Free Thinking Folgen

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Its follow-up takes the lead character to Parisian salons and an underworld of drug dealing so Free Thinking tracks the French connection through film, history and philosophy as Matthew Sweet is joined by Viet Thanh Nguyen, by film critic Phuong Le and by Peter Salmon - author of a biography of Derrida - he's been investigating the ideas of the Vietnamese thinker Tran Duc Thao who inspired some of Derrida's work. The Sympathizer and the new novel The Committed by Viet Thanh Nguyen are out now. You can hear Phuong Le in a Free Thinking discussion about Marlene Dietrich https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q8cq and about Billy Wilder https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000p1dx Peter Salmon's biography of Derrida is called An Event, Perhaps. You can hear him talking about that in a Free Thinking called Derrida and post truth https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nc7t Free Thinking also has a playlist exploring different takes on the idea of Home and Belonging https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03mb66kProducer: Harry Parker

Mars is the focus of current space exploration but how far back does this interest go? Dr Joshua Nall tells Seb Falk about the Mars globe held at the Whipple Science Museum in Cambridge. Hannah Smithson explains her research into the way we see colour and explains the different perceptions of that blue/black/gold/white dress. Timothy Peacock has been studying the fears about Skylab falling to earth, looking at government files and the media reporting of the 1979 re-entry and distintegration of the first United States space station.Dr Joshua Nall is a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker and the Curator of Modern Sciences at the Whipple Museum of the History of Science in Cambridge. His book News from Mars: Mass Media and the Forging of a New Astronomy, 1860–1910 was awarded the Philip Pauly Prize by the History of Science society. Hannah Smithson is Professor of Experimental Psychology and a fellow of Pembroke College at the University of Oxford Dr Timothy Peacock is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Glasgow and co-director of the University's Games and Gaming Lab (GGLab)Seb Falk is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by the BBC and Arts and Humanities Research Council to put research on the radio. He is the author of the book The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science. You can hear more from him in a Free Thinking episode called Ancient Wisdom and Remote Living https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000q3by and his short feature for BBC Radio 3 about why we shouldn't compare Covid to the Black Death https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000nkzrYou can find a playlist exploring New Research on the Free Thinking website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90This episode was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. Producer: Torquil MacLeod

From prejudice against accents to early attempts to create an artificial voice - Matthew Sweet is joined by the academics Sadie Ryan, Allison Koenecke and Lynda Clark.Sadie Ryan hosts a podcast Accentricity and is part of the Manchester Voices project team https://www.manchestervoices.org/project-team/ You can find a New Thinking podcast episode looking in more detail at that project https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07h30hmLynda Clark is part of the InGAME (Innovation in Games and Media Enterprise) project at the University of Dundee. She's interested in interactive fiction and AI storytelling. She's been researching the experiments of Joseph Faber who created Euphonia in 1846 and created her own take working with games and digital experiences.Allison Koenecke works in the Stanford University Computational Policy Lab and the Golub Capital Social Impact LabYou might also be interested in these programmes from the Free Thinking archives - all available to download as BBC Arts & Ideas podcasts What is Speech? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b1q2f3 What is Good Listening? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000djtd The pros and cons of swearing https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09c0r4m Language and Belonging https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0006fh9 AI and creativity: what makes us human? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0005nml Robots https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08chbpcProducer: Luke Mulhall