Episode summary: An update on the future of The Test Kitchen series and PJ Vogt and Sruthi Pinnamaneni’s departure.

Episode summary: This fourth session in the Earth Convention series explores the huge global impact of food production on the environment and climate change - and indeed on human health. Food production is responsible for a quarter of all the greenhouse gas emissions contributing to global warming,...

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Episode summary: The past 12 months have been tumultuous for us all. But imagine, for one second, how it would have been without a cup of tea? In the first three months of lockdown, we spent an additional £24 million on tea and coffee according to research firm Kantar. And despite tea trends divergi...

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Episode summary: Are different countries counting deaths from Covid 19 in the same way? Tim Harford finds out if we can trust international comparisons with the data available. We discover Peru currently has the most excess deaths per capita over the course of the pandemic, while Belgium has the hig...

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Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the idea and experience of Christian pilgrimage in Europe from the 12th to the 15th centuries, which figured so strongly in the imagination of the age. For those able and willing to travel, there were countless destinations from Jerusalem, Rome and Sa...

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Episode summary: Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures that centre around acts of love - from the story of Ruth Coker Burks, who became a loving caretaker for hundreds of men during the AIDS epidemic, to the poet Nikita Gill’s look at a love which ended in its beginning. Jewel...

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Episode summary: Julia Angwin, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Markup, joins us to talk about her innovative method for investigating Facebook and holding it accountable — paying Facebook users to show her team what they’re seeing. This is a thrilling interview about what the future of data jo...

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Episode summary: David and Helen talk to Nick Timothy, former chief of staff in Downing Street under Theresa May, about the future for Boris Johnson’s government. Is he now safe from leadership challenges? Can he hold together the coalition that won the 2019 election? Is Keir Starmer the one under p...

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Episode summary: The story of the twelve bronze zodiac heads that are at the center of a fight over the repatriation of Chinese cultural heritage. Most believe all such cultural artifacts should return to China, but many others argue that these objects are also serving as nationalistic propaganda. 1...

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Episode summary: As a young biology student, one of the things I and my classmates worried about was population. You didn’t need to be a mathematical whizz to understand the force of Thomas Malthus’ argument in An Essay on the Principle of Population, even if you didn’t agree with the methods he pro...

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