Little Atoms

Paul Wolinski and Joe Shrewsbury are one half of 65daysofstatic, an instrumental band from Sheffield, as comfortable crashing samplers to mine glitches as they are putting guitars through too much distortion. Influenced by a technologically dystopian present and an apocalyptically likely future, they tend to be found filling venues, galleries or headphones with different kinds of noise in their ongoing efforts to find the limits of what ‘being a band’ can mean. The Space Lady is a street-performing singer based in Colorado, USA. Originally beginning on the streets of Boston in the late 70s, she has recently begun playing again. Often seen performing in 1980’s Boston, and then a decade later in San Francisco’s Castro community – where she would play and sing for hours on end for the gay scene, and got her apt moniker – The Space Lady’s winged helmet and setup of a Casio battery-powered keyboard, vocal mic and echo & phaser controls became a small but striking phenomenon. Her sound is a blend of synth-lade

Born into a showbiz milieu in Sydney, Tim Baker left Australia to travel in his early 20s and lived in Rome and Madrid before moving to Paris, where he wrote about music and worked in film. He later ran consular operations in France and North Africa for the Australian embassy, liaising with international authorities on cases involving murder, kidnap, terrorism and disappearances. His fiction includes the collection of short stories, Out From the Past, and his film work includes writing the feature film Samsara. His debut novel is Fever City.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Alex Fleetwood is the founder and director of Hide&Seek, a game design studio dedicated to inventing new kinds of play. Hide&Seek started life in 2007 as a festival of social games and playful experiences on London’s South Bank, and built into a studio occupied a unique position in the UK, creating innovative games, installations and events with organisations including Film4, the Cultural Olympiad, Tate Modern, Warner Bros, Gâité Lyrique, Nike, Sony, the Royal Opera House and Kensington Palace. Anab Jain was born and educated in India (NID), with an MA in Interaction Design from the Royal College of Art, and founded Superflux in 2009, leading the Consultancy’s client partnerships whilst balancing the Lab’s self-initiated conceptual projects. She has lead multidisciplinary design, strategy and foresight projects for businesses, think-tanks and research organisations such as Sony, BBC, Nokia, NHS, Design Council, Forum for the Future, Qatar Foundation and Govt. of UAE. Honoured as a TED Fellow, she is

Olivia Laing‘s first book, To the River, was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year. Olivia is the former Deputy Books Editor of the Observer and writes for a variety of publications, including the Observer, New Statesman, Guardian and Times Literary Supplement. She’s a 2011 MacDowell Fellow, and has received awards from the Arts Council and the Authors’ Foundation. Olivia ‘s latest book is The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Andy Miller is a reader, author and editor of books. His writing has appeared in numerous publications, including the Times, the Telegraph, the Guardian, Esquire and Mojo. He’s the author of Tilting at Windmills: How I Tried to Stop Worrying and Love Sport, among others. His latest book is The Year of Reading Dangerously: How Fifty Great Books Saved My Life.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Cara Hoffman is the author of the critically acclaimed 2011 novel So Much Pretty. She grew up in northern Appalachia, where she dropped out of high school to work full time. Hoffman spent three years travelling and working as an agricultural labourer in Europe and the Middle East. She returned to the US, had a baby and found a job delivering newspapers which eventually led to work as a reporter covering environmental politics and crime. She has been a visiting writer at St. John’s, Columbia and Oxford, where she lectured on Violence and Masculinity for the Rhodes Global Scholars Symposium. Hoffman lives in Manhattan and teaches writing and literature at Bronx Community College. Cara ‘s latest novel is Be Safe I Love You.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Neil Denny talks to Theoretical physicist Lisa Randall about her new book Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs, and then Francesca Kay on her latest novel The Long Room. Lisa Randall is one of the world's leading theoretical physicists and the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University. She has received numerous awards and honours and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Physics. She is the author of numerous books including Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions, and Knocking On Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate our Universe. Her latest book is Dark Matter and The Dinosaurs: The Astounding Interconnectedness of the Universe. Francesca Kay's first novel, An Equal Stillness, won the Orange Award for New Writers...

