dark heart of Italy, Utopian dreams and Blood on the Altar. He moved to Parma in Italy in 1999, returning to the UK in 2004. Jones and his wife now manage a...

We are joined today by the Welsh Journalist, documentary filmmaker, screenwriter and bestselling author Jon Ronson. He’s written nine books including Them: Adventures with Extremists, The Psychopath Test as well his most recent work So you’ve been publicly shamed , an exploration of shame in particular via social media outlets such as Twitter an this is going to be the topic of our discussion. The...

We are joined today by Glyn Blackett who is a Mind – Body health coach from York in the UK. He specializes in stress management skills training, in particular using biofeedback in conjunction with the practice of mindfulness. He’s the author of the book Mind-Body Intelligence: How to manage your mind using biofeedback and mindfulness and this will be the topic of our discussion today.

My guest today is Robert Epstein, who is a senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology in California. He is the author of 15 books, and the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today. His books include Teen 2.0: Saving our children and families from the torment of adolescence and Parsing the Turing Test: Philosophical and methodological issues in...

We are joined today by Charles Kenny, who is an English/American economist and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development. He’s the author of several books including Overselling the Web: Development and the internet, The upside of Down: Why the rise of the rest is good for the West and we are going to talk about his book Getting Better: Why Global Development Is Succeeding--And How We Can...

We are joined today by Nigel Ohlson, a counsellor /psychotherapist & professional youth worker practising in South Devon in the UK. He’s also experienced in delivering Adventure Therapy based programmes and this will be the topic of our discussion.

We are joined today by Mike Rose who is a research professor in the department of education of UCLA, California. He’s the author of several books including Why School, Back to School and Possible Lives. We’re going to be talking about education and some of the themes explored in these books but we’ll be focusing in particular on his book The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American W...

This week’s guest is Sharon Begley. Sharon is an American journalist who is the senior science writer for Stat, the publication from The Boston Globe that covers stories related to the life sciences. Previously she was the senior health & science correspondent at Reuters, the science columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and previous to that the science editor at Newsweek. Her interests include th...