More or Less: Behind the Stats - Birds, Mozart, austerity, Thatcher

Birds + windows =? The BBC Quiz show The Unbelievable Truth reckons that more than 2 million birds die crashing into window panes every day in the US. Tim Harford finds this, well, unbelievable. Marcus du Sautoy explores the maths in Mozart's The Magic Flute; a student who uncovered a mistake in a famous economic paper, which has been used to make the case for austerity cuts, explains how he did it; and separating fact from fiction about Margaret Thatcher with a look at the numbers of her time in office.

New Books in Native American Studies - Lance R. Blyth, “Chiricahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880” (Nebraska UP, 2012)

Most people today think of war–or really violence of any sort–as for the most part useless. It’s better, we say, just to talk things out or perhaps buy our enemies off. And that usually works. But what if you lived in a culture where fighting was an important part of social status and earning a living? What if, say, you couldn’t get married unless you had gone to war? What if, say, you couldn’t feed your family without raiding your enemies? Such was the case with Chiricahua Apache of the Southwest. As Lance R. Blyth shows in his terrific book Chirichahua and Janos: Communities of Violence in the Southwestern Borderlands, 1680-1880 (Nebraska UP, 2012), war was a necessary part of Chiricahua life, at least in the 17th and 18th centuries. They needed to fight the Spanish in Janos, and there was nothing the Spanish could really do to stop them, at least in the long term. Of course the Spanish–who were, it should be said, invaders–fought back. And so the two communities entered into a two century-long struggle that only ended with the “removal” of the Chiricahua Apache by the United States in the nineteenth century. Listen to Lance tell the fascinating story.

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Start the Week - Gavin Turk on the Value of Art

On Start the Week Lisa Jardine talks to the artist Gavin Turk about the construction of artistic myth and the question of authorship and authenticity. The rare book dealer Rick Gekoski searches for lost treasures amid tales of theft, forgery and destruction, while the curator Paul Roberts reveals the life and culture preserved in the volcanic devastation of Pompeii and Herculaneum. The everyday object - a table - is at the centre of Tanya Ronder's new play of belonging, identity and inheritance.

Producer: Katy Hickman.