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.
And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared today. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.
1276
P.J. O'Rourke: The Funniest Man in America
P.J. O'Rourke is America's premier political satirist and has more citations in The Penguin Dictionary of Humorous Quotations than any other living writer. In this live appearance for Intelligence Squared in 2010, he discussed his new book, ...
90 min
1277
I'd rather Be a Roundhead than a Cavalier
In the 1640s England was devastated by a civil war that divided the nation into two tribes – Roundheads and Cavaliers. Counties, towns, even families and friends were rent apart as the nation pledged its allegiance either to King Charles I (supported b...
88 min
1278
David Grossman in conversation with Linda Grant
One of Israel’s most acclaimed writers, David Grossman is the author of numerous pieces of fiction, nonfiction and children's literature. His work has dealt with Jewish history, the occupation of the West Bank, the cost of war and the dramas of fa...
86 min
1279
Psychiatrists & the pharma industry are to blam...
Drug pushers. We tend to associate them with the bleak underworld of criminality. But some would argue that there’s another class of drug pushers, just as unscrupulous, who work in the highly respectable fields of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical indu...
92 min
1280
William Gibson on 'Zero History' with Cory Doct...
On 5th October 2010, Intelligence Squared paired author William Gibson with popular blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow in a wide-ranging conversation that gives a fascinating insight into the mind of the man heralded as the "architec...
76 min
1281
Stop Bashing Christians! Britain has become an ...
Are Christians victims of a hateful animus, or are they demanding special treatment in a secular state which in fact applies the law equally to all? Peter Hitchens fears that without Christianity, we might end up undermining the whole foundation of law...
108 min
1282
Is London too rich to be interesting?
It used to be so easy. You left university, came to London and got yourself a flatshare in one of the cheaper areas: Notting Hill, Maida Vale or Highgate. Living was cheap and if it took you a while to find out what you really wanted to do with your li...
86 min
1283
Karen Armstrong on Religion and the History of ...
Karen Armstrong has written over 16 books on faith and the major religions, studying what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common, and how our faiths have shaped world history and drive current events.
She came to the Intelligence Squared stage...
83 min
1284
Napoleon The Great?
How should we remember Napoleon, the man of obscure Corsican birth who rose to become emperor of the French and briefly master of Europe?
As the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo approaches in 2015, Intelligence Squared brought together two ...
85 min
1285
Steven Pinker on Good Writing with Ian McEwan
Steven Pinker is one of the world’s leading authorities on language, mind and human nature. A professor of psychology at Harvard, he is the bestselling author of eight books and regularly appears in lists of the world’s top 100 thinkers.On September ...
78 min
1286
Francis Fukuyama in Conversation with David Run...
Professor Francis Fukuyama came to the Intelligence Squared stage in September, to square up with one of Britain’s most brilliant political thinkers, David Runciman, to assess how democracy is faring in 2014. We certainly haven’t attained the rosy futu...
83 min
1287
Marina Abramović on art, performance, time and ...
Marina Abramović is the most celebrated performance artist in the world. Over a career spanning four decades she has pioneered performance as an art form and accumulated a devoted following that includes Jay-Z and Lady Gaga.Using her body as both sub...
82 min
1288
History Shows Us That Scotland and England Woul...
This event was recorded at the Chalke Valley History Festival in July 2014.
The future of the Union will be voted for in a referendum soon, and this debate explored the historical relationship between Scotland and England, and the direct bearing that ...
59 min
1289
London Should Love Its Bankers
Do the British have a death wish? You’d be forgiven for thinking so the way so many of them seem to want to cripple the most dynamic part of their own economy. What is the world’s largest market for dollars? London. Where does the Chinese State Adminis...
95 min
1290
Has Martin Luther King's Dream Been Realized?
This event was on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. On 28 August 1963, civil rights campaigners marched on Washington to secure equality before the law. Today, America’s first black president sits in the White House,...
65 min
1291
Money Can't Buy Happiness
Leading voices from the fields of science, philosophy came to the Intelligence Squared Asia stage for this thought-provoking debate about the pursuit of wealth and its relationship to happiness. Among other topics, this debate raised questions about t...
90 min
1292
University is an unwise investment
For many Western teenagers university has long been considered a passport to the good life: a rite of passage consisting of mind-expanding reading and writing or the acquisition of a professional qualification, and meeting like-minded people often over...
62 min
1293
It's Time to End The War on Drugs
To liberalise or prohibit, that is the question.
Prohibitionists argue that legalising anything increases its consumption. The world has enough of a problem with legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, so why add to the problem by legalising cannabis, ...
131 min
1294
"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
1295
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
1296
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
1297
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
1298
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
1299
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
1300
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