Better Known

Kathy Willis discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Katherine Willis CBE is Professor of Biodiversity in the department of Biology and the Principal of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford. She is also a Crossbench Peer in the House of Lords. Previous roles include Director of Science at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and a member of the UK Government’s Natural Capital Committee. In 2015, Kathy was awarded the Michael Faraday Medal for public communication of science from the Royal Society. Her new book is Good Nature: The New Science of How Nature Improves Our Health.

Staring out of a window onto greenery instead of a brick wall or a general urban scene.

Having a vase of yellow or roses or houseplant with green-white leaves on your desk.

Even if you only have 20 minutes for your walk or run, always head for the park/urban green space. Why? Because experiments show that there is a much greater reduction in our stress hormones (salivary amylase, cortisol and adrenaline) if we exercise in green space rather than on the streets.

Garden without your gloves. Why? Because experiments show when we do so the environmental microbiota (good bacteria) found in biodiverse environments, including organic soils, is transferred onto our skin and into our gut.

Visit the Mediterranean garden at the Royal Botanic Garden, Kew. Why? Because this hidden gem at Kew has a whole host of health benefits associated with it due to the smells (volatile organic compounds) given off by the mediterranean herbs lavender, rosemary, and mint.

Buy a diffuser and diffuse the scents of cypress trees in your home or office. Why? Because clinical experiments and field trials are showing that when we do so, not only are stress hormones reduced, but also it can trigger a significant increase of natural killer cells in our blood.

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Bruce Omar Yates discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Bruce Omar Yates was born in London to an English father and an Indian mother. Bruce grew up in the South of France before returning to London to study Literature and Film at King’s College London. Bruce is principal songwriter for the cult rock groups Famy, who released their album We Fam Econo in 2014, and Los Porcos, who released their album Porco Mio in 2016. The Muslim Cowboy is his first novel and is out now from Dead Ink Books at https://deadinkbooks.com/product/the-muslim-cowboy/.

English Milk Punch: a delicious low-ABV punch made from brandy, tea, spices and milk. It was popular in Victorian times - Dickens would drink it - as it is shelf stable. After refrigeration came along it lost popularity.

I Cantautori Genovesi: Fabrizio De Andre, Gino Paoli, Luigi Tenco (and others) - a group of arty, literary songwriters from Genoa in the 1960s. They would enter songs to compete against each other in the Sanremo Music Festival. Deep romance. Luigi Tenco shot himself after losing the competition one year.

Martin Maloney: A lesser celebrated but wildly influential painter from the YBA generation. His painting style is deliberately crude but makes deeply educated references to the canon.

Sickle Cell Disease: One of the most common inherited diseases in the world, very cruel and life threatening, and particularly rife in West Africa and India.

The Gulag Archipelago: Not exactly unknown, but not enough people have read it. The subject of Soviet war crimes is neglected relative to their scale, the book had a big historical impact, and Solzhenitsyn was a really great writer.

Parenting: Discussion in the culture might make you think that parenting is exhausting, stressful, financially burdensome, and so on, but it's not, it's just wonderful.

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Pedro Domingos discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Pedro Domingos is a renowned AI researcher, tech industry insider, and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington. He is the author of the best-selling book The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World (Basic Books, 2015), which has been translated into over twelve languages and sold over 300,000 copies. His new book is 2040: A Silicon Valley Satire at https://2040novel.com/.

Moravec's paradox: what seems hard for AI is easy and vice-versa. https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/what-is-moravecs-paradox-definition.html

Automation creates more jobs than it destroys, and AI is no exception. https://www.paltron.com/insights-en/does-ai-create-more-jobs-than-it-destroys

John von Neumann was the greatest genius of the 20th century. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/23/books/review-man-from-future-john-von-neumann-ananyo-bhattacharya.html

Olaf Stapledon's "Star Maker" is the greatest science fiction novel of all time. https://yardsaleofthemind.wordpress.com/2021/08/25/olaf-stapledons-star-maker-book-review/

"Her" is that rare thing: a realistic depiction of AI in a movie. https://www.wired.com/story/spike-jonze-her-10-year-anniversary-artificial-intelligence/

Portugal's discoveries in the 15th and 16th centuries started the age of globalization. https://www.history.com/news/portugal-age-exploration

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Harriet Constable is a journalist and filmmaker based in London. Her journalism and documentary work has featured in outlets including the BBC, Economist and New York Times. She is a graduate of Colombia University’s School of Journalism summer school, is a Pulitzer Center grantee and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Her first novel is The Instrumentalist.

Anna Maria della Pietà: the greatest violinist of 18th century, possibly a composer in her own right, fundamental to Vivaldi's music, grew up in the extraordinary Ospedale della Pietà - the original conservatoire of music

Synaesthesia: people think it's seeing music through colour - which it is in The Instrumentalist - but it's more than that. Words can have smells and taste, one sense can trigger another in profound ways.

Bach’s Cello Suite in G minor while standing on a mountain: anyone can enjoy classical music, it's supposed to be listened to LOUDLY, it's supposed to be magnificent. Go somewhere epic, ideally in nature, and play this piece. Track the mountain with your eyes.

The Foundling Museum: the UK’s first children’s charity, a heartfelt ode to the orphans and their parents.

Female musicians: Fanny Mendelssohn, Clara Schulman, Nannerl Mozart, Francesca Caccini - listen to Nocturne in G minor.

Spaghetti Aglio Olio

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C. Michelle Lindley discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

C. Michelle Lindley’s writing has been featured in The Georgia Review, Conjunctions, and more. She has received support from the National Endowment for the Arts and has an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University and a BA from the University of Berkeley in English and Art History. The Nude is her first novel.

Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha https://asianreviewofbooks.com/content/dictee-by-theresa-hak-kyung-cha/

2022 Irma Vep remake https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-reviews/irma-vep-tv-review-1235151952/

The Island of Naxos https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Tourism-g189431-Naxos_Cyclades_South_Aegean-Vacations.html

The Pie Scene from David Lowery’s A Ghost Story https://www.thewrap.com/rooney-mara-devoured-pie-9-minute-ghost-story-scene/

Ana Mendieta's Ocean Bird Washup https://www.ft.com/content/a6c4090e-2cda-11e3-8281-00144feab7de

Kate Braverman https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2019/10/rip-kate-braverman-1949-2019

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Richard Davenport-Hines discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Richard Davenport-Hines is a British historian and literary biographer. His history of the Profumo scandal, An English Affair, was published in 2013. His book on espionage scandals, Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain was published in January. His other books include biographies of W. H. Auden, Marcel Proust and John Maynard Keynes. He was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford in 2016. His new book is History in the House: Some Remarkable Dons and the Teaching of Politics, Character and Statecraft.

Anthony Quayle's novel Eight Hours from England https://thelastwordbookreview.com/2019/09/22/eight-hours-from-england-by-anthony-quayle/

Wrest Park in Bedfordshire https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/wrest-park/

The Merlin app that can identify birdsong https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

Christopher Spence, founder of London Lighthouse hospice

Raccoons https://www.peta.org.uk/blog/13-astounding-facts-didnt-know-raccoon-dogs/

Feedback, the global campaign against food-waste & the ecological damage done by bad agricultural practices https://feedbackglobal.org/about-us/

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Susanna Rustin discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Susanna Rustin is a leader writer on social affairs at The Guardian, where she has worked for more than 20 years. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times. Sexed is her first book.

The "Reform Firm" - the group of women's rights campaigners with Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon at the centre of it, in the middle of 19th century. They organised the first big suffrage petition presented in the House of Commons, ran a magazine for women from Langham Place (just off Oxford Circus), campaigned for jobs and education - Bodichon co-founded Girton college with Emily Davies and she was George Eliot's dear friend. But apart from feminist historians and biographers, hardly anyone knows about them. Victorians are deeply unfashionable for some very good reasons but there is lots to admire about them as well.

Feminist evolutionary biology - feminists going all the way back to George Eliot were deeply and justifiably suspicious of his theory of natural and sexual selection, which they realised would be used as an argument for the naturalness of male dominance and authority, and female passivity and inferiority. But there is the most wonderful tradition of research by female evolutionary biologists and anthropologists - many of them American but some important Brits too - who from the 1970s onwards published research that presented a radical, alternative view of female primate and human behaviour, and countered the masculinist bias in evolutionary science up to that point. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy's book Mother Nature first published in 1999, 25 years old this year, is a beautiful and deeply illuminating book. I think people educated in social sciences/ humanities need to take off their blinkers when it comes to the ways in which humans have - like every other life form! - been shaped by evolutionary forces.

