A new The Rest Is… podcast! Perhaps not the exciting news it used to be. Some of the more recent launches from Britain’s leading podcast production company, Goalhanger, have proved less successful than the The Rest Is History and ... Politics, less fun than The Rest Is Entertainment or … Football. But The Rest Is Science, launched this week, feels like a winner. Hosted by the BBC presenter and mathematician Professor Hannah Fry (British) and the science and philosophy YouTuber Michael Stevens (American), it’s lighter in tone than many of its stablemates, though just as informative. The brisk 37-minute opening show about water was packed with the sort of kid-friendly fun facts that blow adult minds too. Did you know that ice, because it’s structured like a mineral, has the same classification as rock? Which means water is like lava? Drink up!
As with all two-hander podcasts, everything’s down to the casting. Fry and Stevens are immensely likeable and spark nicely – a chemistry that isn’t guaranteed. Despite their experience, this isn’t an easy job. Both are used to presenting solo, shooting facts down a camera barrel in short swift takes. But The Rest Is Science requires democratic chat, and, since it airs as both video and audio, it also needs its presenters to appear to have their talking points already organised in their head, complete with accurate stats. This is impossible, so Fry hides her notes down the side of her chair; Stevens has his on his knee.
Their discussion rambles delightfully around its topic, from how much water is in other non-water drinks (a typical cup of coffee is 98% H2O; Coke 90%) through to how much of the water on Earth is actually drinkable (just 0.0072%!) The balance between the hosts is about right, though at the start, I wanted more from Fry. As the show progressed, she spoke for longer, responding with fewer “wows” to Stevens’s facts, and began to demonstrate more of her own knowledge and deductions.
Answering a more specific question every episode would provide a tighter structure, though I imagine the show will answer audience questions on bonus subscriber-only episodes. Anyway, you don’t really care about the hopping about. There is just so much fun in this charming podcast, from learning how much water would kill a rat in one go (just 40 grams: “That’s nothing!” says Fry “That’s a double shot!”) to how, if the Earth was scaled down to the size of a school globe, all of its rivers and oceans could be held in the bowl of a tablespoon. With The Rest Is Science, Goalhanger surely has yet another monster hit.
The annual airing of Radio 4’s Reith Lectures is not something I usually get excited about. But this year’s opening lecture – the first of three by Rutger Bregman, the Dutch historian and best-selling author of Humankind: A Hopeful History and Utopia for Realists – was bracing. More: it was a stirring call to arms.
Bregman started by explaining that, as the son of a preacher, he would be structuring his lectures like a sermon. And the best sermons consist of three parts. “Act one, misery. Act two, redemption. And act three, thankfulness,” he said. “But I’m afraid that today we’re going to have to spend most of our time on act one, misery.”
In he dived, splash into our contemporary anguish. “The Roman elite fiddled while Rome burned,” he said. “Our elites live-streamed the fire and monetised the smoke. Immorality and unseriousness: those are the two defining traits of our leaders today. And they’re not accidental flaws, but the logical outcome of what I call the survival of the shameless. Today, it’s not the most capable who rise, but the least scrupulous.” His descriptions were pin-point, his language glorious, his disdain withering.
There was some hoo-ha this week when Bregman revealed that part of his lecture had been edited, very recently, by the BBC: his description of Donald Trump as the “most openly corrupt president in American history” was removed. It was obvious where from, because the rest was so perfectly balanced and rhythmic. The editing was also ironic, given that a good section of the lecture berated institutions for moral turpitude in sucking up to the powerful. “If the right is defined by its shameless corruption,” he said, “then liberals answer with a paralysing cowardice.” Ouch.
What Bregman is asking for is “a moral revolution”, a change among ordinary people as well as those who govern us – not just politicians, but those who run commercial enterprises. “Companies like to spray a thin layer of purpose or corporate responsibility over their dubious business models,” he said. “Please let’s not kid ourselves.”
Bregman wants us to believe that “the purpose of power is to do good” and we should act accordingly. It reminded me of Professor Michael Sandel’s 2009 lectures. “What we need,” Sandel said, “is a politics oriented less to the pursuit of individual self-interest and more to the pursuit of the common good”. Bregman is funnier and spikier: our times seem much darker, his message tougher. The applause at the end of his lecture was thunderous, and rightly so. This is the first unmissable Reith Lectures series in years.
Photograph by Goalhanger