Society

• Why prices rise

  What inflation is, how it is measured, what pushes prices up, and why central banks aim for 2 per cent a year instead of zero.

  • 8min read
  • 11min listen
  • 30questions
• The medium is the message

  Marshall McLuhan’s claim that the way a message reaches us shapes us more than the message does, and the main objections to it.

  • 8min read
  • 11min listen
  • 27questions
• Media & persuasion

  How news is chosen and worded, how persuasion and propaganda work on us, how numbers mislead, and why checking before you share matters.

  • 9min read
  • 11min listen
  • 31questions
• Knowing the past

  How we know what happened before anyone alive was born, from sources and how they are tested to Ibn Khaldūn’s rule for catching the impossible.

  • 9min read
  • 10min listen
  • 28questions
• Rules & justice

  Laws, courts and rulers, and what it takes for a judgment to be just.

  • 9min read
  • 10min listen
  • 32questions
• People & places

  Why nearly all Egyptians live on a twentieth of Egypt, what sets a population growing, and why every map of the world is a little wrong.

  • 9min read
  • 10min listen
  • 36questions
• Cities & civilization

  Why cities appeared, what holds them together, and Ibn Khaldūn’s account of why the families that rule them rise and fall.

  • 8min read
  • 10min listen
  • 30questions
• Money & trade

  Why a slip of printed paper buys a week’s food, how one number tells millions of strangers what to do, and what the market inspector was for.

  • 9min read
  • 10min listen
  • 32questions
• Culture & language

  What a culture is, how it is passed on and borrowed, and how language, spoken and written, carries it.

  • 9min read
  • 11min listen
  • 35questions
• Living together

  The unwritten rules, the positions and the ties that turn a crowd of strangers into a society, and how a newborn becomes one of its members.

  • 9min read
  • 10min listen
  • 31questions