Evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar has spent many years investigating human mating strategies. What that means is that he can spend time pondering why we kiss, what the point of high heels is, and why a GSOH is so often on the shopping list of desirable traits in a partner. Here in under four minutes he tackles some of those questions.
Jon Agar‘s new History of Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond goes beyond the limitations of disciplinary and national histories of science to look at the broad themes in the science of the last eleven decades. He shows the close connections between science and warfare, politics and the commercial world, and charts the rise of new fields and the impact of new discoveries. He also tells the stories of some of the remarkable individuals, both well known and less familiar, who shaped twentieth-century science. Jon Agar is senior lecturer in science and technology studies at University College London. He is the editor of the British Journal for the History of Science; his previous publications include histories of the computer and the mobile phone. To listen to the complete interview, click here. For excerpts, click on the links below. 1. “One of the interesting things about twentieth-century science is that a lot of the really exciting stuff has happened at the edges of disciplines.” Jon Agar explains here why he set out to write a …
“I wanted to look for a politics for the stranger, and of the stranger, which didn’t require of strangers to become friends with each other or with the host community. I felt that that kind of politics was just too narrow and impossible quite frankly in a very cosmopolitan age.” My guest in this podcast is Ash Amin, who until last year was professor of geography at the University of Durham, and now holds the 1931 chair in geography at Cambridge. I met Ash Amin in Cambridge recently to talk about his latest book, Land of Strangers. Most modern Western societies are nothing more than a collection of strangers, Amin maintains; public and political awareness of the stranger has become acute: nobody wants the immigrant or the asylum seeker. The stranger has become a figure of fear and hate, to be contained and disciplined. Land of Strangers argues that humanist policies of inclusiveness are not up to the demands of our extraordinarily cosmopolitan age. The book instead calls for a different kind of politics of …
