How do undersea cables work and what is their significance in our daily lives? Samanth Subramanian, an award-winning journalist tells us about "fragile cables that connect our world" in his brilliant new book, "The Web Beneath the Waves". They operate behind the scenes and on the sea bed. Over 600 of them carry around 95% of the world's intercontinental traffic. Unlike satellites which get a lot of press, submarine cables are largely unsung until something goes wrong. Take Ghana's stock exchange which, in 2024, had to shut down an hour earlier than scheduled after seismic activity severed some cables. In 2024 Houtis, a rebel group in Yemen, bombed a cargo ship, whose anchor was said to have damaged three cables. And then there's the occasional shark bite too. With barely 69 or so repair ships out there, the entire process of fixing these cables "is delightfully Victorian", says Samanth. We live in an era that this piece of technology holds enormous geopolitical clout too. His research, for his slim book, took him to some of the most unexpected places. The Economist named it as among the best books of 2025.

Photo credit: Chinky Shukla

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In this podcast Sir John Kay, one of the most original economic thinkers of our time, talks about what companies often get wrong. Drawing from his latest book, The Corporation in the Twenty-First Century: Why (Almost) Everything We Are Told About Business Is Wrong, Sir John argues that chasing money instead of meaning is the first folly of modern corporations. Often times they focus far more than is necessary on quarterly numbers. Buzzwords like "maximising shareholder value" look great on power point slides. "No one has an epitaph on their grave that said he maximized shareholder value", he says. He shares many examples where behemoths disappeared gradually and then suddenly after shifting their purpose to maximising shareholder value.

The conversation also turns to ethics. He quotes Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mocking Bird - "I can't behave one way at home and another in town" addressing that the company and the individual shouldn't have different moral codes. "There isn't a separation in my mind between ethics and morality as applied to business and ethics and morality as applied to life. They're one and the same".

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Turning jargons and complex spaghetti-like subjects into simple language is an art that few authors can pull off. Edward Fishman is one of them. His book, "Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare", a New York Times Bestseller, explains something that we often read in the newspapers but rarely understand.

For instance, we read that Iran has been "sanctioned" because it hasn't stopped its ambitions to enrich uranium which can be used to build a nuclear weapon. But what exactly are sanctions? How do they work? What kind of work goes on behind the scenes? How can a country be isolated from the global financial system? Why it can't be a one-size-fits-all?

Eddie has worked at the US Treasury, the State Department, and the Pentagon and played a key role in designing sanctions on Iran and Russia. In this podcast he talks about the evolution of economic warfare and how states can throttle economies without firing a shot. What work and what backfires? And what have policymakers learned so far?

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Jason Burke has spent decades reporting from conflict zones around the world. In this episode he speaks about his latest book, "The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s".

Jason explains how Palestinian factions turned aircraft hijacking into a coordinated political strategy, who the key figures were and how these operations were planned and carried out. He also describes the intelligence world that operated alongside this violence, what the day-to-day life of a spy looked like in the 1970s and how states quietly cooperated across borders. He also goes on to examine the wider consequences of this period, including Israel’s response and the international coordination that made operations such as the Entebbe rescue possible, an audacious raid possible as much by politics as by military planning.

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Danny Bate joins us to talk about the history of the English alphabet, letter by letter. From the ancient Egyptian origins of A to the comeback of K, Danny talks about how writing systems travelled across civilisations and shaped modern English. We discuss silent letters, spelling quirks, phonics, Scrabble and standup comedy. Drawing on his work as a linguist, Bate explains how sound, history, and habit come together in the way we read and write today. His latest book "Why Q Needs U" was shortlisted among the best books of 2025 by The Economist and is a brilliant read.

Danny also runs his own podcast. Check it out on https://dannybate.com/podcast

Picture credit: http://dannybate.com/

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