The Vietnam Paris connection

Is idleness ever a virtue? In a world that seems to privilege utility and productivity above all else, Matthew Sweet considers whether we can rethink the importance of doing nothing. His guests for Radio 4's late night ideas discussion programme are:Tom Hodgkinson, editor of The ...  Show more

Do individuals or broader forces shape history? In the 2025 Reith lectures on BBC Radio 4, Rutger Bregman argues that small groups of individuals can have an outsize influence and he looks to examples in history from suffragism to the ending of slavery. In the Free Thinking studi ...  Show more

Vietnam, or Indochina as it was known, had been under French colonial rule since the nineteenth century. This was until the Vietnamese nationalist group, the Viet Minh, took on the French in 1946. Ho Chi Minh, son of a Confucian scholar, former chef in Boston, and lover of French ...  Show more

Podcast episode about the Vietnam war with Noam Chomsky, and Mrs Van, a member of the Vietnamese Women's Union. We look at the geopolitics of the conflict and its human cost. Support this podcast and get early access to episodes and other benefits here on patreon: https://patreon ...  Show more

In the chaos of the helicopter evacuation from Saigon in April 1975, Doan Hoàng Curtis' sister was somehow left behind. It would haunt her family for years. Doan was just three years old when her family made it onto one of the last helicopters to leave Saigon as troops from the c ...  Show more

Top Chef alum Tu David Phu joins Google to talk about his book, "The Memory of Taste: Vietnamese American Recipes from Phú Quoc, Oakland, and the Spaces Between." The book is a playful collection of over 85 Vietnamese and Viet American dishes, and immersive travel photography tha ...  Show more