Lee Rourke is the author of the short story collection Everyday, and the novel The Canal, which won the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize in 2010. He is writer in residence at Kingston University, where he is an MFA lecturer in creative writing and critical theory. He also lectures in creative writing at the University of East London. His latest novel is Vulgar Things.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Following a doctorate and subsequent research career in genetics, Kat Arney is now Science Communications Manager for Cancer Research UK, where she translates science into plain English to help people understand more about the disease. Kat is also a science writer and broadcaster, whose writing has appeared in the Guardian, Science, New Scientist, BBC Online and Al-Jazeera Online. She has presented several BBC Radio 4 science documentaries and programmes in the Costing the Earth series, is a regular presenter with the Naked Scientists, and presents and produces the Naked Genetics monthly podcast. Kat’s first book is Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this interview, recorded in Oxford ahead of the release of "God Is Not Great", Christopher Hitchens spoke to Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy about Richard Dawkins, Karl Marx, religion, blasphemy and nuclear apocalypse  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Juliet Jacques is a freelance writer, best known for the Guardian’s “Transgender Journey”—the first time the gender reassignment process had been serialised for a major British publication. Her column was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2011. She was included in the Independent’s Pink List for the last four years, and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman. She has also written for Granta, TimeOut, Filmwaves, 3am, the London Review of Books, the New Humanist, the New Inquiry, and many other publications. She is the author of Trans: A Memoir. This is the 400th edition of Little Atoms, and Neil is joined by former host Becky Hogge in conversation with Juliet.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Lucy Inglis is a historian, novelist, and occasional television presenter. In 2009 she created the Georgian London blog, which became the largest free body of work on the eighteenth century city online, which became a book, Georgian London: Into the Streets. She’s currently working on a book about Opium.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Peter Pomerantsev is an award-winning TV producer and a contributor to the London Review of Books. His writing has been published in the Financial Times,New Yorker,Wall Street Journal,Foreign Policy,Daily Beast, Newsweek,Le Monde Diplomatique, among others. He has also worked as a consultant for the EU and World Bank. He is the author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Jon Savage is the author of England's Dreaming: Sex pistols and Punk Rock and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875 - 1945. He is the writer of the award winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein Story (1998) and Joy Division (2007) as well as the feature film of Teenage (2014). His latest book is 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Max Porter is a senior editor at Granta. His first book Grief is the Thing With Feathers has been shortlisted for The Goldsmiths Prize 2015 and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award 2015.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

On this week’s Little Atoms podcast, Man Booker shortlisted novelist Hanya Yanagihara on A Little Life and journalist Antony Loewenstein on Disaster Capitalism. Hanya Yanagihara is the author of The People in the Trees, which was shortlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Her latest novel A Little Life was shortlisted for the 2015 Man Booker Prize for Fiction. She was until recently the Deputy Editor at the New York Times’ T Magazine, and she lives in New York City. Antony Loewenstein is an independent Australian journalist, documentary maker and blogger who has written for the BBC, the Nation and the Washington Post. He’s a weekly Guardian columnist and the author of three best-selling books, My Israel Question,The Blogging Revolution and Profits of Doom: How Vulture Capitalism is Swallowing the World. His latest book is Disaster Capitalism: Making a Killing Out of Catastrophe, and he’s currently working on a documentary about disaster capitalism.  See acast.com/privacy for

This week, a Live Little Atoms event. Authors Emma Jane Unsworth and Zoe Lambert in conversation with Neil Denny at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester on Friday 25th September. Zoe Lambert is a Manchester based writer. She lectures in creative writing at Lancaster University, and has published numerous short stories in anthologies.  Her debut […]  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Timothy Snyder is Housum Professor of History at Yale University, and has written and edited a number of critically acclaimed and prize-winning books about twentieth-century European history: Bloodlands won the Hannah Arendt Prize, the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding, the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award in the Humanities and the literature award of the American […]  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The last of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books, ahead of the award ceremony on Thursday 24th September. This week Neil Denny talks with Matthew Cobb, and there’s a repeat of our interview with Alex Bellos from May 2014. The show also includes a short […]  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The second of three episodes of Little Atoms in association with the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books. This week Neil Denny talks with David Adam, and there’s a repeat of our interview with Gaia Vince from August 2014. This show also marks the 10th anniversary of Little Atoms. We first broadcast on […]  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.