Civilization and the planet

Broadcast from Serbia, this episode dives into the Balkans, the most misunderstood, most underestimated corner of Europe, and one with the biggest upside if it can ever stop tripping over its own history. We look at why Serbia sits so close to Russia, why Kosovo still blocks the ...  Show more

This episode begins at the ancient seven-arch bridge in Killaloe, the crossing point where Clare, Tipp and Limerick collide, and jumps to Višegrad in eastern Bosnia, where Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina uses one structure to tell a five-century story of tribes, trade, love, ...  Show more

In honor of our Earth, on her day, we have two stories about the overlooked, ignored, and neglected parts of nature. In the first half, we learn about an epic battle that is raging across the globe every day, every moment. It's happening in the ocean, and your very life depend ...

Myths. We tend to think they’re a thing of the past, fabrications that early humans needed to believe in because their understanding of the world was so meagre. But what if modern civilisation were itself based on a set of myths? This is the big question posed by Professor Yuval ...  Show more

Understanding the new world order is a moving target. In this episode Rick engages in a thought-provoking conversation with Ian Bremmer, president and founder of the Eurasia Group. Bremmer, a prominent political scientist and author, delves into the complexities of the shifting g ...  Show more

One of the difficulties in thinking about extinction, as Lorraine Daston argued in her recent review of Vanished by Sadiah Qureshi, is ‘the challenge of scale: the mismatch between our decades and centuries and the Earth’s epochs and aeons’. Lorraine joins Tom to explore the ways ...  Show more