Pod Academy

In 1958 Charles Keeling began measuring the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere - the graph of his year-on-year measurements is called 'The Keeling Curve'.

Fast forward 50 years, and we are all familiar with debates on global warming, but it is a complex, interrelated problem, with no clear end point.  Humankind seems unable to get to grips with it.

Craig Barfoot talks to Dr Joshua Howe,of Reed University about his book, Behind the Curve: Science and the Politics of Global Warming.

We can't afford to fail on curbing emissions, and yet failure is inevitable, we are already failing.  Joshua Howe argues that any contribution is valuable and points to local and regional Climate Action Plans [in the UK that might be the Transition Towns movement as well as local authority enviornmental plans] that address our moral responsibility, and enable us to take action.

 

This podcast is presented and produced by Kieron Yates.

Although he’s one of France’s most widely read and popular authors of the twentieth century, Boris Vian has never won the international recognition gained by friends and contemporaries such as Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

Kieron Yates talks to Alistair Rolls, Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Newcastle, Australia about the life and work of Boris Vian

Even within France, apart from a few doctoral studies, Vian’s work has remained outside the consideration of academia and to some degree is still frowned upon by scholars.

The closest most English speaking audiences will have come to Vian’s work is probably Michel Gondry’s 2004 film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which drew inspiration from two of Vian’s novels. More recently Gondry has directed a film of Vian’s most famous book, L’Ecume des Jours. Titled Mood Indigo for English speaking audiences, the film stars Audrey Tautou and gets its US and UK cinema release this summer.

A recent translation of Vian’s poems and short stories – If I say If- published by the University of Adelaide Press, and co-edited by Alistair Rolls means that for the first time all of Vian’s short stories are available in English.

Born in 1920 at Ville D’Avray, a bourgeois town on the western edge of Paris, Boris Vian was raised in a world of imagination fuelled by literature and society games. His parents were well-off and his early life was carefree and comfortable. But, in 1929 the stock-market crash ended the Vian fortune. The Vian’s were forced to move into the caretaker’s cottage of the family home so they could rent out the main house. At the age of twelve Vian was diagnosed with a heart condition that consigned him to his bedroom and to the care of his mother.

Boris’s health improved in his teenage years and he went on to become a brilliant scholar who, reputedly, had read everything.

Alistair Rolls: He was clearly very talented from an early age. One of his next door neighbours as a child was Yehudi Menuhin and Menuhin and he used to play chess together. He was very sharp. He was very mathematically alert… very musically alert early on and he was brought up in a very culturally alert environment so he was exposed early on to opera and all kinds of classical music.

I kept on coming across the expression, “Il a tout lu”…he’s read everything. No one’s read everything. Then the people in the Boris Vian Foundation in Paris took me aside and said , “You have to understand that you know that we publish more now than we used to publish.” So back in the 1920′s it was not possible to read everything but you could give it a damn good shot.

So he had this ongoing heart condition which he had from early on. I think it wasn’t just the heart condition that stifled Vian. It was then people’s reaction to the heart condition notably his mother. So he was certainly over mothered when he was young and I think he rebelled against that. And then you have this overwhelming thesis which is such that Vian killed himself by living. He lived too hard and brought about his own death.

KY:  Boris’s obsession with literature and language led to him cultivating a passion for punning and wordplay. He also began to learn English in his spare time.

Music also played a major role in Boris’s teenage life. At the age of 16 he developed a passion for jazz and went on to become not only a competent trumpeter and band leader but a highly regarded critic and editor for jazz magazines.

In the immediate post-war years Vian could be found in the trendy hotspots of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, rubbing shoulders and exchanging ideas with other luminaries of the area or simply playing his trumpet in the lively clubs.

How much of our social status is tied to that of our parents and grandparents? How much does this influence our children? More than we wish to believe. While it has been argued that rigid class structures have eroded in favour of greater social equality, Gregory Clark's The Son Also Rises, proves that movement on the social ladder has changed little over eight centuries.

In this bookpod, Gregory Clark, a Professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, talks to Craig Barfoot about his novel technique of tracking family names over generations to measure social mobility across countries and periods.  It led him to conclude that even in countries apparently committed to equality - like Sweden and the USA - it can take hundreds of years for high status families to revert to the mean of ordinariness.

