C.K. Stead chats about his second memoir You Have a Lot to Lose, his relationships with foes and friends including Janet Frame and his infidelity.

NZer quantum physicist Andrew Wilson was part of a team that became the first in the Southern Hemisphere to create the fifth state of matter, the Bose-Einstein Condensate. He's just been appointed to lead the quantum physics team at the lab where this work took place: JILA at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

The American singer-songwriter and guitarist Jesca Hoop has had five solo albums, been mentored by Tom Waits and collaborated with the likes of Eels, Placebo, Iron & Wine, Andrew Bird and Elbow.

Lotta Dann - aka Mrs D - overcame her own problems with alcohol to become sober, and an authority on the understanding of addiction and recovery. She's in to talk about her new book The Wine O'Clock Myth on the alcohol industry's efforts to target women.

Poet and writer Kate Camp returns with another classic work of literature. This week she covers A Journal of the Plague Year, a book by Daniel Defoe released in 1722. It documents the 1665 bubonic plague outbreak that came to be known as the Great Plague of London. So what can this tell us about our current coronavirus experiences?

Smartphones too big for female hands, air-bags designed to protect men's bodies - in many respects it really is a man's world. From design to government policy, from medical research to the workplace, the male experience is often assumed to be the standard. In her book Invisible Women writer and feminist campaigner Caroline Criado Perez brings together examples gathered from across the world to show how women's experiences are ignored. Criado Perez's past successes include getting a woman featured on English banknotes, and having a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett erected near Parliament in London.

Intrepid New Zealander Sophie Ballagh kayaked around the Antarctic peninsula with her Australian partner for 2 weeks, sleeping in a tent as they explored the region's ice-clogged waterways. With a documentary ICEolation to tell their story, it's the latest in a long line of adventures she's been on around the world. With exploring on hold for the foreseeable future, she joins us from Tasmania where she is plotting her next adventures.

Local author Pip Adam's latest book Nothing to See follows intertwining characters navigating sobriety and surveillance capitalism in three snapshots taken 12 years apart. The book follows her collection of short stories, Everything We Hoped For (2010) and the novels, I'm Working on a Building (2013), and The New Animals (2017). The latter won the Acorn Foundation Prize for Fiction. A graduate of Victoria University's Creative Writing program, Adam also hosts the podcast "Better off Read" where she speaks to other authors about reading and writing.

Actor Jesse Eisenberg is best known for his portrayal of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in the 2010 movie The Social Network. In his latest role he's playing Marcel Marceau in a little-known episode of the mime artist's life story: a daring attempt to rescue 120 Jewish orphans from the Nazis in the Second World War. Resistance opened in New Zealand cinemas on Thursday June 11th.

American behavioural economist Robert Frank is interested in the power of peer pressure to influence our behaviour. So with the world facing a deadly pandemic and potentially catastrophic climate change, in his book Under The Influence he considers how the power of social pressure can be harnessed for the general good.