Before becoming a vet, New Zealander Wendy McCulloch worked as a caterer for some of the biggest acts in music, including Tina Turner and the Rolling Stones. Now based in New York, she's been offering home-based vet visits to city residents as the founder of HomeVetsNYC. Her house calls have become even more complex and demanding during the Covid-19 outbreak in the city, especially as many of her clients are elderly or immuno-compromised. She's also a board member of the South African wildlife charity, the Wild Tomorrow Fund.

Journalist Robert Fisk has spent the past 40 years living in war zones, covering conflict in the Middle East. He's dedicated to being on the ground and on the frontlines, and this commitment has landed him several scoops including face-to-face interviews with Osama Bin Laden. His sometimes controversial career is the focus of This Is Not A Movie, a new documentary by Canadian director Yung Chang. The film is playing at the Doc Edge Festival, which will be online only this year and runs between Friday 12 June and Sunday 5 July.

At the same time as the Covid-19 pandemic began sweeping the world Australian moral philosopher Toby Ord released his book calculating the possibility of the end of humanity. In The Precipice he weighs up scenarios that could contribute to our downfall. From the man-made threats of climate change and nuclear war, to the potentially greater, more unfamiliar threats from engineered pandemics and advanced artificial intelligence. A research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, and a Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy at Oxford University, Ord is (like his compatriot Peter Singer) a leading light in the 'effective altruism' movement which encourages people to use evidence to help others as much as possible. He co-founded the movement in 2009 with William MacAskill, and has created an international society called Giving What We Can, whose members have pledged over $1.5 billion.

Peter Warner is part of an extraordinary story that made global headlines over the past week, despite it being decades old. It's the tale of a real life 'Lord of the Flies' scenario, six Tongan boys who were marooned on a desert island and rescued 15 months later. In 1966 Peter Warner was the captain of a fishing boat that sailed past the island, called 'Ata, and found the teenagers there. Students at a Catholic boarding school in Nuku'alofa, the boys had stolen a boat, and set sail for Fiji, only to be put off course by a storm, eventually washing ashore at 'Ata. Peter Warner describes his role in the story, and the enduring friendships that came of it.

New Zealand actor and novelist Barbara Ewing has written a memoir about life as a young woman in Wellington and Auckland in the 1950s and early 1960s, before she headed off to study in London. One Minute Crying Time documents her early experiences of anxiety, fraught family life, and what at the time was a controversial romantic relationship with a young Maori man.

Pelenakeke (Keke) Brown has recently returned to Aotearoa after being based in NYC for six years. An interdisciplinary artist, her work spans art, writing, and performance. She's become the interim artistic director of Touch Compass, a professional performance company showcasing work from artists, writers, and actors with and without disabilities. A founding member of the company, she's now the first artist with a disability to lead it. Among the subjects up for discussion, how her art practice is grounded in the Samoan concept of the va (the space that connects people through their relationships).

Widely blamed for being a disease vector in the spread of the novel coronavirus, bats have a bit of a PR problem at the moment. It's resulted in overzealous individuals burning their colonies, and slaughtering them in large numbers. Disease ecologist Jonathan Epstein has stepped up to go into bat for his creepy and cute little animal friends. From pollination to pest control, he says bats do an awful lot of good for us. Jonathan's work as a disease ecologist for The EcoHealth Alliance involves hunting down viruses among vast colonies of cave-dwelling bats.

Shaun Bythell lives in Wigtown, Scotland, where he runs The Bookshop - the largest second hand bookshop in Scotland. Its shelves span nearly 2 kilometres and contain over 100,000 books, Shaun has written two hit books, laced with his trademark grumpy good humour, about his shop and its clientele: The Diary of a Bookseller and Confessions of A Bookseller He's currently putting the finishing touches to a third book. We check in on him, his wife, and their 11 month old to see how their bookish bubble's going, and how the book trade is faring through the lockdown.

Virologist Dr Chris Smith is back to answer more questions about the emerging science around the novel coronavirus pandemic. A consultant clinical virologist at Cambridge University, and one of BBC Radio 5 Live's Naked Scientists, he's been digesting all the latest Covid-related science and research for us each week, as we come to understand more about the virus and how it's spreading.

This week RNZ exposed an unapproved police trial of controversial facial recognition software Clearview AI. Described as a "search engine for faces" the technology is used by hundreds of police forces across the US and the world to help identify criminals and their victims. Founded by Australian Hoan Ton-That, Clearview has assembled a database of 3 billion images scraped from social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. So why does Clearview AI cause disquiet among privacy advocates? What do we know about the business, and how it operates? And do we really have anything to fear? Kashmir Hill is a technology reporter for The New York Times: she's got a particular interest in privacy, and has been reporting on Clearview's operations over the past few months.