Thinking Allowed Episodes Episode guide
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Digital intimacy
How are algorithms transforming our relationships?
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Prison Abolition
Laurie Taylor considers the radical case for ending imprisonment.
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Taste and Lifestyle
Taste and Lifestyle: how consumer culture remade taste and the West Indian front room.
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Dance Culture
Laurie Taylor takes a journey through the dancefloor, from the electric slide to the tango
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Democracy
Democracy - what threatens or promotes it?
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Poverty
Laurie Taylor explores the causes and consequences of poverty in the UK and US.
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Elite Universities - Working Class Students
Elite universities and the lives of working class academics.
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Asylum and 'Home'
Asylum and 'home' - the impact of asylum dispersal and Syrian refugees' quest for home.
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Museums
Museums: Then and now.
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Religion of Work and Welfare
The religion of work and welfare.
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Parenting
Parenting - a cultural history.
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Dirty Work
Dirty work - the invisible labour we choose not to see.
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Self-improvement
Self-improvement: are 'wellness' and 'confidence' cultures enhancing our lives?
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The football pools - mass investment
Betting and investment - what are the connections and the differences?
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The Internet - how it shapes the past and the future
The Internet - how it shapes our understanding of the past and the future.
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The NHS
The NHS and the 'sick note'.
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Protests
Protests: from Occupy to MeToo and Iran.
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Gender and Alcohol
Gender and alcohol - the craft drink scene and what constitutes a 'proper night out'?
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Futilitarianism - Extreme Pessimists
Laurie Taylor talks to Neil Vallelly about current feelings of futility and uselessness.
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Rules and Order
Are we are more orderly society than in the past?
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Gentrification revisited
Exploring the myth and reality six decades after the term gentrification was coined.
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The Sea
The Sea - the privatisation of our oceans and the threat of plastic pollution.
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Survival of the city
Survival of the city: how do cities manage to thrive and re-invent in the face of threats?
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Package holidays and 'authentic' travel
Package holidays and ‘authentic’ travel: Laurie Taylor on the origins of budget tourism.
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Shopping
The history of the high street. Also, dreams of consumption.
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Ballroom dancing
Ballroom dancing: its social history and sexual politics.
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Wealth - Plutocratic London
Plutocratic London and dynastic wealth.
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Covid and change
Covid: how has it changed our economy and home lives?
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Workplace Misbehaviour
Workplace misbehaviour: how has it changed over the years?
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Psychiatry: a social history
Psychiatry: Laurie Taylor explores the history of modern psychiatric practice.