Little Atoms

Matthew Kneale studied Modern History at Oxford University. He is the author of several novels, including English Passengers which won the Whitbread Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. His latest book is An Atheist’s History of Belief: Understanding Our Most Extraordinary Invention. Also this week, columnist Suzanne Moore on A Book of Dreams by Peter Reich.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Philip Hoare is the author of seven works of non-fiction, including an acclaimed biography of Noel Coward, and Leviathan or, The Whale, which won the 2009 BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. An experienced broadcaster, Hoare wrote and presented the BBC Arena film The Hunt for Moby-Dick, and directed three films for BBC’s Whale Night. He is Visiting Fellow at Southampton University, and Leverhulme Artist-in-residence at The Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011. He is also co-curator of the Moby-Dick Big Read. His latest book, The Sea Inside, was published by Fourth Estate in June 2013. Also this week, columnist Deborah Orr talks about Kate Bush’s debut album The Kick Inside.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Rana Dasgupta won the 2010 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best Book for his debut novel Solo. He is also the author of a collection of urban folktales, Tokyo Cancelled, which was shortlisted for the 2005 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Capital: A Portrait of Twenty-First Century Delhi is his first work of non-fiction. Born in Canterbury in 1971, he has lived in Delhi for 13 years. Also this week, writer Sarah Ditum talks about Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Owen Hatherley writes regularly on architecture and cultural politics for Architects Journal, Architectural Review,Icon, The Guardian, The London Review of Books and New Humanist, and is the author of several books, including Militant Modernism, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain and A New Kind of Bleak: Journeys through Urban Britain. His latest books are Landscapes of Communism, and The Ministry of Nostalgia.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

A special edition of Little Atoms for Resonance FM’s fundraising week. Recorded live at The Slaughtered Lamb on 10th February 2014. Is Music Journalism in a Critical Condition? The UK music scene once supported four weekly music papers, which wielded the power to form the musical agenda in a way that’s unimaginable today. Of these, only the NME staggers on in managed decline, along with an ever dwindling number of monthly magazines. The changing ways we consume music and the rise of the internet have radically changed the musical landscape, and perhaps this is a good thing. Those weeklies were notoriously bad at covering certain genres, and the internet has enabled a much wider range of writers to share the music they love. On the other hand it has yet to find a reliable way to pay them to do so. Are the days of making a living from music journalism over? Joining Neil Denny of the Little Atoms Radio Show to explore this question, and to share tales of private jets and rainy nights at the Northampton...

Aleks Krotoski is an academic and journalist who writes about and studies technology and interactivity. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Media and Communications Department at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Aleks writes for the Guardian and Observer newspapers, and hosts Tech Weekly, their technology podcast. She presented the Emmy and Bafta-winning BBC 2 series Virtual Revolution, and more recently the BBC Radio 4 series Digital Human. Her first book is Untangling the Web: What the Internet is Doing to You. Also this week, critic Matthew Sweet on the Ealing WW2 propaganda film Went The Day Well?  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

James Bridle is a writer, artist, publisher and technologist usually based in London, UK. His work covers the intersection of literature, culture and the network. He has written for WIRED, ICON, Domus, Cabinet, the Atlantic and many other publications, and writes a regular column for the Observer newspaper on publishing and technology. In 2011, he coined the term “New Aesthetic”, and his ongoing research around this subject has been featured and discussed worldwide. His work, such as the Iraq War Historiography, an encyclopaedia of Wikipedia Changelogs, has been exhibited at galleries in the Europe, North and South America, Asia and Australia, and has been commissioned by organisations such as Artangel, Mu Eindhoven, and the Corcoran Gallery, Washington DC. Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist and writer. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from... &n

Irving Finkel is an archaeologist and Assyriologist, currently Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Script, Languages and Cultures in the Department of the Middle East at the British Museum. He’s also an expert on the history of board games, and the founder of the Great Diary Project. Irving is the author of numerous books, most recently The Ark Before Noah: Decoding the Story of the Flood. Also on this week’s show, astrophysicist Lucianne Walkowicz on the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Temple of Dendur.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury are one half of 65daysofstatic, an instrumental band from Sheffield, as comfortable crashing samplers to mine glitches as they are putting guitars through too much distortion. Influenced by a technologically dystopian present and an apocalyptically likely future, they tend to be found filling venues, galleries or headphones with different kinds of noise in their ongoing efforts to find the limits of what ‘being a band’ can mean. The Space Lady is a street-performing singer based in Colorado, USA. Originally beginning on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, she has recently begun playing again. Often seen performing in 1980’s Boston, and then a decade later in San Francisco’s Castro community – where she would play and sing for hours on end for the gay scene, and got her apt moniker – The Space Lady’s winged helmet and setup of a Casio battery-powered keyboard, vocal mic and echo & phaser controls became a small but striking phenomenon. Her sound is a blend of synth-lade

