The New Society | culture from the New Statesman

Carlo Rovelli is a physicist. But he’s also so much more than that. Perennially on lists of the world’s top thinkers, Rovelli likes to think and think hard, about the big questions, where physics meets philosophy and art and literature.

Can we ever truly know what it feels like to be someone, or something, else? Is the mind separate from the body? What even is life? Where could it possibly come from? Where could the universe come from?

These are the questions Rovelli has a stab at answering in his new book On the Equality of All Things: Physics and Philosophy. In particular he draws on quantum mechanics and ancient Eastern thought to argue that the world is not made of separate categories but is one interconnected web of relations, where things are defined by how they interact with everything else.

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Carlo Rovelli.
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You know what you know, and I know what I know, but only when we know what the other knows do we have common knowledge.

That’s the crux of cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker’s latest work, focusing on the shift from private to public knowledge, and how this can suddenly change behaviours or even start revolutions.

Steven Pinker joins Tanjil Rashid to discuss.
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Every story, they say, needs a beginning, a middle and an end; every story needs a setting.

What if that isn’t true? Can you write when everything is in flux, when you are unmoored from places, and when the time is out of joint?

Tanjil Rashid is joined by Amit Chaudhuri, a singer, composer, poet, critic and novelist, to discuss how a story is less important – and less interesting – than the movement of life.
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"We live in a world that deserves unicorns," says Katherine Rundell.

If you haven't come across Rundell's work yet, you will soon. She's written over a dozen books, including an award-winning biography of John Donne and the children's fantasy series Impossible Creatures - a copy of which every Year 6 child in the country will receive this Christmas. Disney has just signed a seven-figure deal for the screen adaptation.. Rundell is being touted as the next JK Rowling.

When she's not writing Rundell works on Renaissance literature as a fellow of Oxford University.

Two themes recur throughout her work: fantasy and animals. And as you might guess from her feelings about unicorns, the two are rarely far apart.

On this episode she joins Tanjil Rashid, following the publication of her new essay collection Napolean's Orangutang to talk about what humans should learn from animals, the connection between religion and fantasy, and - in her words - why wonder is political.
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A third of British adults who used to read for pleasure don't anymore.

And according to the OECD, literacy itself, not just the habit of it, is declining or stagnating across most of the developed world.

In a new book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott argues that we're living through a great unwinding: a retreat from the written word and the kind of rational, analytical mind that print culture built over five centuries, back towards something closer to the pre-literate world: one dominated not by books, but by images, screens, and short-form video.

In this episode, Tanjil Rashid is joined by James Marriott to ask: are we really heading back into the dark?
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