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PODCAST

Past Present Future

Past Present Future is a bi-weekly History of Ideas podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter. Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future. New episodes every Wednesday and Sunday. Take back your personal data

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All Episodes

50:29

History of Ideas: James Baldwin

Past Present Future ·

2023/08/17

This week David discusses James Baldwin’s ‘Notes of a Native Son’ (1955), an essay that combines autobiography with a searing indictment of America’s racial politics.At its heart it tells the story of Baldwin’s relationship with his father, but it is also about fear, cruelty, violence and the terrible compromises of a country at war.What happens when North and South collide?More on Baldwin from the LRB:Michael Wood on Baldwin and power‘James Baldwin’s thinking recalls Virginia Woolf’s view of the

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52:38

History of Ideas: Simone Weil

Past Present Future ·

2023/08/10

This week’s episode in our series on the great essays and great essayists is about Simone Weil’s ‘Human Personality’ (1943).Written shortly before her death aged just 34, it is an uncompromising repudiation of the building blocks of modern life: democracy, rights, personal identity, scientific progress – all these are rejected.What does Weil have to put in their place?The answer is radical and surprising.Read ‘Human Personality’ hereFor more on Weil from the LRB archive:Toril Moi on living like

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52:11

History of Ideas: George Orwell

Past Present Future ·

2023/08/03

This week David discusses George Orwell’s ‘The Lion and the Unicorn’ (1941), his great wartime essay about what it does – and doesn’t – mean to be English.How did the English manage to resist fascism?How are the English going to defeat fascism?These were two different questions with two very different answers: hypocrisy and socialism.David takes the story from there to Brexit and back again.For more on Orwell from the LRB:Samuel Hynes on Orwell and politics‘He was not, in fact, really a political

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52:09

History of Ideas: Virginia Woolf

Past Present Future ·

2023/07/27

This week our history of the great essays and great essayists reaches the twentieth century and Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929).David discusses how an essay on the conditions for women writing fiction ends up being about so much else besides: anger, power, sex, modernity, independence and transcendence.And how, despite all that, it still manages to be as fresh and funny as anything written since.Read more on Virginia Woolf in the LRB:Jacqueline Rose on Woolf and madness‘It

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57:48

From Lincoln to Trump: What Happened to the...

Past Present Future ·

2023/07/20

This week David talks to American historian Gary Gerstle about the shape-shifting journey of the US Republican Party, from the Civil War to the battles of today.How did the party of the North become the party of the South?When did the war party lose its appetite for war?Why does an organisation born out of anti-Catholicism now see its mission as to get Catholics onto the Supreme Court?And what could finally break the party apart?Gary Gerstle’s latest book is The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal

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55:57

History of Ideas: Thoreau

Past Present Future ·

2023/07/13

For the third episode in this series about the great political essays, David explores Thoreau’s ‘Civil Disobedience’ (1849), a ringing call to resistance against democratic idiocy.Thoreau wanted to resist slavery and unjust wars.How can one citizen turn the tide against majority opinion?Was Thoreau a visionary or a hypocrite?And what do his arguments say about environmental civil disobedience today?Read Thoreau’s essay hereFrom the LRB:Paul Laity on Thoreau and self-sufficiencyJeremy Harding on XR

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51:58

Whose Space is it Anyway?

Past Present Future ·

2023/07/06

This week we talk to astrophysicist Chris Lintott and writer Tom Stevenson about the threat from outer space: is it the asteroids, is it the aliens, or is it us?What changed when space travel moved from a Cold War battleground to a billionaire’s playground?Are China and America about to re-start the space race?And what will happen if we do find evidence of extraterrestrial life - will anyone believe it?Read more from Chris and Tom about space in the LRB:Space SnookerWhere are the Space Arks?Flying

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59:44

Why J.S. Mill Matters w/ Tara Westover

Past Present Future ·

2023/06/29

This week David talks to Tara Westover and the philosopher Clare Chambers about the enduring legacy of John Stuart Mill.Reading Mill’s Essays on Religion changed Tara’s life: she explains what happened, and discusses how Mill speaks to contemporary concerns about identity, conviction and doubt.Plus we talk free speech, the marketplace of ideas, the subjection of women - and why Mill isn’t comfort reading (but Thomas Carlyle is!).Sign up to LRB Close Readings:Directly in Apple:

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57:07

Are There Too Many People?

