The Art of StarCraft
Stephen Evans goes deep into the Milky Way to look at the phenomenon of StarCraft and reveals how, in South Korea, it is more than just a computer game and is a key part of the rapidly growing...
View ArticleSeriously... Today Reports from Russia
How is Russian President Vladimir Putin perceived by the people in his own country? How is his intervention in Syria shaping the public mood? In a series of reports, Steve Rosenberg investigates...
View ArticleHippy Internet - The Whole Earth Catalog
Sukhdev Sandhu travels to the epicentres of countercultural America in Woodstock and San Francisco to tell the story of a book of hippy philosophy that defined the 1960s and intimated how the internet...
View ArticleBrain Tingles
The comedian and actor Isy Suttie sets out to explore how creativity is influenced by the mysterious and medically controversial phenomenon ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response). Ever since she...
View ArticleMiles Jupp and the Plot Device
How many stories are there in the world? According to William Wallace Cook, dime novelist and prolific producer of American pulp, there were precisely 1,462 and in Plotto, his "Master Book of All...
View ArticleWork Is a Four Letter Word
Many of us have grown up with the belief that a strong work ethic is a positive thing, and that by contrast idle hands are the devil's playthings. According to Professor Andrew Hussey, that argument...
View ArticleDeciding Fast and Slow
What is it really like to make decisions affecting millions of people, knowing that a mistake might be pounced upon instantly and your career left in tatters? Government ministers face this challenge...
View ArticleRaising the Dead
For the past few decades music teacher and pianist Francesco Lotoro has been collecting music written in concentration camps from the Second World War. Francesco's life is entirely given over to...
View ArticleHerland
In 1915 women could neither vote, divorce nor work after marriage, yet in that same year the American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman envisaged a revolutionary world populated entirely by women who...
View ArticleGay Bombay
Why is homosexuality still illegal in the world's so-called largest democracy? In his celebrated family memoir 'And All is Said', historian Dr Zareer Masani made no bones about his own homosexuality...
View ArticleJarvis on McCullers
The writing of Carson McCullers has perhaps never been as popular or acclaimed as that of contemporaries such as Harper Lee and Tennessee Williams, but nonetheless she remains one of the most...
View ArticleTropicalia: Revolution in Sound
Tropicalia was a musical revolution in Brazil. Singer and journalist Monica Vasconcelos meets the key artists and contemporary champions of Tropicalia - from Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil to Marcos...
View ArticleReaction Time
"Your breasts look fantastic in that dress." From abysmal chat-up lines like this, to love at first sight in Victoria Train Station, BBC Radio Four listeners have some incredible relationship stories....
View ArticleMao's Golden Mangoes
Why would people preserve a mango in formaldehyde? Why would they make thousands of wax replicas of mangoes and carry them in processions, venerating the fruit like a sacred icon? It seems mystifying....
View ArticleBatman and Ethan
Ethan was born blind. He's now a 10 year-old boy who collects sounds on his 51 dictaphones, composes music, and performs on stage in concerts. Until now he's been home-schooled, but last year he was...
View ArticleChoose Life
In February 1996, Trainspotting exploded onto the big screen. Twenty years on, the real-life recovering addicts who inspired the filmmakers and actors reveal their own stories. "All the characters are...
View ArticleMusical Variations: The Life of Angela Morley
Stuart Barr uncovers the colourful career of British composer and transgender pioneer, Angela Morley. In 1972, Wally Stott's transition to Angela Morley made front page news. Wally was famous. He was...
View ArticleSix Degrees of Connection
Is everyone in the world really connected by only six links? A famous experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s claimed that it took on average only six steps for a message to...
View ArticleLaverne in the Willows
Lauren Laverne has long been a firm fan of Kenneth Grahame's classic children's book 'The Wind in the Willows', in particular that most sparky of characters Mr. Toad, whose desire to have everything...
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