Four Thought

The United Nations recently predicted that the world's population will grow to nine billion by 2050 and ten billion by the end of the century.

Whilst news of population growth is often greeted with panic and dismay Danny Doring, a human geographer at the Oxford University Centre for the Environment, argues that, in fact, there's nothing to fear in the future, because the population bomb has already diffused.

Four Thought is a series of talks which combine new ideas and personal stories.

Recorded during the Edinburgh festival, speakers explain their thinking on the trends and ideas in culture and society in front of a live audience.

Producer: Caitlin Smith.

We might think the web is something different, another world somewhere out there - or indeed in our devices - but as Emily Bell argues, the web is actually mapped onto our physical world: the real and the virtual are the same thing.

Emily spent almost twenty years working at the Observer and then the Guardian, setting up Media Guardian website in 2000. Three years ago she and her family moved to New York and Emily became the Director of the Tow Centre for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

Living her life over two continents has caused her to consider the affect of cyberspace on actual space. Are we, as so many promised in the 90s, witnessing the death of distance?

Four Thought is a series of talks which combine new ideas and personal stories.

Recorded during the Edinburgh festival, speakers explain their thinking on the trends and ideas in culture and society in front of a live audience.

In the 1990s, author Alan Bissett was a lad and women were 'birds'.

In a frank and personal account, Alan talks about why he turned to the work of the late American radical feminist Andrea Dworkin after becoming concerned over his use of internet pornography.

He dissects elements of what he describes as our "sex saturated culture" and argues that men need to start engaging with feminism for the good of all.

Recorded during the Edinburgh festival, speakers explain their thinking on the trends and ideas in culture and society in front of a live audience.

Producer: Caitlin Smith.

Greg Votolato confesses his addiction to cars while arguing for more sustainable designs to meet our desire for status and private space. Four Thought is a series of talks which combine new ideas and personal stories. Speakers explain their thinking on the trends and ideas in culture and society in front of a live audience.

Yasmin Hai says it's not Western foreign policy that is radicalising British Muslims but more pedestrian psychological factors closer to home. Four Thought is a series of talks which combine new ideas and personal stories. Speakers explain their thinking on the trends and ideas in culture and society in front of a live audience.

Jad Adams thinks we're dealing with homelessness less well than in the 1930s. Speaking from his experience helping homeless people, he argues that current policy - which he says ties the homeless to hostels funded by their benefits - is not the answer. Four Thought is a series of talks which combine new ideas and personal stories. Speakers explain their thinking on the trends and ideas in culture and society in front of a live audience.

Andrew Graystone speaks from personal experience to argue that we're using the wrong language to talk about cancer. Four Thought is a series of talks which combine new ideas and personal stories. Speakers explain their thinking on the trends and ideas in culture and society in front of a live audience.

Advertising guru Kevin Allen tells a tale of missing cutlery on passenger jets to show where business leaders go wrong. Success, he says, belongs to the "buoyant" leader, riding high on the esteem of the workforce, rather than ruling by fear.

Four Thought is a series of thought-provoking talks combining personal stories with ideas of contemporary relevance. Speakers air their thinking in front of a live audience, hosted by David Baddiel.

Social anthropologist Jamie Tehrani sees our obsession with celebrity culture as a result of our maladapted brains.

Economist Judith Shapiro argues that the next steps towards equality for women will be far harder than those which went before.

Four Thought is a series of thought-provoking talks which combine personal stories with ideas of contemporary relevance. Speakers air their thinking in front of a live audience, hosted by David Baddiel.

Producer: Sheila Cook.