This podcast is about the relations between the social sciences and the neurosciences, and what it might mean to do interdisciplinary work between these areas. Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard, two social scientists interested in stepping outside the bounds of social-science methods, and especially experienced in engaging with neuroscientific experiments, offer a new way of thinking about collaboration between the social- and neuro-sciences. They call their approach ‘Experimental Entanglements’.

Research on the brain, as well as the widespread dissemination of this research, has significantly shaped our understanding of what it is to be human in the 21st century. Indeed, many facets of human life that were, for much of the twentieth century, primarily understood through the abstractions of ‘culture’ or ‘society’ – commercial and economic life, historical change, identity, mental illness – are increasingly understood as functions of the cerebral architecture of individuals or of groups of individuals.

This rapid growth in the neurosciences has produced a wide variety of reactions. Steven Pinker has recently argued that neuroscience offers the greatest intellectual resource for the humanities and social sciences; Raymond Tallis has, in contrast, argued that it poses the gravest of intellectual threats. Indeed, Tallis is far from being the only one to have worried about the reductive and potentially anti-humanist tendencies of the neurosciences.

And yet, beyond such debates, it is increasingly clear that the more that scientists experiment on and with the human brain, the more it becomes clear that our brains, and the experimental and intellectual practices that attend to them, are bound up in cultural, semiotic, bodily, societal and aesthetic ‘webs’. The current situation in cognitive neuroscience – with techniques such as functional neuroimaging available in ever more sophisticated forms – is ripe for a new level of interdisciplinary engagement.

In the last few years, both Callard and Fitzgerald have participated in a number of explicitly designed ‘interdisciplinary’ ventures that have attempted to bring neuroscientists and social scientists together. The European Network of Neuroscience and Society (ENSN) and the Volkswagen Foundation’s European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences and the Humanities are two of these. Indeed, Fitzgerald and Callard first developed their approach of ‘experimental entanglement’ in a workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, which they co-designed, and which was funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. In this podcast they reflect especially on the opportunities and constraints offered by such ‘interdisciplinary’ ventures. They counter a model in which social scientists and neuroscientists simply ‘interact’ with one another, secure in their own disciplinary arenas, and instead propose a much more complex and awkward practice of ‘experimental entanglement,’ in which to collaborate both in and beyond the neuroscientific laboratory.

The podcast touches on existing experimental collaborations. Fitzgerald discusses his research in the Urban Brain Lab at King’s College London, which focuses on the overlap between sociology and neuroscience in questions around city life and mental health – and asks what a shared investigation across these disciplines can and should look like. Callard discusses her on-going collaboration on the brain and mind ‘at rest’ with neuroscientists and psychologists. For much of the twentieth century, psychologists were heavily preoccupied with studying how people respond to external tasks, which made it harder for scientists to bring together biology, psychology and culture to get at what the brain, mind and body are doing when they are ‘at rest’ (i.e. not responding to an external task).

In contrast to usual social scientific interest in effects, ethics, or outcomes of the neurosciences as such,

Introducing Hari Kunzru

Hari Kunzru is an award-winning British novelist famous for authoring several highly acclaimed novels, including The Impressionist (2002), Transmission (2004), My Revolutions (2007) and Gods Without Men (2011). Named among the twenty best young British novelists by Granta in 2003, Kunzru is also a PEN activist and 2014 Guggenheim Fellow. Since his debut novel’s publishing in 2002, he has cemented his role as one of Britain’s most acute observers and commentators on modern life and its intricacies.

Photo credit: Jamie Diamond

“Transmission: A Conversation with Hari Kunzru”, was an event in honour of the author held at Birkbeck, University of London, in June 2014. In the Podcast, Kunzru answers questions about his work and there is additional insight and context provided by experts studying his work. There is also advice on ‘where to start with Kunzru’ for listeners wishing to learn more about the novelist.

A roller-coaster ride of surrealism, dystopia and satirical humour, Kunzru’s works come to life to both challenge preconceptions and shatter the boundaries of genre in contemporary British writing.

This podcast was produced and presented by Jo Barratt, with Isabella Grotto

Transcript

Jo Barratt: Welcome to Pod Academy. In this podcast we welcome the author Hari Kunzru, who came to read and answer some questions about his work at an event at Birkbeck university of London. The event was co-convened by Bianca Leggett, who explained her reasons for bringing this group of academics, writers and fans together to discuss Kunzru's work.

