Following Nasa’s Dart mission, which successfully fired a spacecraft into the asteroid Dimorphos last month, Chris Lintott talks to Tom about what asteroids can tell us about the history of our planet, how scared we should be of them, and why you should be grateful if one hits your car (so long as you aren’t inside it at the time).
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Oct 29
How Prediction Markets Work
According to their boosters, prediction markets such as Polymarket or Kalshi are ‘global truth machines’; their detractors say they’re just a glorified form of gambling. Either way, they’re zero-sum games with, as Geoff Mann put it recently in the LRB, ‘few winners and many loser ... Show More
1 h
Oct 24
Ulysses: James Joyce's properly obscene book
Tom McCarthy, writing in the LRB, described James Joyce's Ulysses as a ‘heavy book, a book full of weight, a fallen book’; a ‘properly obscene book’; ‘a book in which the central stake is the coming into being of the book itself’; a book for which ‘people should desist, once and ... Show More
53m 35s
Oct 22
How Fredric Jameson became Fredric Jameson
Perry Anderson once wrote that in Fredric Jameson’s account of postmodernism, ‘the vocation of Western Marxism has reached its most complete consummation.’ Praising the ‘spacious rhythms’ of his ‘complex, yet supple syntax’ and ‘sudden bursts of metaphoric intensity’, Anderson al ... Show More
53m 25s
Sep 2022
Can Asteroids Rock Our World? with Christina Hernández and Terik Daly
It's a beautiful night—the sky is clear, the stars are twinkling. You see a shooting star! Or is it a comet! Maybe a meteor? Whatever it is, it’s gone in an instant. But what if that whirring bit of space were headed... straight towards the Earth, not past it? Yeah, not so cute. ... Show More
1h 5m
Dec 2022
DART: The Impacts Of Slamming A Spacecraft Into An Asteroid
If an asteroid were hurling through space, making a beeline straight to Earth, how would humans prevent it from doing what it did to the dinosaurs? Would we bomb it? Would we shoot lasers at it like a scene from Hollywood's latest sci-fi flick? Well, the folks at NASA have design ... Show More
14m 7s
Mar 2025
Asteroids Headed Towards Earth with Rick Binzel
<p>How likely is an asteroid to impact Earth? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice sit down with planetary scientist Rick Binzel, the creator of the Torino Scale, to discuss asteroid hazards, the results of the asteroid sample return, and the search for Planet 9.</p><p>NOTE: StarTa ... Show More
46m 59s