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On the 22nd of August 1922, Michael Collins was shot dead in Béal Na Bláth, County Cork.

His death at just 31 ensured he would become one of Ireland’s most iconic figures, forever frozen in time.

This week on What Were We Like, we explore the complicated legacy of Michael Collins.

We also look at the significance of the revival of interest of Collins in recent years and the impact Neil Jordan’s film had on his legacy, despite taking some poetic licence.

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George Saunders reads his story “Appeasement, Ohio,” from the October 26, 2026, issue of the magazine. A winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, among others, Saunders is the author of five story collections, including “Tenth of December” and “Liberation Day,” and two novels, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” which was awarded the Booker Prize in 2017, and “Vigil,” which was published earlier this year.

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Depending on who you talk to the American Israel Lobby is either one of the most powerful forces in US politics or an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

In this Rear Vision we explore the history and ask if the Israel Lobby exist? And if it does what impact it may have had on US politics and US foreign policy in the Middle East.

How AI is rewiring our social fabric—and how we can better shape our future.
 
The age of AI is not what you think. Rather than ushering in a fourth Industrial Revolution, AI has become a crucial social infrastructure of everyday life. It's embedded in the tools, platforms, and systems that organize our most intimate lives and our interactions with the most fundamental institutions of society, from government agencies to banks and schools. In these linkages are embedded assumptions about who we are, what we can do, and where we belong.
 
In Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life (U California Press, 2026), Mona Sloane offers a pragmatic framework for understanding these transformations around prediction, classification, and linearity, proposing that we think about AI as a social arrangement that we coproduce. Drawing on over a decade of empirical research and real-world examples, this book invites us to see AI for what it is: deeply social, deeply political, and open to change. Clear-eyed and provocative, Predicted is a call to reclaim deliberations about progress and innovation as a public good and to ensure that the futures we chart are the ones we choose—together.

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We’re in the wild west of cyberspace. It is a man-made ecosystem, this cyberspace, where man-made AI lives and flourishes, but we’re coming to know that it’s a dangerous place, crawling with bullies and predators, infinitely rich, rife with disruption, misinformation, bad advice, and prurient distractions as well.

Francine Berman.

And furthermore, we’re coming to know that super brainy AI could be quite capable of killing off our soulful old human species, extinguishing our humanity if we let it. So who is protecting us, you ask? What is the public interest? What’s the oversight in this new technology? Where are the guardrails in cyberspace? These are the questions raised by our guest Francine Berman in an urgent guidebook called Better Tech: Putting People First in Cyberspace.

The post Better Tech appeared first on Open Source with Christopher Lydon.

Meg Wolitzer presents three stories that explore good intentions and how they can go wrong.  In “Mantis,” by Gina Chung, a deadly insect tries to mend her ways. The reader is Monica Raymund.  Dino Buzzati’s “The Jacket,” translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti, features a garment that just keeps on giving—but at what cost?  The reader is Justin Kirk.  And two outsiders connect at a party in Caitlin Horrocks’ “23 Months,” read by Liza Weil.

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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.

There is nothing more exciting than seeing children captivated by the magic of stories, and for many of us there’s no better children’s storyteller than Rosemary Sutcliff. Rebeka Russell, publisher of Manderley Press, joins us to share her enthusiasm for the author who inspired her love of literature at a young age and reads from her favourite of Sutcliff’s many books, The Armourer’s House.

Our second guest, Sam Leith, author of The Haunted Wood: The History of Childhood Reading, then takes us into the enchanted world of children’s books and we discuss the importance of both childhood reading and reading to children. Sam’s insights into the development of stories, from oral storytelling to myths, legends, folklore and fairytales, are fascinating and explain how the endless retelling of stories lies at the core of children’s books.

The themes that run through such books (adventures, escape from the structure of adult life and facing the dangerous world on your own) resonate throughout Sutcliff’s work. Although she did not learn to read until she was 9, her mother read Celtic and Saxon legends to her, which fed her imagination and inspired her love of folklore and history. As a child Rosemary suffered from chronic juvenile arthritis and as a result was severely disabled. Like other authors with a difficult childhood, her books always feature a character who is different and is often left on the sidelines, and in her signature she incorporated a dolphin as a symbol of freedom. Initially trained as an artist and miniaturist, she had an extraordinary attention to detail which is reflected in her books’ vivid descriptions of both people and places.

From the perfection of her memoir Blue Remembered Hills (available from  Slightly Foxed) to her historical novels about the Roman occupation of Britain, the Dark Ages, and Norman and Tudor times, Sutcliff’s extraordinary imagination lives on in the canon of children’s writing.

This episode’s recommended reads were Carlo Rovelli’s On the Equality of All Things, Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s autobiography A British Childhood and Susan Hill’s series featuring the detective Simon Serailler.

In 1516, the publication of one small book would coin a new word and give rise to centuries of literature, theory, and thought. In his most influential work, the lawyer and Tudor politician Thomas More (1478-1535) described a seemingly perfect – but entirely fictional – island called Utopia. In 1535, less than two decades after writing the book, More was executed for refusing to accept King Henry VIII as supreme head of the church of England. Misha Glenny and his guests discuss why More’s exploration of service and the ideal state has been read as a blueprint for society, a scathing satire, and as a timeless warning. This In Our Time episode examines the 16th-century origin and legacy of one of most influential works of political philosophy. The discussion explores Utopia’s roots in Renaissance Humanism, what the book has to say about tyranny and governance, and why utopias can so often seem dystopian.

With

Laura Ashe

Cathy Shrank

And

Joanne Paul

Producer: Martha Owen

Reading list:

Terence Cave (ed.), Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ in Early Modern Europe: Paratexts and Contexts (Manchester University Press, 2008)

J. H. Hexter, More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea (Princeton University Press, 1952)

Richard Marius, Thomas More: A Biography (Harvard University Press, 1999)

Thomas More (ed. Joanne Paul), Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2025)

Thomas More (ed. George M. Logan), Utopia (Cambridge University Press, 2016)

Thomas More (ed. Gerard B. Wegemer and Stephen W. Smith), The Essential Works of Thomas More (Yale University Press, 2020)

Joanne Paul, Thomas More: A Life and Death in Tudor England (Michael Joseph, 2025)

Joanne Paul, Thomas More: Classic Thinkers (Polity, 2016)

Howard P. Segal, Utopias: A Brief History from Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012)

Cathy Shrank and Phil Withington (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas More's Utopia (Oxford University Press, 2023)

Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1: The Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1979)

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production

A world-class seminar every week. Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time celebrates the pursuit of knowledge and the enduring power of ideas. In each episode, host Misha Glenny and expert guests explore the characters, events and discoveries that have shaped our world.

Jeanette Winterson joined us to celebrate the French edition of One Aladdin, Two Lamps, her book-length exploration of storytelling, built around One Thousand and One Nights. She recalls finding Shahrazad in her hometown library and the insight this led her to: that she could read herself as fiction as well as fact, and so rewrite her own story. The conversation moves from Freud, epigenetics and the plasticity of the brain to Manchester's Industrial Revolution and the lessons we failed to learn from it. Winterson traces AI from Ada Lovelace to Turing to today's tech moguls, making a case for cautious optimism and for calling it "alternative intelligence." She also argues for being present in the world, and looking at art without a phone.

Buy One Aladdin Two Lamps here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/one-aladdin-two-lamps-2

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Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and two previous collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. She is Professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.

Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company.

Listen to Alex Freiman’s latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3w

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