Jeremy Bowen: Making Sense of the Modern Middle East, Part Two

American author Naomi Wolf made her name with The Beauty Myth, a book that exposed the tyranny of the ideal of female beauty. Now she’s back with a no less dramatic or controversial new work. In Vagina: A New Biography Wolf makes the case that the vagina is much more than a sex organ – it is integral to female well-being, and a catalyst to female creativity, confidence and identity. In this talk for Intelligence Squared she explained how the latest neuroscience reveals fascinating new discoveries about the vagina and female wellbeing, and discussed sexual relationships, pornography, history and literature. She showed how men can learn more about ‘what women really need’, and how women can experience themselves in a new way. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

10 Dec 20131h 36min

In an age of custom-fabricated, do-it-yourself product design and creation, the collective potential of a million garage tinkerers and enthusiasts is about to be unleashed... Check out today's Advent podcast where Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson takes you to the front lines of a new industrial revolution as today’s entrepreneurs, using open source design and 3-D printing, bring manufacturing to the desktop. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

10 Dec 20131h 24min

How can leadership lessons from the past be applied to intractable international problems today? In this talk from July 2013, shortly before the 50th anniversary of President John F Kennedy's assignation, the world renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs analysed JFK’s rhetoric of peace and explains how it began a process that led to détente and eventually to the end of the Cold War. How was it that only 8 months after the Cuban missile crisis had brought the world to the brink of self-destruction Kennedy could reach out to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and persuade him that they shared the same aims and interests? How at such a time of external peril could he dare to ask the American people to look inward and examine their own attitudes towards the Soviet Union? And where, when we need him, is the John Kennedy of the 21st century? Listen to this masterful lecture: part history lesson, part road map for the future. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

6 Dec 20131h 22min

What really divides the left and the right? To answer this question, Intelligence Squared brought together two giants of British intellectual culture for an ideological reckoning: Terry Eagleton, literary critic and long-time hero of the radical left, and Roger Scruton, right-wing philosopher who has written on everything from economic theory to literature, and architecture to wine. What we heard was two two irreducibly different views of the world, where each tries hard to understand the other’s view. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

6 Dec 20131h 29min

It happens to all of us every day. You get rejected. Your customer doesn’t buy. Your boss doesn’t agree. Your crush doesn’t say yes. In this provocative and entertaining talk, Daniel Pink, author of the New York Times best seller Drive, harvests a rich trove of social science to explain the theory and practice of bouncing back. — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

4 Dec 20131h 21min

Should we pay children to get good grades? Is it ethical to pay people to test risky new drugs or to donate their organs? What about hiring mercenaries to fight our wars, or selling citizenship to immigrants willing to pay? Michael Sandel is one of the world's most acclaimed and popular political philosophers. He has given the BBC Reith lectures and his online lectures for Harvard University attract millions of views. In this talk from May 2012 he looked at the role of markets in a democratic society, and asked how can we protect the moral and civic goods that markets do not honour and money cannot buy? — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

4 Dec 20131h 8min

For several years and more than a thousand miles, celebrated travel writer Robert Macfarlane has been following the vast network of old paths and routes that criss-cross Britain and its waters, looking at their connections to countries and continents beyond.  In this event, recorded at the Tabernacle in London On the 12th of June 2012, Macfarlane tells us his enthralling accounts of the ghosts and voices that haunt old tracks, of songlines and their singers, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, and of rights of way and rites of passage. This event was produced by Executive Producer Hannah Kaye with editing by Executive Producer Rowan Slaney. To hear the full length episode of this event and to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, head to intelligence Squared.com/membership or subscribe on Apple Podcasts — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

4 Dec 201334min

People everywhere are better off living in liberal democracy: that has been the reigning assumption of the western world. But could it be we’ve got it wrong? If you were one of the world’s billions of poor peasants might you not be better off under a system dedicated to political stability and economic growth – one that has lifted 400 million out of poverty – rather than one preoccupied with human rights, the rule of law, and the chance to vote out unpopular rulers? Thanks to the Chinese model of government life expectancy in Shanghai is now higher than in New York. So is China better off without democracy? Or is that just the age-old mantra of the tyrant? — We’d love to hear your feedback and what you think we should talk about next, who we should have on and what our future debates should be.  Send us an email or voice note with your thoughts to podcasts@intelligencesquared.com or Tweet us @intelligence2.  And if you’d like to support our mission to foster honest debate and compelling conversations, as well as ad-free podcasts, exclusive bonus content, early access and much more, become a supporter of Intelligence Squared.. Just visit intelligencesquared.com/membership to find out more.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

2 Dec 20131h 41min