Author: BBC Radio 4

The Nobel prize-winning economist and Professor of Psychology Daniel Kahneman focuses his latest research on the high cost of inconsistent decision making. In Noise, co-authored with Oliver Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, he looks at why humans can be so unreliable, and what can be done about it. He tells Andrew Marr that people working in the same job often make wildly different judgements, influenced by factors like their current mood, when they last ate, even the weather. He argues that ‘noise’ is distinct from bias and has been neglected by organisations and businesses.

Gillian Tett is Editor-at-Large for the Financial Times and is also focused on transforming the world of business. But whereas Kahneman uses the methods of psychology, Tett argues for anthropology. For over a century anthropologists have immersed themselves in unfamiliar cultures, studying the hidden rituals at play. In her book Anthro-Vision, Tett uses similar techniques to reveal the underlying structures and human behaviour in our modern world – from Amazon warehouses to Silicon Valley to City trading floors.

Ann Cairns is the Executive Vice Chair of Mastercard which has hundreds of offices worldwide. She explores how psychology and anthropology can help to manage the company’s fortunes and employees through times of flux and change. Cairns started out as a research scientist before developing an interest in offshore engineering, becoming the first woman qualified to work offshore in Britain. She moved into banking in the late 1980s and joined Mastercard in 2011.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The Sackler name is more often associated with philanthropy and lavish donations in the arts and sciences. But the investigative reporter Patrick Radden Keefe tells another story in Empire of Pain. He questions how much of the Sackler wealth was made from the making and aggressive marketing of the painkiller, Oxycontin. He tells Amol Rajan of the misery that has unfolded in today’s opioid crisis – an epidemic of drug addiction which has killed nearly half a million people in the US.

The direct marketing to GPs and advertising campaigns in the US helped to make Oxycontin a hugely popular drug. But in the UK too there are concerns about the over-prescribing of painkillers for long periods of time. Dr Zoe Williams is a GP in South London and presenter of the BBC show, Trust Me I’m a Doctor. As a founding member of the British Society of Lifestyle Medicine she’s pioneering changes to reduce dependency on drugs, and increase take-up of alternative treatments, like exercise.

What happens when people start to mistrust medical authorities is at the heart of Heidi Larson’s work as Director of the Vaccine Confidence Project at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. In her latest book, Stuck, she looks at how vaccine reluctance and refusal is no longer limited to the margins of society. As mistrust of the official message and messenger grows so does rumour, conflict and hesitancy.

Producer: Katy Hickman

The looting of art in war time is nothing new, but Napoleon took it to new heights: demanding of his defeated enemies across Italy their most valuable statues and paintings. Cynthia Saltzman’s Napoleon’s Plunder tells the story of how the most magnificent works of the High Renaissance – by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian and Veronese – went on triumphant display in the Louvre. She tells Andrew Marr how Paris was transformed during this period into the art capital of Europe, and the role art played in cementing the power of the new regime after the French Revolution.

One of the most extraordinary paintings taken during this time was Veronese’s Wedding Feast at Cana, stripped from the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore, on an island in Venice in 1797. The Italian architect and presenter Francesco da Mosto considers what this theft meant to Venice’s political and cultural authority at the time. While many paintings were returned after Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, The Wedding Feast at Cana remains in Paris to this day, hanging directly across from the Mona Lisa. But Da Mosto looks at whether a 21st century solution – a digital facsimile – installed in the original monastery means that Venice can claim to have its Veronese back home.

As the former Director of three major British institutions, including the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith understands the importance and prestige of a country’s national collections. In The Art Museum In Modern Times he explores the changes that have taken place in the past century – from the architecture of the buildings to the expectation of the visitors. Where once was a mission to instruct, educate and amaze, now the emphasis is on contemplation and individual experience.

Producer: Katy Hickman

What it means to be a black Christian woman in the UK is at the heart of Chine McDonald’s new book, God Is Not a White Man. Part memoir and part theological and historical study, McDonald looks back at the role the Christian faith has played over the centuries in perpetuating ideas of white supremacy. She tells Tom Sutcliffe that black women in the church have stayed silent too long.

The writer Jeet Thayil re-imagines the story of the New Testament through the eyes of the women suppressed and erased from the Gospels. Names of the Women brings to life fifteen women whose importance at the Crucifixion highlights the power they once had. Thayil was born into a Syrian Christian family in India and was inspired to write this work by the defiance and authority of his grandmother. In 2011 when the Occupy movement set up camp around St Paul’s Cathedral in London, Canon Giles Fraser was caught between his pastoral care of the protestors, the needs of the church and the demands of the City of London. He suffered a crisis of faith and mental health. In Chosen: Lost and Found Between Christianity and Judaism, Fraser explores his own religious roots, and discovers the healing power of theology for the individual and society. Producer: Katy Hickman