Past Present Future ·

2023/06/22

This week David talks to science writer Meehan Crist about Thomas Malthus and the perennial question of overpopulation. Malthus wrote 225 years ago and was wrong about almost everything, yet his ideas still have a powerful hold on our imaginations and our fears. How many people is too many? What are the limits of population in the age of climate change? And why does Elon Musk think we should all be having more children?Thomas Malthus, ‘An Essay on the Principle of Overpopulation’ (1798)Meehan

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58:54

History of Ideas: Hume

Past Present Future ·

2023/06/15

For the second episode in this season of History of Ideas, David discusses the Scottish philosopher David Hume and explores how eighteenth-century arguments about the national debt can help make sense of American politics today.When does public borrowing become a recipe for national disaster?Who is really in charge of the public finances: the government or the bankers, Washington, D.C. or Wall Street?And what has all this got to do with Hume’s arguments for the morality of suicide?Read Hume’s

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57:50

Rawls, Capitalism & Justice

Past Present Future ·

2023/06/08

This week Daniel Chandler and Lea Ypi join David to talk about the legacy of the great American political philosopher John Rawls and his theory of justice.Did Rawls provide a prescription for the only fair way of doing capitalism?Or did he really show why capitalism and justice will never be reconciled?What can Rawls teach us about how to treat each other as equals?And does it even make sense to talk about justice in Britain or America when the world as a whole remains so fundamentally

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53:48

Live Special: The American Century w/ David Miliband

Past Present Future ·

2023/06/01

This week’s episode was recorded live at the Hay Festival, where David was joined on stage by David Miliband and Helen Thompson to discuss the past, present and future of American power.What explains American global dominance?Can it be justified?How will it be replaced?They discuss the fall-out of the Ukraine war, the threat posed by China, the challenge of climate change and the possibility of a second Trump presidency and ask – is the American century over?David Miliband writes about the

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52:16

AI: Can the Machines Really Think?

Past Present Future ·

2023/05/25

Gary Marcus and John Lanchester join David to discuss all things AI, from ChatGPT to the Turing test.Why is the Turing test such a bad judge of machine intelligence?If these machines aren’t thinking, what is it they are doing?And what are we doing giving them so much power to shape our lives?Plus we discuss self-driving cars, the coming jobs apocalypse, how children learn, and what it is that makes us truly human.Gary’s new podcast is Humans vs. Machines.Read Turing’s original paper here.Sign up to

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52:03

History of Ideas: Montaigne

Past Present Future ·

2023/05/18

For the first episode in the new series of History of Ideas – on the great essays and the great essayists – David discusses Montaigne, the man who invented a whole new way of writing and being read.From the fear of death to the joys of life, from the perils of atheism to the pitfalls of faith, from sex to religion and back again, Montaigne wrote the book of himself, which was also a guide to what it means to be human.Elephants, civil war, gout, cosmology, torture, tennis balls, disease, diets, and

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54:01

Living Behind the Iron Curtain

Past Present Future ·

2023/05/11

This week David talks to Katja Hoyer and Lea Ypi about life under communism.East Germany was the most successful of the communist states of Eastern Europe, measured by economic prosperity and sporting success.Did the GDR ever really offer a model of how Soviet-style communism could give people what they wanted, including social mobility and consumerism?Why did it fall apart in the end?And how did the GDR experiment look from inside Albania, where Lea grew up?A conversation about freedom, dissent,

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50:34

How Dallas Saw the Future

Past Present Future ·

2023/05/04

This week David talks to Helen Thompson aboutDallasand the end of oil.How did the world’s most popular soap opera come to explain the energy crisis and the future of a world hooked on fossil fuels?Is the fate of the Ewing family – fire and ruin – going to be the fate of America?And did J.R. Ewing really pave the way for President Donald Trump?Plus David and Helen discuss ‘oil fictions’, from Isaac Asimov to Italo Calvino.Watch the moment when ‘Miss Ellie Saves the Day’.Helen Thompson on ’the cosmic

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52:35

The Novel that Unravels Democracy

Past Present Future ·

2023/04/27

David talks to Ian McEwan about Italo Calvino’sThe Watcher(1963), one of the greatest of all works of political fiction.Challenging, disturbing, redemptive: this is a book about who gets to count and who doesn’t, and what identity politics really means.David and Ian also discuss how political fiction works - and why the climate change novel is so hard to write. Plus they argue about whether children should be allowed to vote.Next week: Helen Thompson onDallasand the end of oil.Ian McEwan’s latest

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2:44

Introducing Past Present Future

Past Present Future ·

2023/04/12

Past Present Future is a new weekly podcast with David Runciman, host and creator of Talking Politics, exploring the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology.David talks to historians, novelists, scientists and many others about where the most interesting ideas come from, what they mean, and why they matter.Ideas from the past, questions about the present, shaping the future.Brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books.New episodes every Thursday. Hosted

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