My guest on this week’s Book Club podcast is Jonathan C. Slaght, whose new book is Tigers Between Empires: The Journey to Save the Siberian Tiger from Extinction. He tells me about these remarkable animals, the remarkable people who studied them, and how their fates have been entwined with the shifting politics of post-Soviet Russia.

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A lot of us will remember collecting stamps or football stickers or stationary or something of that ilk as a child.

But, is that a modern phenomenon, or is it something inherent that we have seen throughout history?

James Delbourgo is Professor of History at Rutgers University and author of ‘A Noble Madness: The Dark Side of Collecting from Antiquity to Now’. He joins Seán to discuss.

Kent is the Garden of England - if you view it from the air, it’s covered in square miles of plastic, where the millions of tonnes of soft fruit are grown that feed the nation. Aidan Tulloch takes us inside the world of the summer fruit pickers recruited to work for a season on a blueberry farm in Kent.

In early summer thousands of people arrive in UK airports, hired on short-term visas to help pick the annual crop of soft fruit. Picking is an international effort, with jobs advertised in Russian, Bulgarian, Polish and many other languages, and pickers are increasingly being recruited from Central Asian countries like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. They are joined each day by local pickers, often students or young people working summers between other lives elsewhere. Many pickers live in on-site caravans that become their homes for several months. The farm becomes a fascinating, temporary global community.

From spring showers through a heatwave and a late September chill, this is the story of a summer in a pickers' village, from the early starts to the final goodbyes and the return home, where different people from vastly different backgrounds come together over the course of several months. It's the story of 5am alarms, temperamental weather, unexpected friendships and ad-hoc games of football, families left behind in home countries, new lives made in the UK - human stories behind the punnets of blueberries in your local supermarket.

Translations: Irena Taranyuk and Elizaveta Fokht

Presenter: Aidan Tulloch

View the Show Notes Page for This Episode

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In this special episode of The Drive, Peter presents a curated "best of" conversation with bestselling author and previous guest Arthur Brooks, organized around four core themes: happiness itself, the forces that undermine it, the tools and practices that help cultivate it, and the courage required to live and love well. The episode brings together the most meaningful moments from two past interviews into a single, focused discussion that distills Brooks' most insightful ideas and offers practical takeaways for building a life that's both successful and deeply happy.

We discuss:

• Happiness vs. happy feelings, and how happiness and unhappiness can coexist [2:15];
• The six fundamental emotions [5:30];
• The three main "macronutrients" of happiness [15:00];
• Enjoyment: one of the three macronutrients of happiness [22:45];
• Satisfaction: one of the three macronutrients of happiness [30:45];
• Sense of purpose: one of the three macronutrients of happiness [38:45];
• Fame: one of the traps that hijack our happiness [46:30];
• Success addiction, workaholism, and their detriment to happiness [49:15];
• The reverse bucket list: one of Arthur's tools and practices he recommends for moving past the traps that hijack our happiness [59:15];
• Metacognition: one of Arthur's tools and practices he recommends for moving past the traps that hijack our happiness [1:01:00];
• Taking charge of your happiness: discipline, transcendent experiences, and other deliberate actions for "happier-ness" [1:11:30];
• Tracking happiness: the biomarkers and micronutrients behind the macronutrients of happiness [1:22:45];
• The value of minimizing the self and looking outward [1:30:45];
• How Arthur surprised himself with his ability to improve his happiness [1:34:45]; and
• More.

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In 1988, a young arts educator drove into a small town in Kentucky with a camera and a directive to teach photography to school kids. But she never got a chance. Instead, a full blown hysteria connecting her presence with other dark rumours swirling around about widespread ritual child sacrifice prompted a mad dash escape for her life. The truth behind the drama? Well, it involves Patrick Swayze and an environment where cops, social workers, teachers, parents and reporters were being primed to see Satanic crime everywhere.

Can't wait for more episodes? Binge the entire series early on our YouTube channel and on our Apple True Crime channel ad-free for subscribers. 

Slavoj Žižek, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kehinde Andrews – the world has never been short of bad philosophers. But of all the minds who have graced, tortured, or otherwise afflicted human history, which one truly deserves the title: The World's Worst Philosopher?

That's not an easy question; after all, philosophy has given us so many options. When Dan Dennett denied consciousness, was that the silliest claim ever made? What should we think when once sensible people – Philip Goff – convert to Christianity? Is Robert Wright, in fact, Robert Wrong? Is it the wartime quartet, or the woke-time bore-tet? Did Bentham really support bestiality? And why did David Papineau say that thing about women?

Philosophers are supposed to be seekers of truth: lofty creatures aiming at wisdom, clarity, and the betterment of humanity. But philosophers are just people, shaped by forces that lead them astray. Sometimes they miss truth entirely; sometimes they stumble into it through terrible reasoning; and sometimes they make the world a genuinely worse place.

Which brings us to the task at hand: trying to rank the worst philosopher in history. It's no easy feat. In fact, it's going to require the combined efforts of three of philosophy's greatest minds: Jack Symes, Andrew Horton, and (me) Olly Marley.

This episode may also mark the end of our professional careers. But if we're going down, we'll go down like Socrates: making an unnecessarily big deal out of something that, absolutely, could have been easily avoided.

Was Jack the Ripper the first serial killer of all time? Who was his first victim, and why was the murder so shocking? And, what did the Ripper phenomenon reveal about the anxieties of Victorian London?

Join Tom and Dominic as they delve into the darkest days of London’s long history, as Jack the Ripper’s terrible, grisly reign of terror begins...

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Exclusivity was the point of Wu-Tang Clan's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin. Only one copy was produced. A few minutes of it were played -- once -- in public. It sold at auction, with the condition it be heard only in private. And the album may have remained shrouded in mystery, were it not for a pharma bro, a Justice Department seizure... and the power of the Freedom of Information Act.

Thanks to Open Mike Eagle for reading this week's Justice Department documents.

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What if the most revolutionary force in American history wasn't a politician or an army, but post office mail carriers bringing letters to farmhouse doors? At the turn of the 20th century, rural Americans lived in profound isolation, cut off from news, markets, and opportunities that city dwellers took for granted. Predatory merchants and railroad companies exploited this information gap, charging whatever they wanted because farmers had no way to know if prices were fair. But then something radical happened in postal history: rural farmers organized. Through the Grange movement, they launched a decades-long grassroots campaign demanding Rural Free Delivery from the US Post Office, arguing that if city folks got mail delivered to their homes, rural Americans deserved the same democratic right from the Post Office. In Episode 4, Aileen and Maia trace how this seemingly simple postal reform transformed the entire country, spurring the Good Roads Movement, fueling the mail-order catalog revolution, and creating the infrastructure for modern consumer culture. Along the way of this postal history, they explore the 17-year battle for Parcel Post (blocked by private express companies protecting their profits), the absolutely unhinged things Americans immediately mailed once the weight limit increased (yes, including live babies tagged "fragile"), and the inspiring story of Minnie M. Cox, a Black postmaster in Jim Crow Mississippi who forced Theodore Roosevelt to choose between political expediency and federal principle. This episode reveals how public institutions become battlegrounds, how corporate interests exploit public infrastructure for private gain, and why the fight over who the Post Office serves is still happening right now, with billion-dollar companies cherry-picking profitable routes while demanding the Post Office deliver everywhere else at a loss.

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How Jane Jacob's urbanism dreams came to life on the most beloved kids' TV block.

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