Bianca Leggett: My work looks at British contemporary fiction and new cosmopolitan forms and tries to bridge those things together, which is something Hari's work does. I have been very struck by the sense that Hari Kunzru's work, by being so restless and inventive, really stretches over a great deal of expertise and scholars haven't been brought together before and I was determined to make that happen, and I'm delighted it finally has.

JB: Before Bianca speaks to the author, we're going to get an introduction from some of the attendees on the day. Dave Gunning is a lecturer in English literature at the University of Birmingham.

Dave Gunning: Hari Kunzru first really came into prominence in this country as one of the Granta best young British novelists in 2003 on the strength of his one published novel at that time and academics get worked up about to what extent he can be classed as a British novelist, given the global themes that are inside his work, but certainly they seem to identify the talent correctly. The Impressionist, which also won the Betty Trask prize, is the story of an Indian boy travelling around various identities in the early Twentieth century. It takes a sort of romp through the colonial era, but it's also completely tied in to contemporary concerns about identity, what it means to be authentic, what it might mean to actually possess an identity, and throughout subsequent works we see this mix of an intellectually informed level of understanding of debates around culture, and particularly contemporary culture, tied to this wonderful storytelling sense. We see how the contemporary world is experienced and how people orientate themselves within that. In Transmission, the second novel in 2005, we get a computer virus bringing together the worlds of Bollywood cinema, brand management, fortress Europe, and the low status of Indian "tech" workers in the US. It's a broad, intertwining and very funny book. In 2007, My Revolutions is more serious in tone and revisits the political activism of the 1960s in Britain. In 2011 he revisited this the network novel, his interconnected narratives, in Gods Without Men, with these broad marks of crossing historical periods, both finding a geographical base in the unearthly landscapes of...

A third of workers, internationally, earn less than $2 a day.

The World Bank sets the poverty line at $1.25 a day, and on that basis asserts that poverty is declining.  But is that right? Where did that figure come from?  The New Economics Foundation estimates that it should be set at $5 a day, and others suggest $10.

Craig Barfoot talks to Dr Ben Selwyn Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Sussex University about his book the Global Development Crisis.

Rejecting the idea that 'the poor' need to rely on benign assistance, and that the market provides the answer, Dr Selwyn puts forward the view that the capital/labour relationship is the reason most of the world's workers are poor, and advocates labour-centred development - where 'the poor' (the global labouring classes), and their own collective actions and struggles constitute the basis of an alternative form of non-elitist, bottom-up human development.

You can catch up with Ben Selwyn lecturing at Sussex in this YouTube video: here

This book pod is produced and presented by Craig Barfoot.

This podcast is produced and presented by Lee Millam.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, OCD, is a clinically recognised disorder which affects around 1-2% of the population. It is debilitating and paralysing. People with OCD experience intensely negative, repetitive and intrusive thoughts, combined with a chronic feeling of doubt or danger (obsessions). In order to quell the thought or quieten the anxiety, they will often repeat an action, again and again (compulsions). [definition from OCD Action]

Psychologists believe the condition may run in families or that people with OCD have an imbalance of serotonin in the brain.

Now new research is being done at Goldsmiths, University of London that could, in the future, help with treatment. It identifies the precuneus, considered as a central hub between posterior and prefrontal brain regions (and often involved with processing of self-attribution, responsibility and causal reasoning) as a key area for intervention. 

In the meantime, for those with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, its impact can be devastating as Imogen and Maria explain....

Maria: I was affected by imperfections in goods I'd bought, or around the flat I'd see a mark and that would bother me - I'd have to try and cover it or do something with it.  And if something was really bad, I'd lose the ability to function.  I'd go into a deep depression and just sit there, not being able to do anything.  And that led eventually to a nervous breakdown when I was about 32, which is when it was diagnosed.

Imogen:  I can remember I was really scared of being told off in school.  I'd do everything I could to prevent being told off.  I'd get all my school clothes ready in the morning and I wouldn't go in my bedroom after 7am.  I'd get changed in the hallway, I'd have everything out there.  If I'd left something in my room I'd have to get someone else to go in and get it for me because I just felt 'no I can't'.  I thought if I did go in something bad was going to  happen - I wasn't aware of what - perhaps getting told off at school, or someone getting hurt - I just didn't know.

LM:Help is available from the helpline OCD Action.

Olivia Bamber, OCD Action:  OCD can affect anyone of any age, in any job, any gender.  From as young as possible to as old as possible.  Anyone.

Maria: You feel that if you don't think a certain way some harm will happen to someone you love or you care about. Sometimes you have to count certain numbers in your head.  You do things but you don't realise it because you are so living with it all the  time. Half the time you don't realise what you are doing. Most people with OCD have to keep washing their hands or performing tasks all the time, whereas I don't do that. Mine is a different form of OCD - checking things for imperfections etc.  When I was diagnosed, I had peculiar obsessions - ones I don't have any more. But I still have OCD.

LM:  What 'peculiar' obsessions?

Maria: When I had my nervous breakdown it was over my little dog, Cherie.  Initially my partner bought her for me as a puppy because I thought if I had a dog it would help the OC - it would sort it out - but unfortunately she became the focus of my OCD. She was imperfect.  I'd look into her eyes, see a vein that I thought shouldn't be there, and I'd keep checking her and checking her, until I got to a point where I thought there is something not right here, I've got to do something.  I don't want to harm her - it was the worst fear I ever had of harming that little dog that I loved (and I did love her) but I couldn't function, I couldn't do anything. I'd be laying in bed and I remember just crying, I couldn't bear her near me.  I completely broke down and I was taken to hospital and diagnosed with OCD.

Imogen:  I had great support from my family.  They took me to see a CAMS specialist (Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service).

Mario Balotelli, Patrice Evra, Kevin Prince Boateng and Dani Alves are just some of football's most decorated players to have endured racial abuse from fans in the past few seasons.

For eighteen months, Dr Mark Doidge, a sports sociologist, has been studying the efforts to combat racism of three of Europe's biggest clubs - one in Poland, one in Germany and one in Italy . Last month he presented his findings to UEFA at their headquarters in Geneva.

Alex Burd caught up with him on the phone to discuss his report. He started by explaining how he picked his case studies.

Mark Doidge: I used Legia Warsaw in Poland, Borussia Dortmund in Germany and Roma in Italy. The reasons for these clubs was twofold really. One was to have a representative of a club from the north, south and east of Europe so you get a fairly wide geographic spread. The other one was through discussions with UEFA, the clubs should be of sufficient size but also have a bit of contestation within the fan group so it wasn’t a universal group with a particular political persuasion. In Italy especially fan groups have political persuasions and some of them are seen as left wing or right wing. Left wing groups might automatically incorporate anti racism into their approach whereas if you chose a club like Roma which had a mixture of groups with political persuasions you get a sense of contest and a real sense of what’s happening on the ground.

AB: So looking specifically at Italy, we've seen one of Italy’s most prominent black players, Mario Balotelli, receive racial abuse as he trained with the national team ahead of this summer’s World Cup. What are Italian clubs like Roma doing to counteract this?

MD:That’s an excellent question and it’s a very easy answer – very little. One of the recommendations I made in my report to UEFA is that the clubs should support anti-racism measures. That way they can remove it from being an ideological approach. Unfortunately anti-racism has been tied into a left wing identity politically in Poland and Italy, and this automatically gets rejected by those who don’t see themselves as left wing. This liberal lefty thing they don’t want to be incorporated with. Whereas when the football club takes it on board, it’s still political but it’s no longer an ideological position. It’s human rights, it’s common sense, it’s a normal thing that should be done.

One of my recommedations to the UEFA was that Borussia Dortmund was the model club for taking a real interest in this and taking it seriously. There is a picture of Gundogan, one of their players, holding up a club scarf saying ‘against racism’ and this was something you could buy in the club shop. The club also support a fan project which runs modules on civil courage which teaches interaction without resorting to violence and being assertive in public.  There is another on cultural learning and another on anti-racism and the far right. They hold these within the club stadium and participants get a club tour at the end of it. So to me Borussia Dortmund are the model club; unfortunately from what I saw in Legia Warsaw and Roma this hasn’t been taken on board.

AB: If we go back two years Polish football’s record on racism was under heavy scrutiny ahead of the 2012 European Championships. So you would suggest   that these fears of racism towards black players had some basis with Legia?

MD:  That’s a very good question. There was that BBC Panorama programme which provided a good case study on how the media present things, and the impact that has.  There are two things of at work here. First I feel, a personal opinon, that the British media are very good at pointing the finger at other people as if to say ‘racism has dissipated in Britain but look at these foreigners, aren’t they uncivilised in comparison to Britain.’ Let’s not get away from the fact that Britain has had very ...

Money. We all know what it is, but who creates money? The answer is actually surprising. 97% of money in our economy is created by private banks when they make loans, and this is carried out by these banks simply typing numbers into a computer. In doing so, private banks invariably divert this newly created money into house price bubbles and other forms of financial speculation.