Winifred Holtby - wonderful novelist and essayist; overlooked feminist thinker. She died aged 37: her posthumously published South Riding is a wonderful, sweeping, romantic novel about local government in Yorkshire. a writer for an era of devolution and the return of deep poverty.

The law that enables people to set up parish councils (also called town councils and community councils), in the area they live in - and collect taxes locally - known as a precept - to spend on neighbourhood improvements and services.

The gender gap in higher education - girls now significantly outnumber boys at UK universities and this isn't discussed enough.

The history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Britain

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A.J. Jacobs is an author, podcaster and human guinea pig. He has written four New York Times bestsellers that combine memoir, science, humor and a dash of self-help. His most recent book is "The Year of Living Constitutionally," in which he tries to understand our nation’s primary document by adopting the mindset and lifestyle of our Founding Fathers. The result is “fascinating and necessary” (Booklist) and “marvelously witty and wise” (Kirkus). He hosts the “The Puzzler With A.J. Jacobs,” a daily podcast produced by iHeart media, in which he gives short, audio-friendly puzzles to celebrity guests. His previous books include “The Year of Living Biblically,” “The Know-It-All” and “Thanks a Thousand.” He has told several Moth stories, and given several TED talks that have amassed over 10 million views. His weekly newsletter can be found at https://substack.com/subscribe/experimentalliving. He was the answer to 1 Down in the March 8, 2014 New York Times crossword puzzle.

Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography — specifically his advice on epistemic humility https://apuedge.com/humility-benjamin-franklin-and-arguing-with-humility-part-ii/

James Madison’s notes on the Constitution https://lawmagazine.bc.edu/2016/02/a-cautionary-tale-about-the-notes-of-james-madison/

Walking sticks https://www.stickandcaneshop.co.uk/country-sticks

The World Jigsaw Championships https://www.worldjigsawpuzzle.org/

Padel https://ipadel.co.uk/The-Rules

The MIT Mystery Hunt http://puzzles.mit.edu/

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Katherine Bucknell discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Katherine Bucknell edited all four volumes of Christopher Isherwood's Diaries , a volume of letters between Christopher Isherwood and his partner Don Bachardy (The Animals), and W.H. Auden's Juvenilia: Poems 1922-1928. Co-editor of Auden Studies, a founder of The W. H. Auden Society, and director of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation, she is widely recognised as a leading authority on Isherwood, and her new biography Christopher Isherwood Inside Out is now available. She is also the author of five novels. She was born in Vietnam, raised in America, and lives in London.

Christopher Isherwood's novel Prater Violet https://lonesomereader.com/blog/2024/1/30/prater-violet-by-christopher-isherwood

DH Lawrence's novel The Lost Girl https://journals.openedition.org/lawrence/2328

The Nucleo Project https://www.thenucleoproject.org/

Marfa Stance https://www.marfastance.com/

How scallops move https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGdXxoHJaBA

The value of memorising poetry https://theconversation.com/ode-to-the-poem-why-memorising-poetry-still-matters-for-human-connection-121622

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Tom Newton Dunn is a presenter, political commentator and writer. He first made his name as an award-winning defence correspondent covering the Iraq and Afghan wars. He went on to be Political Editor of The Sun for 11 years, leading coverage of four general election campaigns and the Brexit referendum, and interviewed seven British Prime Ministers and US President Donald Trump.

Moving to broadcast, Tom helped launch Times Radio as the new station’s Chief Political Commentator and the presenter of its flagship Sunday morning political programme. He moved to TalkTV on its launch to anchor an hour-long weeknight news programme. He continues to write for The Times and The Evening Standard. His book is Letters from Everest, available at https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/letters-from-everest-unpublished-letters-from-mallorys-life-and-death-in-the-mountains-tom-newton-dunn?variant=40964397269070.

Britain once invaded Tibet, and by brutal force (in 1904). This was the earliest origin of the modern day conquest of Mount Everest.

Mallory was bisexual, and had homosexual affairs with other Bloomsbury Group members

Mallory had ADHD - or at least, I'm certain he did, as it explains much about him, from his obsessiveness to his forgetfulness (though of course he was never diagnosed)

The Mallory family think George's habit of climbing with a photograph of wife Ruth could be a key clue to whether he reached the top

We revere noble failure more than success - we do for Mallory

More than 300 climbers have died while trying to summit Everest since. Mallory was only the first

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