Past Present Future

Today’s episode in our series about transhumanism and its astonishing influence looks at how it helped build Silicon Valley. David talks to Duncan Bell about what happened when California became the centre of transhumanist operations. Where do drug-taking hippies fit into this story? Who were the cyberpunks and what did they want? How were Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and others shaped by the transhumani...

In part two of our series about how transhumanism shaped our world, David talks to Duncan Bell about what happened when sci fi dreams started to become reality. What changed when space travel turned from fantasy to fact? Did supercomputers herald new human possibilities or the prospect of human obsolescence? Why did transhumanism move from the left to the right of the political spectrum? And who b...

Today it’s the first episode in a new series about the weird and wonderful world of transhumanism: the idea that human beings can be transformed by technology and machines. David talks to historian of ideas Duncan Bell about transhumanism as science and as science fiction, as accurate prophecy and as outright lunacy. How did the idea have its origins in Darwinism? Why did the early transhumanists...

For the final episode in our series on living in an ageing world David talks to Lyndsey Stonebridge about one of the most interesting and challenging of all writers on the subject of old age – Simone de Beauvoir. Why did Beauvoir believe that we are all duplicitous about the elderly? How did she experience her own ageing body and the prospect of her own death? What did she learn from watching Sart...

In today’s episode for our series about living in ageing societies, David talks to historian and legal scholar Samuel Moyn about the problem of gerontocracy, aka the rule of the old. Why do older generations now have so much wealth and so much power? Why is this particularly true in the United States? Is the real problem elderly politicians or elderly voters? Do the young stand a chance any more?...

In today’s episode of our series about the significance of longer human lives David talks to the doctor and writer Richard Coker about the meaning of the event that comes for all of us in the end: death. Are we finding it harder to talk about and face up to mortality? How do doctors think about death, having seen so much of it? Is the line between life and death getting harder to draw? What is the...

To start our new series about what it means to live in a world of ageing populations, David talks to geneticist Adam Rutherford about the benefits and pitfalls of increasing longevity. Are GLP-1s – drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro – miracle cures that will extend human lifespans? What happens if longer lives do not coincide with better health? How far can life extension be pushed? And who w...

Today is the final episode in our series about the relationship between twentieth-century biography and philosophy. David talks to Nikhil Krishnan about the life and thought of Iris Murdoch, a deeply philosophical novelist and a fully committed philosopher. How was Murdoch influenced by the ideas of Plato? Why did she believe that metaphysics could serve as a guide to morals? What lessons did her...

In today’s episode about the intersection between twentieth century philosophy and biography David talks to the historian and literary critic Lyndsey Stonebridge about the life and thought of Hannah Arendt. How did Arendt, who was Jewish, make sense of her passionate relationship with Martin Heidegger, who was a Nazi? How did she experience her double exile, first to France and then to the United...

Today’s episode in our series about twentieth-century philosophy and biography explores the life and thought of Elizabeth Anscombe (G. E. M. Anscombe), a remarkable and remarkably uncompromising philosopher. David talks to Nikhil Krishnan about Anscombe’s relationship with Wittgenstein, her relationship with Catholicism and her fierce relationship with the truth. Why did she believe that consequen...

In the second part of David’s conversation with historian Robert Saunders about the impact of the Bulgarian crisis of 1876 on the course of British politics, they discuss how Gladstone used the controversy to plot his way back to power. What made his campaign in the Midlothian constituency a watershed in the history of parliamentary democracy? How did he overcome Queen Victoria’s resistance to ret...

In our occasional series with historian Robert Saunders about significant political anniversaries, we remember the appearance of a pamphlet exactly 150 years ago that changed the course of British politics. On 6th September 1876 William Gladstone published The Bulgarian Horrors: The Question of the East, which reignited and reshaped his epic rivalry with Benjamin Disraeli. What made the two m...

