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Plus: Gulf states face Iranian counter attacks, upsetting their image of safety. And U.S. forces used Anthropic’s AI to coordinate strikes in Iran, defying a White House order to stop working with the company. Daniel Bach hosts.
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The UK government has declared 2026, the National Year of Reading. The numbers suggest that reading needs all the public relations it can get. Under a third of school children say they read for pleasure and the number going on to read English Literature at University has shrunk by over a third in the last fifteen years. Their parents are not doing much better, with some surveys suggesting that any where up to half of adults have not read a single book in the last year. So, how can the case for the value of reading and the simple pleasure of picking up a book cut through? Tom Sutcliffe chairs Radio 4's discussion programme which starts the week. His guests are:
Margaret Busby was Britain's first Black woman publisher who has enjoyed a 50 year career at the centre of cultural life and the book trade. Among her achievements she founded a publishing house, edited the ground-breaking international anthologies Daughters of Africa and New Daughters of Africa and championed authors marginalised by the mainstream. Her new book Part of the Story: Writings from Half a Century features her own literary output from between 1966 and 2023.
Sarah Dillon, Professor at the University of Cambridge, has looked at the question 'what are you reading?' The books we encounter shape the choices we make and when it comes to scientists, it appears that ideas from imaginative literature influence their thinking. Storylistening: Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning, co-authored with Dr Claire Craig, former Director of the UK Government Office for Science, makes the case for the value of attention to stories in decision making.
Lottie Moggach is an arts journalists and writer of literary thrillers - she's also edited, researched and taught writing. Her latest novel, Mrs Pearcey, is Victorian true crime novel. She reflects on historical fiction, her own reading and working as a writer today.
Producer: Ruth Watts
Today’s episode of Up First was edited by James Hider, Tina Kraya, Anna Yukhananov, Miguel Macias, Mohamad ElBardicy, and Alice Woelfle.
It was produced by Ziad Buchh and Nia Dumas.
Our director is Christopher Thomas.
We get engineering support from Zo van Ginhoven. Our technical director is Carleigh Strange.
(0:00) Introduction
(01:53) US Israeli War With Iran
(05:14) Trump's War Address
(09:05) Gulf Countries Bear The Brunt
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Today, we are dropping another episode in our "chats" series, but expanding the audience set to include more folks. This episode is Founder Chats - hearing from those scaling the companies themselves.
In this episode, we are talking with Max Denevich, Co-founder and CRO of LoyaltyPlant. Max is going to share with us to road he travelled, entering into this industry, his go to market strategies, scaling across geographic region - and much, much more.
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Mary Balmana grew up in San Francisco and has driven down Monterey Boulevard near the Glen Park neighborhood hundreds of times. She often notices a large, beautiful Victorian building tucked between the houses and apartment buildings that dominate the block. And she's wondered, what's the story with it? How did such a grand building end up in such an unassuming spot?
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This story was reported by Katrina Schwartz. Bay Curious is made by Christopher Beale and Olivia Allen-Price. Additional support from Jen Chien, Katie Sprenger, Maha Sanad, Ethan Toven-Lindsey and everyone on Team KQED.
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There is a value to shared knowledge that tends to go unrecognized because it's so ubiquitous. Nonetheless, experimental psychologist Steven Pinker explains in this Social Science Bites podcast, common knowledge underlies things like paper money, governance, and even coral reefs.
And common knowledge, he makes clear to host David Edmonds, "does not have its ordinary sense of conventional wisdom or an open secret or something that everyone knows, but rather something that everyone knows that everyone knows, and everyone knows that, and everyone knows that, and so on, ad infinitum."
Possing that shared knowledge – and the knowledge that others share that knowledge – creates the conditions for coordination, and thus action beyond what an individual could achieve. That's the reason, he says, "that autocrats fear common knowledge of the regime's shortcomings is that no regime has the firepower to intimidate every last citizen."
Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, details his understanding of the virtues and vices of common knowledge in his most recent book, When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...: Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life. The book, his 13th, continues his streak as one of the most publicly recognized of public intellectuals, including recognition as one of Foreign Policy's "World's Top 100 Public Intellectuals" and Time's "100 Most Influential People in the World Today." He is also only the second (so far) returning guest to Social Science Bites, having addressed violence and human nature in a 2012 podcast.
After more than two months of tug-of-war for Warner Brothers Discovery, Netflix is dropping the rope and clearing the way for Paramount Skydance to take over one of Hollywood's most iconic studios. Meanwhile, more fallout after the FBI raided Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent Alberto Carvalho's home and office on Wednesday. And from flood watch to heat warnings, Southern California is rounding out February with more extreme weather. After a series of winter storms pummeled the Southland earlier this month, damaging roads and flooding businesses, a high-pressure system is sending temperatures 15 to 20 degrees above normal. In business, the majority of Moreno Valley Mall remains closed after city officials found hundreds of fire safety violations, and Trader Joe's issued a nationwide frozen chicken fried rice due to potential glass contamination. Read more at https://LATimes.com.
We create digital breadcrumbs all the time — when we buy something online, when we post on social media, and even when we look up directions on the internet. This is data generally collected by private companies — but how and when should the government be able to access it?
There have been lawsuits filed recently against the Department of Homeland Security over its collection and use of consumer data. Jeramie Scott, senior counsel and director of the Surveillance Oversight Program at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, explains how the government collects data about us.
The United States and Israel continued to strike Iran with missiles for a second day on Sunday, destroying more power centers of the Iranian regime and, according to rights groups, bringing the civilian death toll over 100. Iran responded with retaliatory attacks.
At the same time, all eyes were on the Iranian government and the millions of citizens who have long opposed it.
Farnaz Fassihi, who covers Iran for The New York Times, brings us the view from a pivotal moment inside Iran.
Guest: Farnaz Fassihi, the United Nations bureau chief for The New York Times. She also covers Iran and how countries around the world deal with conflicts in the Middle East.
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Photo: Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
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OA1240 - Shaina Aber, Executive Director with Acacia Center for Justice, joins today to discuss immigration nonprofit work during Trump 2.0. Find all of the tools and programs we talked about at their website, Acacia Center for Justice.