Episode summary: From the fields of Ukraine to a bakery in Beirut, we find out what it costs to produce a global staple - bread.

Episode summary: Natalie Haynes, critic, writer and reformed stand-up comedian, brings the ancient world entertainingly up to date. In each episode, she profiles a figure from ancient Greece or Rome and creates a stand-up routine around them. She then goes in search of the links which make the ancie...

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Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the remarkable rise of Venice in the eastern Mediterranean. Unlike other Italian cities of the early medieval period, Venice had not been settled during the Roman Empire. Rather, it was a refuge for those fleeing unrest after the fall of Rome who sett...

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Episode summary: 5x15 is delighted to announce a special online event with Oliver Burkeman, author of the international breakout bestseller Four Thousand Weeks, a book that touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of readers. Inspired by its investigation into time and how we use it, some of those...

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Episode summary: Today’s bad idea is about how ideas get adopted, argued over and rejected: David talks to political philosopher Alan Finlayson about what’s wrong with seeing this as a competitive marketplace. From St. Paul to Citizens United, from John Stuart Mill to Jordan Peterson, what happens w...

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Episode summary: After Toronto unveiled its “raccoon-resistant” compost bins in 2016, some people feared the animals would be starved but many more celebrated the innovative design. Rolling out this novel locked bin opened a new battlefront in city’s ongoing “war on raccoons.”

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Episode summary: Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Austrian-British economist Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (1944) in which Hayek (1899-1992) warned that the way Britain was running its wartime economy would not work in peacetime and could lead to tyranny. His target was centralised planni...

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Episode summary: In this crossover episode with EconTalk, Tyler joins Russ Roberts to discuss Grossman’s 20th-century epic on war, freedom, and humanity

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Episode summary: Just hours after Donald Trump claimed victory in the US presidential election, rumours started swirling that something was afoot. A graph went viral on social media that appeared to show there were 20 million more votes cast in 2020 than in the 2024 election. Where had these suppose...

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Episode summary: Earlier this year I read a book called The End of Reality by the writer Jonathan Taplin. The book is a meditation on the outsize power and influence of four billionaires: Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Andreesen, and Elon Musk. After the election I rang Jonathan up for a special...

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