The Great Philosophers
On the classic BBC series.
A. The BBC has made available its classic series on The Great Philosophers in the Western tradition. It’s a 15-part series of 45-minute conversations with United Kingdom and United States academics on major philosophers: Plato; Descartes; Locke; Hume; Kant; Hegel; Nietzsche; the Existentialists; the American Pragmatists; and Wittgenstein, amongst others. For its time of original broadcast this was a significant public education initiative that gave broader access to elite university thinking. You may need a VPN to view the individual episodes.
B. Cult victim-survivor Liz Cameron speaks about going through the brainwashing or thought reform (psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton) process in Korea’s JMS or Providence group. This is for her recent book Cult Bride: How I Was Brainwashed - And How I Broke Free (Sydney: Pantera Press, 2025). Similar victim-se iurvivor testimonies are in Victoria’s current inquiry into cult and organised fringe group based recruitment.
C. A timeline of antisemitic incidents in Australia since 2023 to the Bondi mass shooting.
D. Why utility bill costs and prices are rising.
E. How poet Gertrude Stein prepared for the afterlife.
F. The fight for the last wild salmon.
G. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Mathematical Statistics, created by Dr Peter Kempthorne.
H. Paul DiFilippo reviews one of the science fiction novels of the moment: QNTM’s There Is No Antimemetics Division (New York: Ballantine Books, 2025). This differs from Nadia Asparouhova’s recent book Antimemetics: Why Some Ideas Resist Spreading (Dark Forest Collective, 2025) on virality. Here is a roundtable on the latter book.
I. A Financial Times documentary on cybercrimes and the rapid growth in online scamming.
J. Noted economist and political scientist Barry Eichengreen on the United States dollar as the global reserve currency and BRICS-led (attempted) de-dollarisation.
K. Dutch historian Rutger Bregman gives the first of four Reith Lectures on: What history teaches us about the future. All four lectures are now available.