Rebuilding Beirut’s village in a city
A year ago Johnny Khawand saw the home he grew up in ripped apart by the massive explosion in a chemical dump in the port of Beirut, Lebanon – one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history. For hou...
29 Jul 202126min
A tale of two Tokyos
The wait is finally over for the Tokyo Olympics, 2020. Ken Nishikawa and Nick Luscombe take inspiration and hope from the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, which kick-started a new internationalism in Japan as ...
27 Jul 202127min
Two smiley faces: Episode four
So how do you get an emoji added to the list? We hear from the women who have had hundreds of emoji approved between them, from the sari, to the mirror, to the one-piece bathing suit. How did they do ...
25 Jul 202123min
The road to rock'n'roll
In a segregated US, black audiences, entertainers and entrepreneurs established their own network of live performance venues known as the Chitlin’ Circuit. Concentrated primarily in the Deep South, it...
24 Jul 202149min
The Tokyo Olympics
A year later than planned, due to the pandemic, the Tokyo Olympics are underway. Yet Covid cases in the capital are rising, and a recent poll showed that 55% of people in Japan were opposed to the Gam...
24 Jul 202123min
Dangerous liaisons in Sinaloa
The Mexican state of Sinaloa is synonymous with drug trafficking. With the profits from organised crime a driver of the local economy, the tentacles of ‘narco cultura’ extend deep into people’s lives ...
22 Jul 202126min
Lex Gillette: A leap in the dark
Lex Gillette was seven years old when his eyes stopped working. At first, things were a little blurry, a little distorted. Then, after 10 operations to treat the retinas that kept detaching in both hi...
20 Jul 202127min
Two smiley faces: Episode three
We travel to California to find out who controls the emoji available on every single smartphone in the world - the mysterious Unicode Consortium. This secretive organisation decides what is included a...
18 Jul 202123min
