I have long wanted to meet John McWhorter. He’s an extremely well-known public intellectual and opinion leader who, in my opinion, always talks sense. I have this rather eccentric idea that before becoming a public intellectual, you need to earn your credentials by having something important and interesting to be intellectual about, and John McWhorter qualif ... Show More
Oct 2025
If God designed it, why is it so badly built?
In this episode, Richard Dawkins revisits a 2012 conversation from the Great Minds program, produced by the Educational Broadcasting System in South Korea. He examines why life looks designed yet is full of flaws, showing how imperfections in nature reveal the true workings of ev ... Show More
13m 46s
Sep 2025
Why Ants Tear Off Their Own Wings
In this episode, Richard Dawkins revisits a 2012 conversation from the Great Minds program, produced by the Educational Broadcasting System in South Korea. Drawing on themes from his book Flights of Fancy, Dawkins explores humanity’s ancient dream of flight, the physics that gove ... Show More
15m 47s
Sep 2025
Why Ideas Spread Like Viruses
In this episode of The Poetry of Reality, Richard joins a live audience in Edinburgh to discuss his latest book, The Genetic Book of the Dead. In this wide-ranging conversation, he reflects on how DNA preserves the story of evolution, describing organisms as “living books” that r ... Show More
1h 15m
Mar 2018
Words and Deeds - the Astor Visiting Lecture 19 October 2017
Michael Jackson, Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School, delivered the Astor Visiting Lecture at Oxford on 19 October 2017. Introduced by Ramon Sarró (Oxford). Abstract: 'In this talk, I share some vignettes from my recent fieldwork among A ... Show More
57m 25s
Mar 2021
R. A. Judy, "Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black" (Duke UP, 2020)
In this episode, I interview R.A. Judy, professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, about his book Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiēsis in Black, which was published by Duke University Press in 2020. In Sentient Flesh R. A. Judy takes up f ... Show More
1h 14m
Sep 2023
Episode 4: John McWhorter
I recently started learning French, and the process has made one thing clear to me: There’s a lot I don’t understand about how languages work. So, I turned to John McWhorter, a linguist who has dedicated his career to demystifying the roughly 7,000 languages spoken around the wor ... Show More
30m 13s
Feb 2024
Jonathan A. C. Brown, "Slavery and Islam" (Oneworld Academic, 2019)
In his majestic and encyclopedic new book Slavery and Islam (Oneworld Academic, 2019), Jonathan A. C. Brown presents a sweeping analysis of Muslim intellectual, political, and social entanglements with slavery, and some of the thorniest conceptual and ethical problems involved in ... Show More
1h 8m