Hello! We're going to take a break for a little while. In this episode, we discuss what the past 7 months have been like for us and what kinds of topics we'd like to cover in our next season. If you have only recently found us, we'd love it if you'd go back to the beginning and listen to earlier episodes. Also, feel free to share the podcast and subscribe to our Substack in order to be emailed with new episodes. Also, rate it and review it or whatever it is you're supposed to do with...

Caroline Crampton is a writer and a podcaster. She is the creator and host of the award-winning detective fiction podcast Shedunnit. She curates articles as editor-in-chief of The Browser, and she writes reviews and essays for publications like Time, Literary Hub and the Guardian. She writes non-fiction books about the world and how we live in it. Here most recent book A Body Made of Glass was serialised as BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week, chosen by the Guardian as a literary highlight of...

Pete Etchells is a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University. He researches the behavioural and wellbeing effects of playing video games, as well as metascientific issues regarding best practice in digital technology effects research. He’s written articles for various publications including New Scientist, the Guardian, the Observer, the New York Times, WIRED and the Telegraph. His most recent book, UNLOCKED, investigates the science behind our relationship with...

Architect and theorist Jimenez Lai was born in Taiwan, grew up in Canada, and lives in Los Angeles. He holds the Robert Gwathmey chair at Cooper Union, and is the director of architecture agency Bureau Spectacular. Before establishing Bureau Spectacular, Lai lived in a desert shelter at Taliesin and resided in a shipping container at Atelier Van Lieshout on the piers of Rotterdam. Lai's first book, Citizens of No Place: An Architectural Graphic Novel, was published by Princeton Architectural...

Baroness Beeban Kidron OBE sits as a crossbench peer in the UK’s House of Lords. She is an advisor to the Institute for Ethics in AI at the University of Oxford, a Commissioner on the UN Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, an expert advisor for the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Body on Artificial Intelligence, and Founder and Chair of 5Rights Foundation. Before taking up her seat in the House of Lords in 2012, Baroness Kidron spent 30 years as a film maker. Her...

Kathy Lette is the author of 17 novels, THE woman about town in London and one of the pioneering voices of contemporary feminism. She is well known for her one-liners, wise cracks and witticism and is as close to being the 21st century's Dorothy Parker as anyone else I know. She wrote her first book, Puberty Blues, when she was 17. The book addresses the sexism in teenage culture in 1970s Australia. Her most recent book, Revenge Club, addresses the sexism older women face and has been called...

Nick Rhodes is a composer, producer and founding member and keyboardist in Duran Duran. Apart from his work with Duran Duran, he's had several side projects with Arcadia, The Devils and TV Mania and has collaborated with various artists, including Blondie, Mark Ronson and the Dandy Warhols. He's a keen photographer and art collector. Nick's wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Rhodes Duran Duran's 'Invisible' video made by AI: Duran Duran's official site:...

The artist and thinker Brenda L Croft is from the Gurindji/Malngin/Mudburra peoples from the Victorian River region of the Northern Territory of Australia, and Anglo-Australian/German/Irish/Chinese heritage. She has been a key participant in the Australian First Nations and broader contemporary arts and cultural sectors as a multi-disciplinary creative practitioner—artist, arts administrator, consultant, curator, educator and researcher—since the mid-1980s. Brenda is a Professor of Indigenous...

Note: This interview was recorded before the most recent General Election in the UK. Professor Tamsin Edwards is a climate scientist specialising in quantifying the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly for the ice sheet and glacier contributions to sea level rise. She was a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report published in 2021. Tamsin regularly provides expert advice on climate science to the public, policymakers,...

Peter Saville is an English art director and graphic designer. He was one of the founders of Factory Records in 1978 and designed many record sleeves for their bands including Joy Division's 'Unknown Pleasures' and New Order's 'Power Corruption and Lies'. Outside of Factory he did work for artists such as Roxy Music, Wham!, OMD, Ultravox, Peter Gabriel, Suede and Pulp. He's worked with various fashion houses including Christian Dior, Stella McCartney and Calvin Klein. He was the Creative...

Caroline A. Jones is Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture, MIT. She studies modern and contemporary art, focusing on its technological modes of production, distribution, and reception, and on its interface with science. She has also worked as a curator, including three exhibitions at MIT's List Visual Arts Center: Hans Haaken, Video Trajectories, and Sensorium. Her exhibitions and/or films have been shown at NY MoMA, SF MoMA, the Hirshhorn DC,...

Sarah Ditum is a journalist for The Sunday Times and has also written for The Guardian, New Statesman, Grazia and UnHerd. She writes columns and features about politics, culture and lifestyle including topics such as violence against women, gender identity and cancel culture. Her book Toxic: Women, Fame and The Noughties, about misogyny in celebrity culture during the 2000s, was published in 2023 and it was announced in spring '24 that one of the book's subjects, Paris Hilton, acquired the...

