Social Sciences

The News Quiz made its debut on Radio 4 in 1977, and decades later it's still playfully making and breaking the headlines of our daily news. If you enjoy your news humorously grilled, with a side order of biting wit, these 14 gems of vintage episodes will be exactly to your taste.

The destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over the Scottish town of Lockerbie in December 1988 was the largest attack on Britain since World War Two. 259 passengers and 11 townsfolk of Lockerbie were murdered. Libyan Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was convicted of the crime. He maintained his innocence until his death in 2012.

Football is the world's most popular sport, and the shirts worn by teams and their supporters are its greatest means of cultural expression. Every year clubs launch new kits with increasingly extravagant marketing campaigns and convoluted explanations of how their designs reflect their history and local community. But football shirts are much more than just a symbol of which club we support.

This explosive exposé reveals the shocking truth about Mohamed Al-Fayed's controversial 25-year reign at Harrods. To the public, he was the jovial, eccentric owner of one of the world's most iconic department stores—handing out lollipops and gifts to customers. But behind the scenes, Fayed wielded his power with cruelty, humiliation, and abuse that went unchecked for decades. Drawing on extensive firsthand interviews with former employees, executives, police officers, and erstwhile friends, The Monster of Harrods exposes chilling accounts of misconduct, many detailed here for the first time.

There are an infinite number of possible futures that lie ahead of us—like threads stretching out into the distance. Rob Hopkins, cofounder of the international Transition Network movement, invites us to travel to future worlds we would actually want to live in.

〈さびしい、苦しい〉老い方にさようなら!世界的な霊長類学者が教える、人生後半戦が「希望」となる考え方とは?・人間はなぜ“人生後半戦”が長いのか?・“老いるほど美しくなる”ゴリラに学ぶべきこと

Les enjeux et les impacts des dernières générations d'intelligence artificielle décryptés par un spécialiste mondial de l'IA. ChatGPT vous enthousiasme et vous effraie tout à la fois ? À entendre ses promoteurs, les capacités de l'intelligence artificielle seraient dès aujourd'hui sans limite. Luc Julia nous emmène dans un voyage au centre de l'IA, de son histoire et de son potentiel. Il déconstruit les idées reçues les plus répandues, à commencer par celle selon laquelle les IA génératives seraient créatives.

Ha ancora senso oggi parlare di Palestina e Israele usando espressioni come "processo di pace", "soluzione a due Stati", "partizione"? Ha senso continuare con un vuoto dibattito politico, facendo il gioco dei sionisti e mantenendo lo stato quo? Le tesi di Noam Chomsky e Ilan Pappe raccolte in questo volume ruotano attorno all'idea che i tempi siano maturi per un cambio di rotta.

L’Autobiogrammatica che avete tra le mani è un gioco sorprendente e vertiginoso: il racconto di un’esistenza – unica e comune – come la storia di un linguaggio. Esiste un legame segreto tra le due linee sinuose lungo cui si snoda la nostra vita: da una parte l’apprendistato dell’alfabeto, dei nomi, del lessico famigliare, dell’insulto, dello scherzo, delle lingue straniere, dei codici segreti, della poesia; dall’altra l’invadente amore per i genitori, la scuola che è un viaggio nell’ignoto, le seduzioni e dilazioni dell’amicizia e del desiderio, la contrattazione di un posto nel mondo.

Plato’s Critias is the foundational source of one of the most enduring mysteries in human history: the lost civilization of Atlantis. In this unfinished dialogue, Plato unveils a majestic tale passed down through Solon from ancient Egyptian priests—of a powerful empire beyond the Pillars of Heracles, rich in technology, beauty, and ambition.

In The Timaeus, Plato offers one of the most influential philosophical visions of the ancient world—a sweeping dialogue that lays out the structure of the cosmos, the nature of the soul, and the divine intelligence behind creation.

महाकवि भास संस्कृत साहित्य के मूर्धन्य कवि हैं। उन्होंने अपने जिन तेरह नाटकों से संस्कृत साहित्य को समृद्ध किया उनमें स्वप्नवासवदत्ता और प्रतिज्ञायौगन्धरायण विशेष लोकप्रिय हैं। नाटकों की भाषा बहुत ही सरस और बोध्गम्य है। अभिनय की दृष्टि से भी भास के नाटक सर्वथा उपयुक्त हैं।

By day, Gary Heidnik was a man of God with money, charisma, and a growing congregation. But behind closed doors, he was building a torture chamber by hand and filling it with women.

