How To Academy Podcast

An icon whose spectacular works occupy a liminal space between sculpture, engineering and architecture, Anish Kapoor is one of the world’s most ambitious living artists.The first living artist to take over the Royal Academy with a record-breaking blockbuster exhibition, the recipient of a Turner Prize, a knighthood, the LennonOno Prize for Peace, the $1 million Genesis Prize, an Oxford doctorate and the Padma Bhushan, India’s third-highest civilian honour, Anish Kapoor holds the rare status of an artist both revered by critics and overwhelmingly loved by the public.From Chicago’s Cloud Gate to the London Olympic Park’s Orbit, the Rockefeller Center’s Sky Mirror to Paris’s Leviathan, Kapoor’s sculptures resonate with mythic significance, belonging to a tradition and a way of thinking that extends back to the great wonders of the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On New Year’s Day 2020, Sarah Gilbert, Professor of Vaccinology at Oxford University, read an article about four people in China with a strange pneumonia. Within two weeks, she and her team had designed a vaccine against a pathogen that no one had ever heard of. Less than 12 months later, vaccination was rolled out across the world to save millions of lives from Covid-19.In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, Professor Gilbert and her colleague Dr Catherine Green, who led on the manufacturing of the vaccine, join us to separate fact from fiction and explain how they made a highly safe vaccine in record time with the eyes of the world watching. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Willis Wu mostly gets to play Generic Asian Man. If he is lucky, sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son. For now he is a bit player: but he dreams that one day he will be offered the most coveted role someone who looks like him might aspire to: Kung Fu Guy.A coruscating satire of race, assimilation and Hollywood, Charles Yu's Interior Chinatown is both a groundbreaking experimental novel and a deeply personal and affecting family story heralded as one of the best books of 2020. A New York Times bestseller and the winner of the 2020 National Book Award, the novel confirms Yu as one of America's most exciting young authors.In this episode of the How To Academy Podcast, he explores the history of Chinese culture in the US, how his personal experiences as a first generation Taiwanese-American shaped the narrative, and what his own time in Hollywood has taught him about the art of storytelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

In 2017, President Trump made a cryptic remark at a gathering of military officials, describing it as ‘the calm before the storm’-then refused to explain himself to puzzled journalists. But on internet message boards, a mysterious poster called ‘Q Clearance Patriot’ began an elaboration all of their own.In this week's podcast, Mike Rothschild explores his new book, The Storm Is Upon Us. With families torn apart and with the Capitol under attack, he argues that mocking the madness of QAnon will get us nowhere. Instead, he argues that QAnon tells us everything we need to know about global fear after Trump-and that we need to understand it now, because it’s not going away. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was a world-wide sensation – forever changing how we think about women and desire. A bestseller in the US and the UK, “Book of the Year” for more than thirty of the most respected media titles, including the FT, Times and Time magazine, an instant classic beloved by cultural icons including Gillian Anderson, Gwyneth Paltrow and Elizabeth Gilbert, Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women is a global phenomenon.Now Lisa’s debut novel Animal is set to do the same for how we think about madness and trauma. Animal opens with a self-inflicted gunshot to the head of an unrequited lover and becomes a road-trip to California, centring on a woman who is driven to extremes by the violence of her past. In this episode of the podcast, Guardian columnist Hadley Freeman explores the inspiration behind this brazen and daring fictional debut. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The quality of professional judgments have a huge and lasting impact on all of our lives: the decision of an A&E doctor treating a patient, a teacher grading a paper, or a high court judge delivering a sentencing should not be a matter of personal taste. And yet there is huge, unwanted variability across human judgment.Bias has long been the star of the show when it comes to errors in decision making. Now Daniel Kahneman, Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony have uncovered a critical and overlooked factor: noise. Noise explains why police officers show greater leniency towards offenders who have the same name as they do; why doctors prescribe more drugs at the end of the day than at the beginning; why judicial sentences tend to be more severe in hot weather; and why stock-market performance is affected by sunshine.In conversation with Diana Fox Carney, Kahneman, Sunstein and Sibony reveal how noise and bias both shape our thought processes – and the remedies we can take to make far better decisions and judgments. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Join us for a wild journey through culture, science, philosophy and religion to better understand the mercurial genius William Blake. Taking us on wild detours into unfamiliar territory, John Higgs places the bewildering eccentricities of a most singular artist into context. The journey begins with us trying to understand him, but we will ultimately discover that it is Blake who helps us to understand ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Every day, extraordinary inventions and innovative ideas are side-lined in a world that remains subservient to men.But it doesn’t have to be this way. From the beginning of time, women have been pivotal to our society, offering ingenious solutions to some of our most vexing problems. More recently, it is women who have transformed the way we shop online, revolutionised the lives of disabled people and put the climate crisis at the top of the agenda.For too long we have underestimated the consequences of sexism in our economy, and the way it holds all of us – women and men – back. In conversation with author and activist Caroline Criado Perez, Katrine Marçal sets the record straight and shows how, in a time of crisis, the ingenuity and intelligence of women is that very thing that can save us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Drawing on his first-hand knowledge of life in the White House, global geopolitics and the upper echelons of power, Bill Clinton teamed up with one of the world’s best-known and best-selling authors, James Patterson, to tell the story of the most thrilling, frightening, and plausible tale of an American presidency yet devised. ‘Meticulous in its portrayal of Washington politics, gripping in its pacing, and harrowing in its depiction of the perils of cyberwarfare' (Ron Chernow), The President Is Missing was heralded as both a heart-pounding thrill ride and an authentic look inside the mind of the leader of the free world. Now President Clinton and James Patterson are back with a new novel: The President's Daughter. In this week's podcast, they share insights into their creative process and reflections on the world in 2021. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Sir David Hare is renowned across the English-speaking world as the finest political storyteller alive today. In our age of blockbuster musicals and CGI superheroes, his oeuvre stands as a testament to the power of theatre and cinema to capture and even transform the soul of a nation. A student in that extraordinary year, 1968, Hare quickly emerged as a writer of courage, heart and coruscating satirical talent, fusing human drama with grand political narratives to map the convulsions of the post-war years.Whether depicting the crumbling institutions of church and state, ruthlessly mocking media tycoons, or engaging in a forensic analysis of the Suez Crisis and WMD debacle, his plays are not cold, calculating social commentary but a barometer of our age, revealing who we are and may become with a rare depth of romantic feeling. And his BAFTA winning, Golden Globe and Academy Award nominated screenplays – undisputed modern classics such as The Hours, The Reader and Damage – have brought his vision to a global audience.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices