Episode summary: “They will be targeted for the rest of their lives.” Where does that leave everyone else? When James Le Mesurier fell to his death in Turkey in 2019 he left behind a tangle of truths and lies. Mayday tells the extraordinary real story of the man who organised the White Helmets – res...

Episode summary: David talks to Roberto Foa about his recent report into young people’s attitude to democracy around the world. Why are millennials so much less satisfied with democratic politics than older generations? Can populist politics do anything to alter that? And what does the generation di...

Episode summary:

Having listened to this first episode via Huffduffer, I decided to subscribe to the podcast only to discover (I fear) that my robot doesn’t seem to pick up the details from Overcast. If it had, I would have noted that this is possibly a podcast where good content will outweigh ba...

You might think, what with my interest in food and living in Italy, that I would have devoured this book when it first came out, but I didn’t, and I don’t know why. It is so glorious, in so many respects. Most importantly, it gives the lie to the idea that Italian food is a food of poverty or someho...

There isn’t much I can say about this luminous book that has not already been said by people far more accomplished than me. I found it a spell-binding read; the different points of view, the empathy for Marie-Laure and Werner, the timeline weaving back and forth, here and there.

How I came to read...

The old coincidence detector beeped yesterday as I listened to the Reply All podcast Candidate One. It was about an election at Berkeley High School, a hotbed of political activism and its evil twin, political chicanery.

Tl, dr; someone tried to cheat and got caught. Yay democracy and truth.

Episode summary: What will it take to make the United States a more fully-functioning democracy, and how can we, as citizens, bring about that change? By host and producer John Biewen, with series collaborator Chenjerai Kumanyika. Interviews with Michael Waldman, Jennifer Cohn, and Sanford Levinson....

Episode summary: A former Ackerman employee explains how expenses were hidden. Leaked audio of Wayne LaPierre lets people know the real damage under his watch. Where will the NRA go from here?

My script was a little flaky in picking up all episodes of this podcast series, but I just wanted to add...

I’ve just finished the most delightful book I have read in a very long time. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles is simply breath-taking in the way it spins its magic. I freely confess to being extremely sentimental, easy to tears in a film or even music, but I don’t recall having wept tears of joy...

Wackos and ZoomGlüts - Not Boring by Packy McCormick

Interesting is such a devalued word. What else to say about this rather fine essay? It explains a lot of things and it explains them well. I particularly sympathised with his experience of the glut of free and wonderful things to do online in th...