Robert D. Kaplan challenges Western ideas about the Middle East and tries to offer a broader picture of the future of the region that looks beyond the binaries of democracy and authoritarianism. Plus, Loren Grush tells the story of the six extraordinary women that smashed the glass ceiling of NASA's space program back in 1978.

The future of the Middle East and NASA's first female astronauts

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Anne Applebaum on the connections between Russian and Chinese autocrats and the Trump Republicans seeking to discredit liberalism. Plus how Joseph Stalin secretly organised to evacuate 12,000 Greek communists after the Greek Civil War, and send them to Tashkent, Uzbekistan.

The autocrats teaming up with MAGA politicians and the Greek communists "rescued" by Stalin

Designer dogs are all the rage today, but the modern way of ordering and breeding dogs is an English invention which started in 1860.  Dogs began to be categorized according to their form and not function, and breeds became increasingly uniform and standardized.   So was this good or bad?

Guest Michael Worboys, author of Invention of the Modern Dog; Breed and Blood in Victorian Britain.

How the modern dog was invented

Richard Flanagan spoke to Phillip about tracing the path from H.G. Wells’ 1914 novel, The World Set Free, to the invention of the atomic bomb and the bombing of Hiroshima, which saw his father’s internment in a Japanese prison camp come to an end.

In his semi-autobiographical book, Question 7, Flanagan returns again and again to a question – “Who loves longer?”.

Guest: Richard Flanagan, Booker prize winning author

Richard Flanagan's nuclear connections

In 1977, a group of scientists led by Dr Carl Sagan from Cornell University, created a record of humanity to send into space in an attempt to make us comprehendible to aliens.

The contents included 115 images and a variety of natural sounds, such as those made by surf, wind and thunder, birds, whales, other animals, among other things.

Dr Sagan said "The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space."

Guest: Jonathan Scott, author of The Vinyl Frontier

NASA's golden record

As early as 1917, the Soviets began their race to become the world’s leading science authority - with very mixed results. The successes included launching the world’s first man into space and the failures included  the starvation of millions of their own people.

Guest: Simon Ings, author of Stalin and the Scientists; A History of Triumph and Tragedy

The future of the Middle East and NASA's first female astronauts

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