Author: BBC Radio 4

It’s Ok To Be Angry About Capitalism is the title of the new book by the US politician Bernie Sanders. In it he castigates a system that he argues is fuelled by uncontrolled greed and rigged against ordinary people. He tells Tom Sutcliffe it’s time to reject an economic order and a political system that continues to benefit the super-rich, and fight for a democracy that recognises that economic rights are human rights.

The Chief Economics Commentator at the Financial Times Martin Wolf looks more closely at how and why the relationship between capitalism and democracy appears to be unravelling. But despite the failings – slowing growth, growing inequality and widespread popular disillusion – he argues in The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism that the relationship remains the best system for human flourishing.

But the economist Kate Raworth believes that mainstream economics has had its day. Its failure to predict and prevent financial crises, while allowing extreme poverty, inequality and environment degradation to persist, means its contributing to, not solving, societal unrest. She argues that her theory – Doughnut Economics – offers a new model for a green, fair and thriving global economy.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli celebrates the life of an ancient Greek philosopher, in Anaximander And The Nature Of Science (translated by Marion Lignana Rosenberg). He tells Adam Rutherford that this little known figure spearheaded the first great scientific revolution and understood that progress is made by the endless search for knowledge. Anaximander challenged conventions by proposing that the Earth floats in space, animals evolve and storms are natural, not supernatural.

The travel writer Kapka Kassabova has gone searching for ancient knowledge about the natural world in her latest book, Elixir: In the Valley at the End of Time. The Mesta River, in her native Bulgaria, is one of the oldest inhabited rivers in Europe, and a mecca for wild plant gatherers, healers and mystics.

In Dvořák’s lyric opera the eponymous hero Rusalka is a water spirit who sacrifices her voice and leaves her home for the love of a Prince. In a new contemporary staging at the Royal Opera House (21 February–7 March 2023) the co-directors Ann Yee and Natalie Abrahami foreground the uneasy relationship between nature and humanity, and the latter's destruction of what it fails to heed.

Producer: Katy Hickman

Image credit: Asmik Grigorian in Natalie Abrahami and Ann Yee’s Rusalka, The Royal Opera ©2023 Laura Stevens

The psychologist Kimberley Wilson lays bear the truism ‘we are what we eat’. In Unprocessed: How the Food We Eat is Fuelling our Mental Health Crisis she bring into sharp focus the known links between diet, brain, behaviour and mental health. She tells Tom Sutcliffe how the government’s failure to address poor nutrition is a catastrophe.

Rebecca O’Connell’s research focuses on the social, cultural and economic reasons that shape what children and families eat, and the part food plays in their everyday lives. With the cost of living crisis and an increase in families suffering food poverty, she looks at the capacity to ‘choose’ to buy healthier food, and what other countries, like Portugal, have achieved in prioritising school meals.

But what about the food itself and how it’s grown? The author of The Ethical Carnivore, Louise Gray, turns her attention to fruit and veg in her latest book, Avocado Anxiety And Other Stories About Where Your Food Comes From. Tracking from farm to table, Gray discovers the impact that growing fruits and vegetables has on the planet.

Producer: Katy Hickman