Intelligence Squared
Intelligence Squared is the home of lively debate and deep-dive discussion. Follow Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts and enjoy four regular episodes per week taking you to the heart of the issues that matter in the company of the world’s great minds. We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be. Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.
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1201
"Contemporary Art Excludes the 99%"
What is the role of contemporary art museums today? Are biennales and art fairs platforms for experiment and exchange, or little more than social attractions for the elite? Have collectors become the new curators? Are private and corporate interests in...
77 min
1202
America's Drone Campaign Is Both Moral And Effe...
Bug splats. That’s what the American operators of drones, sitting in safety thousands of miles away, call the casualties of a drone attack in Pakistan or Yemen. Why bug splats? Because that’s what a human body zapped by a drone looks like on those Amer...
116 min
1203
Sex, bugs & video tapes: the private lives of p...
Would you like the details of your sex life, private conversations, and hidden passions splashed across the pages of a British tabloid or published online? Could you do anything to stop it? In Britain, unlike in the USA or France, there is no right to ...
46 min
1204
Art Schools Are Bad At Producing Good Artists
What makes a good artist? Can creativity can be taught? What kind of education ups the ante for success in today’s global culture?
These are some of the questions that were explored in this Intelligence Squared Asia debate in Singapore in January 2013...
91 min
1205
Jesus Would Have Voted Democrat
Remember the rich man and the eye of the needle? Blessed are the meek? The last shall be first? Jesus didn’t hold much truck for wealth or power, nor was he exactly a supporter of family values. He didn’t even encourage hard work (“Consider the lilies ...
101 min
1206
Shakespeare vs Milton: The Kings of English Lit...
Nearly four centuries after his death, no writer has come close to matching Shakespeare’s understanding of the world – or his gift for dramatic poetry. It’s not just kings and queens that he captured so uniquely in his transcendent verse. Shakespeare a...
132 min
1207
A Journey Into Outer Space, With Brian Cox
Are they out there? Intelligent beings from another world. Will we ever make contact with them? Is it even sensible to make guesses about whether life exists in other galaxies billions of light years from our own? How much do we know about outer space?...
114 min
1208
VS Naipaul in Conversation With Geordie Greig
Nobel laureate and giant of Western letters, Trinidad-born V. S. Naipaul has excelled in both fiction and non-fiction. His latest book The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief is a travelogue in which Naipaul sets out to discover how far the ol...
78 min
1209
Stop Poking the Bear: The West Needs to Engage ...
You don’t have to like Vladimir Putin, or doubt that he’s a nasty piece of work, to recognise that the Russian president’s reaction to the crisis in Ukraine is largely justified. The promise that Russia managed to extract from the West, as it watched i...
46 min
1210
How to Think Like a Freak: Learn How to Make Sm...
The books Freakonomics and SuperFreakonomics have been worldwide sensations, selling tens of millions of copies. They have come to stand for challenging conventional wisdom using data rather than emotion. Questions they examine are typically: Which is ...
89 min
1211
Look West Not East: South America Will be the 2...
Conventional wisdom tells us that a new star will rise in the East, and all eyes have been looking towards China or India as the 21st century’s new superpower. But remarkable as their recent economic growth may have been, the institutional frailty of b...
99 min
1212
The Allied Bombing of German Cities in World Wa...
No one doubts the bravery of the thousands of men who flew and died in Bomber Command. The death rate was an appalling 44%. And yet until the opening of a monument in Green Park this year they have received no official recognition, with many historians...
87 min
1213
Calm Down Dears: State Snooping Is A Price Wort...
So now we know: our spooks and their spooks are hoovering up and exchanging massive amounts of data on our private lives: not just whom we phone and email but the actual content of our communications; not just which websites we visit but what we choose...
93 min
1214
Western Parents Don't Know How to Bring Up Thei...
Why are there so many Chinese maths and music prodigies? Because Chinese mothers believe schoolwork and music practice come first, that an A-minus is a bad grade, that sleepovers, TV and computer games should never be allowed and that the only activity...
89 min
1215
The Making Of The Modern Middle East: Lawrence ...
How much blame for the current troubles in the Middle East lies with the decisions made by the West in 1919 – when the Ottoman Empire was carved up arbitrarily into the modern states we know today? Is it true that Arab society has tended to define itse...
88 min
1216
Britain Should Not Have Fought In The First Wor...
As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, books, television documentaries and articles on the subject abound. So do different opinions, especially as to whether Britain’s engagement was worth it.
Was it a vitally important c...
100 min
1217
Stephen Fry and Friends on the Life, Loves and ...
In this historic event, Stephen Fry and other friends of Christopher Hitchens came together to celebrate the life and work of this great writer, polemicist and orator.Fry was joined on stage in London by Richard Dawkins where the two discussed Hitche...
46 min
1218
The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Cannot Rock the ...
Is it a myth that women can have it all, all of the time? Or do the rising numbers of female executives in Hong Kong and around the world suggest otherwise? Does the glass ceiling exist as a barrier to the boardroom, or is the only limitation to a woma...
46 min
1219
The Best Chance For Peace In Israel And Palesti...
Is it surprising that the Israelis and Palestinians are still unable to come to some sort of agreement? After all if the adjudicator in a mediation is firmly on your side why bother to concede anything to the enemy? Conversely, why accept anything prop...
108 min
1220
One Size Doesn’t Fit All: Democracy is Not Alwa...
Democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried. So said Winston Churchill and who would disagree? One man, one vote, the rule of law, equality and a free press. These are the principles which tens of thousands have...
46 min
1221
Sam Harris on the Science of Good and Evil
Where do our ideas about morality and meaning come from? Most people - from religious extremists to secular scientists - would agree on one point: that science has nothing to say on the subject of human values. Indeed, science's failure to explain...
82 min
1222
Between You and I The English Language Is Going...
Speaking and writing correct English are the hallmark of an intelligent person. No one who cares about language wants to be caught splitting an infinitive or muddling up ‘infer’ and ‘imply’. Which is why the bestseller lists are regularly topped by boo...
102 min
1223
Jane Austen Vs Emily Bronte: The Queens of Engl...
Who was the Queen of English literature. Was it Jane Austen with her sensitive ear for the hypocrisy lurking beneath the genteel conversation in the drawing rooms of Georgian England? Or Emily Brontë with the complex tale of violent attraction, thwarte...
117 min
1224
Niall Ferguson On The Six Killer Apps Of Wester...
Niall Ferguson is the most brilliant British historian of his generation. In this talk from February 2011, based on his book 'Civilisation: The West and the Rest', he asks how Western civilization came to dominate the rest of the world.
His...
83 min
1225
"Let The Bad Guys Be: The Perils of Foreign Int...
Some leaders are so objectionable – Bashar al-Assad, Robert Mugabe – that it may seem only right to strain every sinew to get rid of them. But ghastly as their regimes may be, is there any reason to think that foreign intervention makes the situation b...
83 min