Thinking on Sunday was launched as a new series of events with different themes to the Sunday Lectures. These interesting and stimulating sessions have a talk or presentation followed by Q&A, debate and discussion. The speakers are experts in their field, and/or have a passion for subject. Especially popular with our ethical society members, Thinking on Sunday is open to the public and promises to motivate and nourish the mind!
Tom Roberts traces the life of the Murdochs, how Rupert Murdoch’s view of the world was formed, and assesses its impact on the media that influences our politics today.
This is the story of our quest to understand the most mysterious object in the universe: the human brain. Matthew Cobb reveals how we came to our present state of knowledge.
Today in one the richest countries in the world, 60% of households in poverty have people in jobs, inequality is the highest it has been for 100 years, climate change threatens our extinction and automation means millions are forced into a life of precarity. The solution? Basic Income, says Guy Standing.
It’s well past time for museums to be honest about their acquisitions history and how objects arrive in their collections in the first place. Alice Procter seeks to resist triumphalist nostalgia with art history. How did the narratives of Empire come into being? Who controls them?
Professor David Nash explores the crime of blasphemy: as an act of individuals but also as a widespread and constant presence in cultural, political and religious life.
The model of ‘the good life’ and its formulas for success ignore the haunting possibility that one may not succeed and as a result be deemed ‘a failure’. Beverley Clack explores that often-neglected theme of failure, not just as the opposite of achievement but also how it has been conflated with loss.
Geoff White, one of the UK’s leading technology correspondents, charts the astonishing development of hacking, from its conception in America’s hippy tech community in the 1970s, through its childhood among the ruins of the Eastern Bloc, to its coming of age as one of the most dangerous and pervasive threats to our digital world.
Cancer has always been with us. Dr Kat Arney takes us to the dawn of life on planet earth right up to the present day to get to the heart of what cancer really is and how by better understanding its evolutionary journey we might one day overcome it.
Evolving technology changes ethics. Juan Enriquez points out that, contrary to common wisdom, technology often enables more ethical behaviours. Technology chal-lenges old beliefs and upends institutions that do not grow and change.
The story of western correspondents in Russia is the story of Russia’s attitude to the west. James Rodgers analyses the news throughout history, from the coverage of the siege of the Winter Palace and a plot to kill Stalin, to the Chernobyl explosion and the Salisbury poison scandal.
Marina Sitrin discusses what she found whilst writing her book Pandemic Solidarity, which collects first-hand experiences from around the world of people creating their own narratives of solidarity and mutual aid during the global crisis of COVID-19.
George Zarkadakis envisions a future liberal democracy in which intelligent machines facilitate citizen assemblies, helping to extend citizen rights, and blockchains and cryp-to-economics enable new forms of democratic governance and business collaboration.
