Free Thinking Folgen

The Nebra Sky Disc, a blue-green bronze dish around 30 cm in diameter, is thought to feature the oldest description of the cosmos on its surface. It's one of the exhibits in a new exhibition at the British Museum. Anne McElvoy looks at culture and travel between Britain and Europe from 4000 to 1000 BC, what we understand about the building of Stonehenge and other sites of that period in Scotland and Wales. Her guests are three archaeologists: Mike Pitts, Susan Greaney and Seren Griffiths. and the British museum exhibition curator Neil Wilkin.The World of Stonehenge runs at the British Museum in London from February 17th to July 17th 2022. Mike Pitts is the author of How to Build Stonehenge. Susan Greaney works for English Heritage at Stonehenge as a Senior Properties Historian and is studying for a PhD at Cardiff University. She's a New Generation Thinker, on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to turn academic research into radio - and on the Radio 3 website and BBC Sounds you can find an Essay by her, and a short Sunday feature based on her trip to explore connections between the Neolithic peoples of Britain and the ancient Jomon civilisation of Japan https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000hgqx Seren Griffiths is also a New Generation Thinker. She teaches at Manchester Metropolitan University and has co-curated exhibitions and projects at Oriel Môn Museum Anglesey and written an Essay for Radio 3 about world war one battlefield finds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000vgvbProducer: Torquil MacLeod

The doomsday clock stands at less than two minutes to midnight, but how alarmed should we be and how can art respond to humanity's apparent vulnerability? Shahidha Bari is joined by author Sheila Heti, theatre director Omar Elerian and New Generation Thinker SJ Beard.Sheila Heti's new novel Pure Colour, a kind of fable about end times, is published on 15th February. You can find her discussing a previous novel exploring motherhood in the Free Thinking archives https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b3fjvgThe Chairs (Les Chaises) by Eugene Ionesco, translated and directed by Omar Elerian, runs at the Almeida Theatre, London until 5th March. First staged in post-war Paris in 1952, it features two characters, Old Man and Old Woman, who spend the play preparing chairs for a series of invisible guests coming to hear a revelation which could be the meaning of life, or could be about the end of the world.SJ Beard is Academic Programme Manager at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council to share academic research on the radio. You can find their Essay about AI and what we learn from Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide on BBC Sounds https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09vz70dProducer: Torquil MacLeod

The first underwater film, the making of Moby Dick in Fishguard, Wales, the poetry of Marianne Moore and the secret world of whale scavengers are conjured by Rana Mitter's guests:In a new book, Strandings, Peter Riley, Associate Professor in Poetry and Poetics at the University of Durham, loses himself in the secretive world of whale-scavengers who descend on coastlines to claim trophies from washed-up carcasses.Author and artist Philip Hoare has written extensively about whales, encountering them often in his daily swims in the sea. His most recent book, Albert and the Whale, explores the life of Albrecht Dürer. You can hear him talking more about this link in another Free Thinking episode called Dürer, Rhinos and Whales https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001212cRachel Murray is a Leverhulme Fellow at the University of Sheffield whose current project examines the presence of marine life, particularly invertebrates, in contemporary and modern literature and both she and Philip Hoare look at the poetry of Marianne Moore. You can hear her presenting a Radio 4 feature Lady Chatterley's Bed Bugs https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000qwtxEdward Sugden, Senior Lecturer in American Studies at King’s College, is undertaking a biography of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, which turns the novel itself into a character and tracks its turbulent history from near-obscurity to becoming one of the most enduring novels of all time.Producer: Tim BanoYou can find a playlist exploring prose and poetry of all kinds on the Free Thinking website and a series of programmes exploring Modernist ideas and writing and there's also an episode devoted to Jaws: Sharks and Whales https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b060zryfImage: A sperm whale