BBC In Our Time

I have found myself moving back to blogs and podcasts. From 2002 to 2009 roughly, my social media world would largely have revolved around a number of blogs like Tyler Cowen's Marginal Revolution, Andrew Gelman, Crooked Timber, and others. All of them are thankfully still going strong and available on the side bar as a blog feed. I also spent a lot more time listening to radio and the BBC archive in particular was a major source of company during some of the nocturnal phases of my PhD. Many readers here will be familiar with the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time. It takes the form of the host Melvyn Bragg interviewing three academics about a topic. Bragg is an interesting host, at times a little prickly and often working hard to keep authority over academic guests that like most of us would happily go the full hour themselves on any particular question. The programmes cover a wide range of topics from history, science, philosophy, and culture. It has a UK-focus and most of the guests are academics from British universities, and predominately humanities academics. At the time of writing this post, the programme had accumulated over 1,000 episodes. Below in no particular order are 10 episodes that might be interesting to readers here. I hope at least one researcher or student reading the blog finds these for the first time and gets as much benefit from them as a source of companionship when in the knowledge trenches as I did.  

1. David Hume 

2. Bergson and Time

3. Happiness 

4. Game Theory 

5. Ulysses 

6. Utilitarianism 

7. Hannah Arendt

8. Booth's Life and Labour Survey

9. Circadian Rhythms

10. Theory of Justice