Athena Stevens has never learned the name of the doctor whose lack of intervention at her birth lead to her cerebral palsy, but she feels the consequences of his actions – and inaction – every day. The factor observed first and foremost in her life will forever be the effects of what other people have done to her, rather than her accomplishments. And yet, she was groomed to believe that she would overcome any force that stood in her way.

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles was an unknown young writer taking whatever job he could while pursuing his distant literary dreams. He'd instead become an eyewitness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

Connecting to Our Ancestral Past is a pragmatic, spiritual journey that introduces a variety of specific rituals and conversations in connection with Constellations work, an experiential process that explores one's history and powerful events of the past in order to understand and resolve problems of the present. Constellations facilitator and author Francesca Mason Boring presents this therapeutic method in the context of cultures like the Shoshone, of which she is a member, that have seen the world through a prism of interrelationships for millennia.

Charlie, Dennis, Mac, Sweet Dee, and Frank are deplorable characters. They will never mature, become more self-aware, or less self-involved. That is what the creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia are committed to—and that’s why the show’s millions of devoted fans have stuck with the cult comedy hit for over sixteen seasons and counting. As thoughtful, provocative, and engaging as the show itself, this book also explores how the show has pushed the envelope and used absurdist comedy to explore major societal issues, including the #MeToo movement, LGBTQ+ rights, racism, and more.

How do you raise boys to men in a world where trouble beckons at every turn? How do you make sure they learn the 'right' lessons, stay out of danger, find a path to follow? How do you ensure they'll be OK? Celia Lashlie has some of the answers. After years working in the prison service, she knows what can happen when boys make the wrong choices. She also knows what it's like to be a parent—she raised a son on her own and feared for his survival. As a crucial part of the Good Man Project, she talked to 180 classes of boys.

Low-rise jeans, butterfly clips, The Lizzie McGuire Movie, and Paris Hilton’s nights out. The early 2000s were a time of major moments in fashion, media, celebrity culture, and especially music. The aughts were a particularly fruitful era for female artists—still the only decade in the history of recorded music when women made up more than half the list of highest-grossing performers—and especially pop stars. Artists such as Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Beyoncé were leading the charge—their success not only leading to a new respect for female artists, but for pop stardom itself.

Bitch is a bitch of a word. It used to be a straightforward insult, but today—after so many variations and efforts to reject or reclaim the word—it's not always entirely clear what it means. Bitch is a chameleon. There are good bitches and bad bitches; sexy bitches and psycho bitches; boss bitches and even perfect bitches. This eye-opening deep-dive account takes us on a journey spanning a millennium, from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog through to its myriad meanings today, proving that sometimes you can teach an old dog new tricks.

Managing the stresses of everyday life can be exhausting and overwhelming. Dr. Jennifer Caspari knows this struggle well—both through her work as a clinical psychologist and her lived experience as a disabled woman with cerebral palsy. You Are More Than Your Body weaves together clinical expertise, personal stories, and practical, evidence-based tools to help listeners with chronic health conditions better cope with pain, fatigue, depression, and the emotional vulnerability that comes with living in a world not designed for our bodies.

Una habitación propia no es solo un ensayo sobre literatura, es una guía de liberación interior para cualquier mujer que busque independencia, voz propia y un espacio mental donde florecer. Con una lucidez adelantada a su tiempo, Virginia Woolf plantea una verdad esencial que sigue vigente: para que una mujer pueda crear, necesita libertad económica, estabilidad emocional y un lugar propio —físico y simbólico— donde no tenga que pedir permiso para ser.

Become Ungovernable is a provocative new work of political thought setting out to reclaim "freedom", "justice", and "democracy", revolutionary ideas that are all too often warped in the interests of capital and the state. Revealing the mirage of mainstream democratic thought and the false promises of liberal political ideologies, H. L. T. Quan offers an alternative approach: an abolition feminism drawing on a kaleidoscope of refusal praxes, and on a deep engagement with the Black Radical Tradition and queer analytics.

If ADHD and anxiety are draining your focus, disrupting your relationships, or keeping you stuck—this audiobook is your breakthrough. Backed by science and crafted for the neurodivergent mind, this 7-week CBT program delivers over 50 powerful tools to help you finally regain control—without burnout or overwhelm.

"Hold tight. The way to go mad without losing your mind is sometimes unruly." So begins La Marr Jurelle Bruce's urgent provocation and poignant meditation on madness in black radical art. Bruce theorizes four overlapping meanings of madness: the lived experience of an unruly mind, the psychiatric category of serious mental illness, the emotional state also known as "rage," and any drastic deviation from psychosocial norms.