David Chater is an award-winning British broadcast journalist who has worked in international television news for over 40 years. He has reported for Independent Television News, Sky News and Al Jazeera English from pretty much every conflict you can think of. He's reported on the Falklands War, the Yugoslavian Homeland Wars, the First Gulf War, the Second Gulf War, the Sri Lankan civil war, the war in Afghanistan, the second Chechen War. He's been in the middle of a Scud missile attack, a...

Jason Farago is a critic at large for the New York Times, writing about culture and its place in the wider world. His writing has taken him from wartime Kyiv to the Olympic stadiums of Tokyo to dance parties in Johannesburg. He also is the co-creator of Close Read, a criticism series that delves into a single cultural work, detail by detail. Before joining the Times, he served as a US art critic for The Guardian and was a regular contributor to publications such as The New Yorker, The New...

Nimco Ali OBE is co-founder and CEO of The Five Foundation, a global partnership to end female genital mutilation. Nimco is an activist, author and a survivor of FGM. Her tireless work has put FGM front and centre in the feminist campaign to end violence against women and girls. Nimco was awarded an OBE for her trailblazing activism in 2019. In the past 10 years, Nimco was awarded Red Magazine’s Woman of the Year award, placed at No 6 on the Woman’s Hour Power List, named by The Sunday Times...

Vid Simoniti is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy of Art at the University of Liverpool, where he also directs the MA in Art, Philosophy and Cultural Institutions. Before joining the department at Liverpool in 2018, he was the inaugural Jeffrey Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, the University of Cambridge. Vid's academic work bridges philosophy, political thoughts and arts criticism. He's interested in how art can bring about social and political change and his most recent...

David Joselit is the Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Art, Film at Harvard and the department's current chair. He previously held the chair in Art History at Yale and was a curator at the ICA in Boston. He's one of the editors of leading art and theory journal, October. David is one of the most important, if not the single most important, theorist, critic and historian of 20th century and contemporary art and the cultures and concerns that produce and consume it. David is the author of...

Thank you for listening to The Cluster F Theory. If you don’t already subscribe at Substack, please sign up on our page in order to receive an email when new episodes are released. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it or review it wherever you listen and share it with your friends. Thank you! Tracy King is a writer, producer and consultant based in both Birmingham and London. She has written for publications such as the New Statesman, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and The New European....

Thank you for listening to The Cluster F Theory. If you don’t already subscribe at Substack, please sign up on our page in order to receive an email when new episodes are released. If you enjoy the podcast, please rate it or review it wherever you listen and share it with your friends. Thank you! Anna Kornbluh is a professor of English at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she founded InterCcECT, the Inter Chicago Circle for Experimental Critical Theory. Her research and teaching...

Richard Wiseman holds Britain’s only Professorship in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, and has published over 100 academic papers examining the psychology of magic and illusion, deception, luck and self-development. He has written several popular psychology books (including The Luck Factor and 59 Seconds) that have been published around the world. Richard has also created psychology-based YouTube videos that have attracted over 800 million views, he...

Tom McCarthy is a novelist whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and adapted for cinema, theatre and radio. His first novel, Remainder, won the 2008 Believer Book Award. His third, C, was a 2010 Man Booker Prize finalist, as was his fourth, Satin Island, in 2015. Tom is also the author of the study Tintin and the Secret of Literature and of the essay collection Typewriters Bombs Jellyfish. He contributes regularly to publications such as the New York Times, the London...

Richard Bacon has been a household name for over 25 years in the UK. As a tv presenter he's known for shows such as Blue Peter, Top of the Pops, The Big Breakfast and Good Morning Britain. As a radio presenter he's been on pretty much every channel you can think of. He's started his own production company, Yes Yes Media, creating and producing tv shows, including the very popular I Literally Just Told You. Richard' Twitter post as he was first admitted to hospital. Richard's Instagram post...

Katrin Tiidenberg is a Professor of Participatory Culture at the Baltic Film, Media, Arts and Communication School at Tallinn University in Estonia. She has held fellowships at Durham University, Aarhus University and Microsoft Research New England. Katrin's research focuses on the hows and whys of people's online and social media practices with a particular emphasis on visuality, sex and political participation. Her research engages the most relevant issues of our day, identity, community,...

Adam Thirwell is an award-winning novelist and screenwriter. Among his best-known books are Lurid & Cute, Politics, Multiples and Kapow!. His latest novel is The Future Future, which Salman Rushdie described as "A dazzling performance, unlike anything else you'll read this (or any other) year". He has twice been selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, received a Somerset Maugham Award in 2008, and was a recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of...