How To Academy Podcast

Today's computer scientists play the same role as the oracles of the ancient world and the astrologers of the Middle Ages. Modern predictions not only advise on war, crop output, and marriages, algorithms and statisticians now determine whether we can get a loan, a job, an apartment, or an organ transplant. And when we cede ground to these predictions, we lose control of our ...

Today, in our clock-bound, screen-immersed world, most of us rely on machines to mark the hours. Past generations, however, would tell time by shadows shrinking, the midday glow over a mountaintop, the crowing of the rooster in the darkness. They noticed the flowers that close at noon, sensed how the quality of light changes at dusk, and marked time at night by the motion of ...

Frank Miller transformed the way comics are told and reshaped popular culture in America and the world. In this episode of the podcast, we’ll hear about his struggles as a fresh faced seventeen year-old kid in seedy 1970s New York and his transformation of Batman from a childish has-been into the gritty, noirish hero we love. We’ll head to Hollywood, hear about how the Si...

Rising from provincial obscurity to the highest elected office in Rome, Cicero became the greatest orator of his age. Yet Cicero was far more than a master of rhetoric. His long and turbulent life unfolded alongside the collapse of the Roman Republic.

Catharine Edwards, one of the world’s foremost experts on Roman history, joins bestselling novelist Robert Harris to tr...

In the midst of a world in upheaval, Erdoğan has remade Turkey in his own image. Once a shining portal that straddled East and West, Istanbul's streets now teem with nationalistic fervour, political repression and rampant corruption. In the old Ottoman neighbourhood of Karagumruk, journalist Suzy Hansen goes looking for the truth about modern Turkey. In this episode of the po...