Born into a showbiz milieu in Sydney, Tim Baker left Australia to travel in his early 20s and lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about music and worked in film. He later ran consular operations in France and North Africa for the Australian embassy, liaising with international authorities on cases involving murder, kidnap, terrorism and disappearances. His fiction includes the collection of short stories, Out From the Past, and his film work includes writing the feature film Samsara. His debut novel is Fever City.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alex Fleetwood is the founder and director of Hide&Seek, a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. Hide&Seek started life in 2007 as a festival of social games and playful experiences on London’s South Bank, and built into a studio occupied a unique position in the UK, creating innovative games, installations and events with organisations including Film4, the Cultural Olympiad, Tate Modern, Warner Bros, Gâité Lyrique, Nike, Sony, the Royal Opera House and Kensington Palace. Anab Jain was born and educated in India (NID), with an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, and founded Superflux in 2009, leading the Consultancy’s client partnerships whilst balancing the Lab’s self-initiated conceptual projects. She has lead multidisciplinary design, strategy and foresight projects for businesses, think-tanks and research organisations such as Sony, BBC, Nokia, NHS, Design Council, Forum for the Future, Qatar Foundation and Govt. of UAE. Honoured as a TED Fellow, she is

Olivia Laing‘s first book, To the River, was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Olivia is the former Deputy Books Editor of the Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. She’s a 2011 MacDowell Fellow, and has received awards from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation. Olivia ‘s latest book is The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Andy Miller is a reader, author and editor of books. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Esquire and Mojo. He’s the author of Tilting at Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport, among others. His latest book is The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed 2011 novel So Much Pretty. She grew up in northern Appalachia, where she dropped out of high school to work full time. Hoffman spent three years travelling and working as an agricultural labourer in Europe and the Middle East. She returned to the US, had a baby and found a job delivering newspapers which eventually led to work as a reporter covering environmental politics and crime. She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s, Columbia and Oxford, where she lectured on Violence and Masculinity for the Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium. Hoffman lives in Manhattan and teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College. Cara ‘s latest novel is Be Safe I Love You.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Neil Denny talks to Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall about her new book Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs, and then Francesca Kay on her latest novel The Long Room. Lisa Randall is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She has received numerous awards and honours and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is the author of numerous books including Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe. Her latest book is Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe. Francesca Kay's first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers...

Lee Rourke is the author of the short story collection Everyday, and the novel The Canal, which won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in 2010. He is writer in residence at Kingston University, where he is an MFA lecturer in creative writing and critical theory. He also lectures in creative writing at the University of East London. His latest novel is Vulgar Things.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Following a doctorate and subsequent research career in genetics, Kat Arney is now Science Communications Manager for Cancer Research UK, where she translates science into plain English to help people understand more about the disease. Kat is also a science writer and broadcaster, whose writing has appeared in the Guardian, Science, New Scientist, BBC Online and Al-Jazeera Online. She has presented several BBC Radio 4 science documentaries and programmes in the Costing the Earth series, is a regular presenter with the Naked Scientists, and presents and produces the Naked Genetics monthly podcast. Kat’s first book is Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this interview, recorded in Oxford ahead of the release of "God Is Not Great", Christopher Hitchens spoke to Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy about Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, religion, blasphemy and nuclear apocalypse  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Juliet Jacques is a freelance writer, best known for the Guardian’s “Transgender Journey”—the first time the gender reassignment process had been serialised for a major British publication. Her column was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011. She was included in the Independent’s Pink List for the last four years, and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. She has also written for Granta, TimeOut, Filmwaves, 3am, the London Review of Books, the New Humanist, the New Inquiry, and many other publications. She is the author of Trans: A Memoir. This is the 400th edition of Little Atoms, and Neil is joined by former host Becky Hogge in conversation with Juliet.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lucy Inglis is a historian, novelist, and occasional television presenter. In 2009 she created the Georgian London blog, which became the largest free body of work on the eighteenth century city online, which became a book, Georgian London: Into the Streets. She’s currently working on a book about Opium.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.