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A simple childhood memory of jubilation raises a lasting question: Is it better to persist with activities we dislike and struggle with, or pursue what comes naturally?

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In 2014 Niall Campbell was described as one of the most promising poets of the younger generation of Scottish writers. Hailing from the island of South Uist in the Western Isles, Campbell is a poet whose work is as lyrical as it is intriguing. After the publication of his debut collection Moontide (Bloodaxe), Campbell took time to talk to the SPL about growing up on an island, his interest in spirituality without God, and the similarities between sculpture and poetry.

David Wright Faladé reads his story “Amarillo Boulevard,” from the October 6, 2025, issue of the magazine. Wright Faladé, the recipient of a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, is the author of a nonfiction book, “Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers,” and the novels “Black Cloud Rising” and “The New Internationals,” which was published earlier this year.

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Kristi Noem is the controversial Secretary of Homeland Security. A staunch MAGA loyalist, she's in charge of ICE detention facilities, including one in Dallas, Texas, that was attacked this week.

As the face of the Trump administration's intensified raids and arrests by US Immigration and Enforcement (ICE) agents, Kristi Noem has become a lightening rod in America, both loved and hated for her combative approach and her many viral media moments - some call her the 'ICE Barbie'.

A former South Dakota Snow Queen winner, she's risen fast from her cowgirl roots. There's even talk of a run for president in 2028.

Presenter: Mark Coles

Host Meghna Chakrabarti and executive producer Jonathan Dyer offer a behind-the-scenes look into how On Point is produced. Recorded in front of a live audience at WBUR CitySpace.

How the science of evolution explains how everything came to be, from bacteria and blue whales to cell phones, cities, and artificial intelligence

Everything Evolves: Why Evolution Explains More Than We Think, from Proteins to Politics (Princeton UP, 2025) reveals how evolutionary dynamics shape the world as we know it and how we are harnessing the principles of evolution in pursuit of many goals, such as increasing the global food supply and creating artificial intelligence capable of evolving its own solutions to thorny problems.

Taking readers on an astonishing journey, Mark Vellend describes how all observable phenomena in the universe can be understood through two sciences. The first is physics. The second is the science of evolvable systems. Vellend shows how this Second Science unifies biology and culture and how evolution gives rise to everything from viruses and giraffes to nation-states, technology, and us. He discusses how the idea of evolution had precedents in areas such as language and economics long before it was made famous by Darwin, and how only by freeing ourselves of the notion that the study of evolution must start with biology can we appreciate the true breadth of evolutionary processes.

A sweeping tour of the natural and social sciences, Everything Evolves is an essential introduction to one of the two key pillars to the scientific enterprise and an indispensable guide to understanding some of the most difficult challenges of the Anthropocene.

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On Point news analyst Jack Beatty on a concept that explains an anomaly in today’s economic news: retail sales are up while other key economic indicators are down.

Call this Mrs. Dalloway’s podcast. We’re reading classic fiction from a century ago for light on the strangeness of the world in our day, or maybe just for relief reading a great old book. The dazzling young critic Merve Emre is our guest and our guide to Virginia Woolf’s modernist masterpiece, Mrs.Dalloway, from 1925. The novel is a day in the life, or a slideshow in the mind, of a rich, ruling class lady in London, volubly in love with life, out shopping for flowers on Bond Street on a morning in June for a party she’ll be giving at home that evening.

Merve Emre.

But Mrs. Dalloway is also a novel of ruin alongside rapture. A second major character, Septimus Smith, is a veteran of World War I. Broken by combat and shell shock, considering suicide because, in his madness, he supposes that only killing himself would allow him to honor life as it should be lived.

The post Mrs. Dalloway at 100 appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

I was delighted to talk to Rhodri Lewis, author of Shakespeare’s Tragic Art. We discussed Shakespeare’s most under appreciated plays, the best films, how to teach Shakespeare, humanism, personae, Frank Kermode, the future of the humanities, being supervised by John Carey, A.C. Bradley, what we have learned about Francis Bacon, and more. There’s a transcript below and you can also watch the whole conversation on YouTube if you wish. We also covered Rhodri’s love of Pevsner architectural guides.

Timestamps

00:00:00 Introduction

00:00:21 Shakespeare's best and worst plays

00:03:14 Performing Shakespeare

00:07:33 Pragmatism

00:09:13 Early experiences with Shakespeare

00:13:52 Teaching Shakespeare

00:17:08 Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet

00:19:38 Which five critical works?

00:23:37 Francis Bacon

00:31:31 What have we learned about Shakespeare?

00:34:32 Too much Shakespeare?

00:41:57 Tragedy

00:49:04 Humanism

00:54:00 Kermode

01:03:59 Quickfire questions

This is a catch-up version of James O'Brien's Mystery Hour. To join the game, call 0345 60 60 973, Thursdays at 12pm.