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Lew Watts was born and raised in Cardiff, Wales. He lived and worked for many years in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa before moving to the United States in 2002. He is the author of the novel, Marcel Malone, and three poetry collections—his most recent, Eira, a collection of haibun and haiku, received a 2024 Touchstone Award. Lew is also the co-author, with Roberta Beary and Rich Youmans, of Haibun: A Writer’s Guide, and serves as the haibun co-editor of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America. Beyond poetry, he is ex-chair of the World Bank’s external panel on climate change, and a past board member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the home of the Doomsday Clock; he currently sits on various corporate and non-profit boards. He divides his time between Chicago and West Michigan with his wife, Roxanne, and his rascal-of-a-dog, Willis. His other passions are four granddaughters, fly fishing (anytime, anywhere), rugby, jazz guitar, tango music, and gin martinis.

In Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (Cambridge University Press, 2024), Julia Jarcho proposes that the desire to write is inextricably bound up with masochistic desires. In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late nineteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, Jarcho tests the limits of masochism as a pleasure-making economy. Reading Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy alongside Sigmund Freud, Gilles Deleuze, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani and others, Jarcho investigates the ways in which masochism rewrites and reinvigorates failures of desire, which critics have otherwise thought of as dead-ending masochism. Jarcho asks particularly difficult questions of masochism as a response to injurious social structures, which yield less uniformly white, searching, and uneasy views of both masochism and authorship. Throw Yourself Away reconsiders how writing and subjects are undone by the excesses and recesses of masochistic desire, which keeps the prospect of pleasure so painfully, so deliciously at bay.

Kaliane Bradley's The Ministry of Time started as a fan fiction project to entertain herself and her friends during covid lockdowns and became an instant hit. 

A final look back at some of the encounters and moments that have encapsulated the programme’s commitment to rigorous, well-researched interviews with people in power.

UnHerd's Freddie Sayers speaks to Quillette Founder and Editor, Claire Lehmann.

Join Freddie Sayers on UnHerd as he sits down with Claire Lehmann, founder of Quillette, the Sydney-based magazine launched in 2015 that’s become a global force for reason and free expression.

With Trump powering through his first 100 days and Right-wing populism surging across the West, the free speech landscape is shifting. Are journalism and open debate now under threat from the Right? Has the Left’s 'woke' orthodoxy given way to a new 'woke Right' menace?

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US-based writer Omar El Akkad has written a book of searing essays, asking, among other things, what it is that 'polite liberal progressives' actually stand for. Guest: Omar El Akkad, journalist, novelist, essayist. Book: ''One day, everyone will have always been against this’ (Text)  Producer: Ann Arnold

For many, technology offers hope for the future―that promise of shared human flourishing and liberation that always seems to elude our species. Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies spark this hope in a particular way. They promise a future in which human limits and frailties are finally overcome―not by us, but by our machines. Yet rather than open new futures, today's powerful AI technologies reproduce the past. Forged from oceans of our data into immensely powerful but flawed mirrors, they reflect the same errors, biases, and failures of wisdom that we strive to escape. Our new digital mirrors point backward. They show only where the data say that we have already been, never where we might venture together for the first time. To meet today's grave challenges to our species and our planet, we will need something new from AI, and from ourselves. 

In The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking (Oxford UP, 2024), Shannon Vallor makes a wide-ranging, prophetic, and philosophical case for what AI could be: a way to reclaim our human potential for moral and intellectual growth, rather than lose ourselves in mirrors of the past. Rejecting prophecies of doom, she encourages us to pursue technology that helps us recover our sense of the possible, and with it the confidence and courage to repair a broken world. Professor Vallor calls us to rethink what AI is and can be, and what we want to be with it.

Our guest is: Professor Shannon Vallor, who is the Baillie Gifford Professor in the Ethics of Data and AI at the University of Edinburgh, where she directs the Centre for Technomoral Futures in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. She is a standing member of Stanford's One Hundred Year Study of Artificial Intelligence (AI100) and member of the Oversight Board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Professor Vallor joined the Futures Institute in 2020 following a career in the United States as a leader in the ethics of emerging technologies, including a post as a visiting AI Ethicist at Google from 2018-2020. She is the author of The AI Mirror: Reclaiming Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking; and Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting; and is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Technology. She serves as advisor to government and industry bodies on responsible AI and data ethics, and is Principal Investigator and Co-Director of the UKRI research programme BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Our host is: Dr. Christina Gessler, who is the creator and producer of the Academic Life podcast.

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Welcome to Academic Life, the podcast for your academic journey—and beyond! You can support the show by downloading and sharing episodes. Join us again to learn from more experts inside and outside the academy, and around the world. Missed any of the 250+ Academic Life episodes? Find them here. And thank you for listening!

Kirsty Lang began her BBC career in 1986 and worked as the Central Europe correspondent for the BBC World Service and as a reporter on Newsnight. After a stint as The Sunday Times’ Paris correspondent, Kirsty went on to present Channel 4 News. Since 2002, she has been a stalwart of Radio 4, presenting Front Row, Last Word, and Round Britain Quiz.

We discuss the BBC's financial squeeze, its plans to restrict international access to domestic radio services, the importance of BBC programming as a form of soft power, the broader implications of budget cuts on public service broadcasting, and what it's like to be the quizmaster on Round Britain Quiz.

“Democracy is under threat. It has never been so under threat in my entire lifetime."

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