So, in response to this, a campaigning organisation named Positive Money has sought to raise public awareness about such money supply issues, highlighting, in a recent book named Modernising Money(2012), how house price inflation, high levels of personal debt and widening inequality can all be linked to who has the power to create money.

I went to speak with Positive Money’s founder, Ben Dyson, in their London office. I started by asking about the aims and objectives of the organisation.

Ben Dyson: We're trying to get a banking system that works for society and not against it. We have seen all of the chaos that the financial system has caused over the last few years and since then there hasn't really been fundamental change. There's been a lot of tweaking around the edges, but we haven't actually addressed the root cause of the financial crisis and also the root cause of many of the social and economic problems that we are facing today.

Christopher Daley: So, Positive Money is therefore looking to bring forth quite radical changes rather than tinkering around the edges of monetary reform?

BD: Yeah, we have got some ideas about fundamental things that need to change, which some people say are radical; in reality they have been done in the past. But, it is a big step further than what the authorities have made with regards to fixing the banking system in response to the crisis.

CD: Ok, could you just outline, very quickly, what those big changes you want to see are?

BD: At the moment it's really about the power to create money and who has this power and how they use it, and if you ask people in the street, most people are under the impression that money can only be created by the government, because that's what you see on every £10 or £20 note. The reality is that the government only actually creates 3% of all the money that exists. The other 97% is just numbers in a computer system, it's those numbers you see when you check your bank balance. They don't represent any real money, they're just an electronic entry into a computer. What that means is that those numbers are created by banks when they make loans, so when you walk into a bank and take out mortgage, that money is not coming from someone's life savings, it's actually created out of nothing. This has implications for almost everything, from debt to poverty to inequality to how much your house costs to whether there is a financial crisis or whether the economy is growing or shrinking. What we're advocating is that we shouldn't be leaving the power to create money in the hands of the same banks that caused the financial crisis and we should remove that power from those banks and return it to a democratic, transparent, accountable body that works in the public interest rather than in the short term interests of the financial sector.

CD: So that led me to ask Ben why, in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, these issues surrounding the control of money supply have not featured more prominently in the news. And I also asked whether these debates about money supply have been seen before?

BD: It's a good question. There used to be huge debates about this a hundred years ago, particularly around the time of the Great Depression as well, and this discussion of money creation was debated by really high profile economists. In the US, when the New Deal was implemented after the Great Depression to get the US economy going again,

Between 1975 and 2010 the style of gourmet dining, in America and beyond, was transformed.

Increasingly, restaurants of ‘fine’ dining incorporated food, décor, and other elements previously limited to the ‘casual’ dining experience.  The celebrity chef, working in an open kitchen, took over from the Maitre D as the most important player, and in many places starched white tablecloths gave way to scrubbed wooden tables.  Innovation, experiment and diversity (rather than the long established rules of French cuisine) have become the order of the day.

In this podcast Eric Lemay talks to Alison Pearlman, author of Smart Casual: The Transformation of Gourmet Restaurant Style in America (University of Chicago, 2013). It first aired on the New Books in Food channel of the New Books Network .

The gourmet experience, of our imagination - an elegant restaurant with a single candle flickering at the center of a luminous white tablecloth,  a quartet playing somewhere in the background, a waiter slipping a perfectly plated appetizer of escargot before you, which you proceed to nuzzle out of their shells with silver tongs and that dainty fork  -  has changed.

It was, perhaps, when Food & Wine magazine declared Roy Choi one of its “Best New Chefs” of 2010 for the food he was serving up in his Kogi BBQ truck, that this sea change in our idea of gourmet eating was confirmed.

And that’s the very change that Alison Pearlman explores in her book,

Alison describes a gourmet experience “replete with eroded hierarchies and pointed style contrasts, convergences of haute and ordinary.” And, of course, food trucks - they may have started in Los Angeles, but as she points out, they have spread much further.  For example, London street food  is cause for foodie celebration and serious London foodies can be found standing on the windy embankment of the Thames eating a pulled pork roll at the The Real Food Market on the SouthBank.  And do listen to Kieron Yates brilliant podcast, The Best Burger in the World? about a food truck in Paris.

In a keen investigation of every element of the dining experience, from menus to molecular gastronomy, Pearlman’s book reveals the surprising nature of what fine dining means for us today.