Patrick Barkham reveals the natural, social and literary history of the Islands that surround the larger Island of Britain, by starting his journey on the Isle of Man, discovering more complex and interesting than the tax-avoiding crooks, his explanation driven by curiosity with a nose for a unique story. He mentions a collection of island-loving…
Peggy Margaret Seeger, the queen of folk revival has released an album of electronic dance versions of her songs in 2012. Peggy Seeger, born in the New York, USA in 1935, is the daughter of the modernist composer Ruth Porter Crawford and musical folklorist Charles Seeger. After studying at Radcliffe College, in 1955 Peggy left…
“For years as I carved a path in venture capital, I believed that if I did what I’d earlier to succeed at the highest levels of academia and law and business, I could rise there, too. I am the daughter of Chinese immigrants, I’ve always believed in keeping my head down and forging ahead. I…
India, Sujatha Gidla was influenced by tales of her uncle, the Dalit revolutionary, port and Naxalite leader KG Stayamurthy. Gilda who grew up in the untouchable slum of Elwin Peta in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, South India. “When you are surrounded by so much misery, you don’t see it as an extraordinary,” and according to her…
Junior Doctor Adam Kay’s confessional indignities and joys of being a junior doctor in the UK National Health Service, based on diaries kept between 2004 and 2010. The moment you set foot on a hospital ward for the first time, he realised that there’s quite a lot they don’t teach you at medical school, as…
At the dawn of the new era, when science fiction is fast becoming reality as AI transforms, crime, war, justice, job and society to what it means to be human. Inspired by a visit to London’s Science Museum in 2014, Max Tegmark, the American Physicist and professor of Physics at MIT and the co-founder of…
Nigel Halleck, son of a Coventry-based lawyer, after serving over a decade as a clerk in the East India Company, he went turned his back on the imperial project, in 1840s India. His descendant Kief Hillsbery arms himself to find some answers. His grandmother’s tale of a long-lost cousin that sparked his interest around Patagonia.…
Small-town Michigan boy, Claude Shannon, a brilliant thinker and digital pioneer, making the discovery of a dry theory that created history was fundamental for the information age. The Mathematical Theory of Communication and its publication in the late 1940s was followed by a wave of popular interest, as in the early 20th century including Mid-western…
The Wisdom Of Finance gives a new perspective on one of the world’s most misunderstood professions. Is there really wisdom in finance? Non-finance might argue that financiers are a greedy and reckless bunch of selfish and wealthy people who are reckless and lawless. Mihir Desai, an asset manager who teaches at Harvard business and law…
Everybody lies is a fascinating, witty book, blending informed analysis of the signal and the noise and looks into new data sources, dominated by Google, where the author Seth Stephens previously worked. “I am convinced that Google searches are the most important data set ever collected on the human psyche”, he writes. Data provides new…