Public

Mona Awad reads her story “The Chartreuse,” from the July 28, 2025, issue of the magazine. Awad is the author of four books of fiction, including “13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl,” which won the Amazon Best First Novel Award, and “Rouge,” which was published in 2023. Her new novel, “We Love You, Bunny,” will come out in September.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Once upon a time, what we now call scientists were known as "natural philosophers". These were people who studied the physical universe through observation and logic, using philosophical methods and reasoning. Today, science and philosophy have gone their separate ways, with some scientists rejoicing in the split (the late theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking famously pronounced that "philosophy is dead"). This week we're asking if science and philosophy need each other, and if a reconciliation between the two would benefit both.

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.

For the final episode in our current series on the history of bad ideas, David talks to philosopher Alexander Douglas about the damage that can be done by the idea of identity. Why is the search for a distinctive personal identity such a futile quest? How does it lead to an identity politics of exclusion and violence? What can we learn from the philosopher Spinoza about having an identity without identity? And what can we glean from the experience of dementia about losing ourselves?

'Against Identity: The Wisdom of Escaping the Self' by Alexander Douglas is out now wherever you get your books https://bit.ly/40d8xES

Available from Saturday on PPF+: Part 2 of David’s conversation with Alexander Douglas in which they talk about how Silicon Valley took a philosophical concept of identity and turned it into a commodity to be marketed. Plus, how should we think about ‘impostor syndrome’? To get this and all our bonus episodes plus ad-free listening sign up now to PPF+ https://www.ppfideas.com/join-ppf-plus

Next time we return to Politics on Trial with an 18th-century blockbuster: Warren Hastings vs the British Empire

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I interviewed Alain de Botton, a philosopher and writer who has turned personal pain into universal wisdom. He's written dozens of books and built The School of Life into a YouTube channel with nearly 10 million subscribers, but the thing that makes him unique is that he approaches writing as a form of emotional archaeology. We talked about why good writing requires suffering, why loneliness is essential to the creative process, and how writing is actually a form of revenge. He also shared his approach to writer's block and why he believes the pressure is on us creatives to deepen our self-exploration. If you want to understand how to write with emotional honesty and create work that genuinely connects with people, this conversation will show you a completely different way to think about the craft. Enjoy!

Hey! I’m David Perell and I’m a writer, teacher, and podcaster. I believe writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. For the first time in human history, everybody can freely share their ideas with a global audience. I seek to help as many people publish their writing online as possible.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s hard to believe that Fitzcarraldo Editions has only existed for ten years; during that short time, they have published a remarkable selection of books (gathering four Nobel Prizes between them), and their iconic blue and white covers have become a mainstay of the bookshop. To celebrate their first decade, Fitzcarraldo are publishing some of their best-loved titles in hardback, limited edition form.

Brian Dillon and Kate Briggs will be at the shop to discuss their books in this series: Dillon’s Essayism (a gathering together of his loose trilogy on the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking), and Briggs’ This Little Art, a fresh, fierce and timely meditation on literary translation. The conversation will be chaired by Helen Charman, whose political history of motherhood, Mother State, came out earlier this year from Penguin.

It was a week that brought the future of Greece and the Eurozone to the brink. Ten years ago, on 6 July the Greek people voted against the terms of a financial bailout which included raising taxes and slashing welfare spending.

Greece owed €323bn to various countries and banks within Europe. Its banks were closed. A quarter of the population and half of Greece’s young people were unemployed.

The morning after the vote, Euclid Tsakalotos was brought in to replace Yanis Varoufakis as finance minister. His predecessor had accused European leaders of “terrorism” in their handling of the crisis. Parachuted in to last-ditch talks with angry European leaders, Euclid Tsakalotos describes to Josephine McDermott the make-or-break 17-hour summit in Brussels.

He reveals that when Angela Merkel, the leader of Greece’s biggest lender Germany, said she was leaving the room because she could not accept what was on the table, Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, actually locked the door to stop her leaving and force an agreement to be reached.

Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.

Recent episodes explore everything from football in Brazil, the history of the ‘Indian Titanic’ and the invention of air fryers, to Public Enemy’s Fight The Power, subway art and the political crisis in Georgia. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: visionary architect Antoni Gaudi and the design of the Sagrada Familia; Michael Jordan and his bespoke Nike trainers; Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal; and Görel Hanser, manager of legendary Swedish pop band Abba on the influence they’ve had on the music industry. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the time an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the President of the United States in protest of America’s occupation of Iraq; the creation of the Hollywood commercial that changed advertising forever; and the ascent of the first Aboriginal MP.

(Photo: A queue outside a bank in Greece in 2015. Credit: Getty Images)

All metaphysical theories are…really weird. In episode 134 of Overthink, Ellie and David chat with Eric Schwitzgebel about his book Weirdness of the World. They think through the difference between weirdness and bizarreness, the nonsensical nature of philosophical theories, and whether we should all just agree with Occam’s razor that the simplest explanation is always best.Is the recent theory that we’re all living in a simulation really that strange? Is it stranger than the idealist metaphysics of Plato or the atomism of Lucretius? And why are philosophical theories doomed to weirdness? Are we the weird ones, or do we just live in a weird world? In the bonus your hosts talk about the butterfly effect and the infinitude of the universe, and how neurodivergent traits can be rewarded in philosophy.

Works Discussed:
Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy
Eric Schwitzgebel, Weirdness of the World

Support the show

Patreon | patreon.com/overthinkpodcast
Website | overthinkpodcast.com
Instagram & Twitter | @overthink_pod
Email | [email protected]
YouTube | Overthink podcast

Before the Greeks and Romans, the Celts ruled the ancient world. They sacked Rome, invaded Greece, and conquered much of Europe, from Ireland to Turkey. Celts registered deeply on the classical imagination for a thousand years and were variously described by writers like Caesar and Livy as unruly barbarians, fearless warriors, and gracious hosts. But then, in the early Middle Ages, they vanished. In The Celts, Ian Stewart tells the story of their rediscovery during the Renaissance and their transformation over the next few centuries into one of the most popular European ancestral peoples.
The Celts shows how the idea of this ancient people was recovered by scholars, honed by intellectuals, politicians, and other thinkers of various stripes, and adopted by cultural revivalists and activists as they tried to build European nations and nationalisms during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Long-forgotten, the Celts improbably came to be seen as the ancestors of most western Europeans—and as a pillar of modern national identity in Britain, Ireland, and France.
Based on new research conducted across Europe and in the United States, The Celts reveals when and how we came to call much of Europe “Celtic,” why this idea mattered in the past, and why it still matters today, as the tide of nationalism is once again on the rise.

Ian Stewart is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. His work has focused particularly on ideas of language, nation, and race in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain, Ireland, and Europe. He has also written at length on the late Scottish Enlightenment and is the co-editor of Adam Ferguson's Later Writings: New Letters and an Essay on the French Revolution (Edinburgh University Press, 2023).

Sidney Michelini is a post-doctoral researcher working on Ecology, Climate, and Violence at the Peace Research Institute of Frankfurt (PRIF).

Book Recomendations:

Modern Ireland 1600-1972 by Roy Foster

British Identities before Nationalism: Ethnicity and Nationhood in the Atlantic World, 1600–1800 by Colin Kidd

The Scottish Enlightenment: Race, Gender, and the Limits of Progress by Silvia Sebastiani

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices