5x15 - November 25th with Wade Davis, Sue Black, Anne Applebaum

Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. She is also a Senior Fellow of International Affairs and Agora Fellow in Residence at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where she co-directs LSE Arena, a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda. Anne's newest book The Twilight of Democracy explains, with electrifying clarity, why some have abandoned liberal democratic ideals in favour of strongman cults, nationalist movements, or one-party states.

Maria Konnikova is a New York Times best-selling author, journalist, a writer and student of human behaviour and professional poker player. Maria had never played poker before when she approached Erik Seidel, Poker Hall of Fame inductee and winner of tens of millions of dollars in earnings, and convinced him to be her mentor. In a little over a year, she began making earnest money from tournaments, ultimately totalling hundreds of thousands of dollars. She tells the story in her recent book: The Biggest Bluff, a New York Times bestseller.

Anthropologist Wade Davis holds the Leadership Chair in Cultures and Ecosystems at Risk at the University of British Columbia. His award-winning books include Into the Silence, The Wayfinders, and Magdalena: River of Dreams. He joins us to talk about COVID-19 and the unravelling of an American era - based on his viral article from Rolling Stone magazine earlier this year.

Dame Professor Sue Black is a world-renowned forensic anthropologist and the Sunday Times bestselling author of All That Remains. Sue's new book is Written in Bone which reveals the secrets hidden deep within our bones. Drawing upon a wealth of remarkable experience, Sue argues that bones are the silent witnesses to the lives we lead.

Named by The Observer as “one of the world’s leading thinkers” and by Vogue as “one of the world’s most inspiring women,” economist Noreena Hertz joins us at 5x15 to talk about The Lonely Century. Even before a global pandemic introduced us to terms like social distancing, Noreena argued that loneliness was well on its way to becoming the defining condition of the twenty-first century. Combining a decade of research - which took her to meet isolated remote workers during lockdown and nursing home residents knitting bonnets for their robot caregivers in Japan - Noreena's book also offers ideas and solutions to the modern crisis of loneliness.