American writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner has profiled an amazing range of celebrities – and is best known for her deep dive into the Goopy world of Gwyneth Paltrow. She talks to Kim Hill about celebrity, truth-telling, divorce and her new novel Fleishman is in Trouble.

An ageing and growing population means the number of New Zealanders diagnosed with cancer is predicted to double by 2040. This is just one of the challenges facing University of Otago epidemiologist Professor Diana Sarfati, the new interim National Director of Cancer Control. Added to the list are survival rates that lag behind many other countries, increasing costs for cancer care and drugs, and a shameful gap in outcomes for vulnerable populations including Maori. So what can be done? And what will the future of cancer prevention and care look like in New Zealand?

Drug overdose is now the most common cause of death for Americans under 50, with nearly 50,000 people dying each year after taking opioids. Pulitzer-prize winning Washington Post journalist Scott Higham has been investigating the role that the drug companies play in the problem. He has obtained internal memos and emails showing how they supplied huge quantities of potentially addictive painkillers into vulnerable communities with little regard to how they were being used and abused.

Kim Hill reads listener feedback for Saturday 31 August 2019.

Craig Potton is an acclaimed landscape photographer, conservationist, traveller and publisher. He is also the Chair of the Nelson Suter Art Gallery. He is currently working on two books, one taking a creative look inside our forests, and the other about pilgrimages in the Tibetan Buddhist Himalayas. He joins Kim in the Wellington studio to share some of his favourite tracks.

Sophisticated digital imaging technology is being used to create 'Deep Fakes'; images and videos that are indistinguishable from reality. Things have moved on from celebrity faces being superimposed onto porn performers. As the slurring Nancy Pelosi video shows, these fakes can now have a political agenda. Professor Hany Farid of UC Berkeley specialises in detecting the signs of digital manipulation, and is trying to design systems that can tell the real from the fake before things go viral. But with hundreds of hours of uploaded video hitting YouTube's servers every minute, it's an all-but-impossible task: and the stakes are high if things get missed.

29 year old Tangaroa Walker is an award winning Southland contract milker who's evangelical about the joys of rural life. On his increasingly popular Facebook page Farm 4 Life he posts videos of daily life on the farm, whether it's delivering calves, or discussing rosters and mental health. He tackles the everyday challenges of his job with enthusiasm and a contagious sense of humour. He also features in Country Life's new Grass Roots series.

He's designed bald patch detectors, giant chairs, shoes that let you walk on water, flying machines, and amphibious cars. But Keith Alexander is best known for his invention of the Springfree trampoline. Reputedly the world's safest, more than half a million have sold worldwide. But success comes with the ever-present threat of rip-off merchants copying his designs, and sometimes strained relations with the investors backing his ideas.

Salman Rushdie was catapulted to literary fame when his second novel Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981.His controversial 1988 book, The Satanic Verses, inspired in part by the life of Muhammad, resulted in the Supreme Leader of Iran issuing a fatwa calling for his assassination. But he hasn't let this experience derail a prolific writing career and has just released his 19th book, Quichotte, which is on the longlist for the 2019 Booker Prize which will be announced in October. This latest novel substitutes pill mills for windmills as it re-imagines Don Quixote in an America blighted by the opioid epidemic. It's a subject with personal and tragic ties to the author's own life.

What can Greenland's vast ice sheet tell us about the health of the world's glaciers? Glaciologist and climate scientist Ruth Mottram works for the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen where she studies the glaciers of Greenland for what they can tell us about our changing climate. These streams of densely compacted ice form over millenia, and can provide valuable water and tourism dollars for the communities around them. But with global temperatures rising, they are melting at an alarming rate.