In today’s episode exploring how twentieth-century philosophy and biography intersect David talks to philosopher and biographer Kate Kirkpatrick about Jean-Paul Sartre, a thinker whose life has been as closely scrutinised as his ideas. What made Sartre an existentialist? How was he shaped by his wartime experiences? Was he, as his critics claimed, a useful idiot for fashionable causes? Why has his...

David talks to philosopher and author Nikhil Krishnan about the life and times of a little known but highly influential twentieth-century philosopher: J. L. Austin, who believed that the deepest truths lay in understanding how ordinary language worked. Why was Austin so opposed to the ideas of A. J. Ayer? How were his experiences in planning D-Day in 1944 an extension of his approach to philosophy...

In our series about how twentieth-century philosophy and biography intersect, David talks to philosopher Alex Carter about the life of Albert Camus, novelist, playwright, journalist, celebrity and public intellectual. What makes Camus a philosopher as well? How was he shaped by his Algerian background? Does it make sense to call him an absurdist? How did he try to reconcile the very different part...

The second life we explore in our series about the twentieth-century philosophers could not be more different from the first: David talks to philosopher Alex Carter about Simone Weil, who died aged just thirty-four and lived through much political and personal hardship, some of it self-inflicted. How did her asceticism inform her philosophical outlook? Why did she believe she needed to work in a f...

Today we begin a new series exploring twentieth-century philosophy through the lives of the people behind the ideas. First up David talks to philosopher Nikhil Krishnan about A. J. Ayer, the man who helped inspire the rise and fall of logical positivism. What did Ayer discover about the nature of truth when he went to Vienna on his honeymoon? How did he manage to popularise such a technical approa...

In today’s episode David talks to forensic anthropologist Sue Black about what happens when forensic science and forensic expertise end up on trial in the courtroom. When and how did scientists get involved in the business of criminal prosecution? What changed with the advent of DNA testing? Is the adversarial system the best way of testing scientific evidence? Can a jury distinguish between good...

We come to the end of this series of bad ideas with a conversation with neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan about the problems of living in an age of diagnosis, when all medical conditions need a label and new labels appear all the time. What happens when the classification criteria for conditions like autism and ADHD get broader and broader? Are doctors or patients driving this? When does predictive t...

Today’s bad idea is one with a very recent history but also a long backstory: David talks to author and journalist James Marriott about what happens when the written word gets supplanted by video and when videos get shorter and shorter. Did the rot set in with television, with YouTube or with TikTok? Is short-form video a symptom or a cause of our shrinking attention spans? What does it mean to ha...

Today’s bad idea is also one that is very hard to pin down: David talks to writer and literary scholar Ian Ellison about the concept of decadence, which went from explaining the fall of ancient Rome to becoming a label modern artists wanted to claim for themselves. What makes a society decadent? Is it always a bad thing? When does decadence explain what’s happening and when does it distract from w...

Today’s bad idea spans literature, film, pop culture and plenty else besides: David talks to literary critic and memoirist Catherine Taylor about what’s wrong with romantic heroes, from Byron and Heathcliff to James Dean and Jack Kerouac to Bridget Jones’s Mr Darcy and Andy Burnham. How did Romanticism give rise to the template for the brooding outsider who gets the girl? Which was the only Bronte...

Today’s bad idea is one the United States has been stuck with for a long time: David talks to historian of America Adam Smith about the damage done by the idea of the electoral college. Why was it thought necessary by the Founders to have special electors between the voters and their choice of president? What made it a dead letter almost as soon as it was created? How has it served to distort or d...

Today’s episode in the history of bad ideas is about one of the central ideas in modern philosophy: utilitarianism, or the view that what matters is the greatest happiness of the greatest number. David talks to philosopher Nikhil Krishnan about how something that sounds so intuitively unobjectionable can produce some extremely objectionable outcomes. What is utility and how do we measure it? Does...

Today’s bad idea is a pervasive political myth: the notion that what really matters at election time is political leadership. David talks to political scientist Jane Green about why leaders are less important than they – and we – tend to think. What does shape how people choose to vote? Why do we consistently overstate what leaders can do? Did Blair or Johnson or Starmer really ‘win’ their electio...