RadioWest

Thursday, a conversation with Bassem Youssef. He was a heart surgeon in Egypt before he reinvented himself as the Jon Stewart of the Arab world. He joins us to talk about the power of satire to make a point.

Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond to “to front only the essential facts of life.” But as the scholar Laura Dassow Walls shows in her biography of Thoreau, there was much more to his life and work than his brief experiment at living in the woods. (Rebroadcast)

In about 30 years there will be 10 billion people on the planet. Most of them will probably be middle class and want things like cars, homes, and Toblerone bars. How do you provide for that many people? Well, there are basically two answers.

In a new book, the philosopher Scott Samuelson offers seven ways of looking at suffering. He pulls wisdom from the lessons of ancient Greek myth, the horrors of the Holocaust, and the beautiful pain of blues music. (Rebroadcast)

Friday, we’re talking about George Frideric Handel's beloved Messiah oratorio. It’s a story with scandal, godliness, and of course, beautiful music.

The philosopher Roman Krznaric has spent years thinking about empathy, and he suggests you forget the idea that it’s some fluffy, feel-good concept. He joins us to talk about our capacity for empathy and why it matters. (Rebroadcast)

Wednesday, we’re talking to scholar Eugenia Cheng about how logical reasoning – complemented by our emotions – can transform the way we think about our shared challenges. 619614

Tuesday, scholar Stephen Greenblatt joins us to talk about Shakespeare's tyrants. In many of his tragedies, he grappled with this question: why would anyone be drawn to a leader unsuited to govern? (Rebroadcast)

Around our 40s, there's a feeling of malaise and discontentment that can hit us all, even when we're at the top of our game. It turns out it is part of a natural cycle and life gets better after 50. (Rebroadcast)

Plastics. They’ve changed medicine, transportation, and food and water safety. But they've also become a global headache. There's more than six billion tons of plastic trash in the world. What can be done about the problem of plastics?