Little Atoms with Jonathan Meades

This week's show features an interview with writer and broadcaster Jonathan Meades. Jonathan and Neil Denny discuss the recent release of DVD box set The Jonathan Meades Collection.

Jonathan Meades is a writer on architecture, culture and food, a novelist and television presenter. He was restaurant critic of The Times for 15 years. Jonathan's writing includes the short story collection Filthy English, the novels Pompey and The Fowler Family Business, as well as a collection food writing Incest and Morris Dancing. This will be Jonathan's third appearance on Little Atoms.

Website back.....

The website is back up, and we've got a new host, Positive Internet. We have a dedicated server and more bandwidth, so hopefully the site falling over will be a thing of the past. I've not fully completed transferring across all the past shows to the new server yet, but the last few shows are there. The rest will follow quickly. Apologies for the absence, we're just too damn popular!

Little Atoms with Rose Shapiro

On tonight's show we are joined in the studio by writer Rose Shapiro.

Rose Shapiro has written for newspapers, magazines and medical journals including the Independent, the Observer, Time Out, Good Housekeeping and the Health Service Journal. Her book Suckers: How Alternative Medicine Makes Fools of Us All is published by Harvill Secker, and is described as follows;

'Alternative' medicine is now used by one in three of us. In the UK we spend an estimated £4.5 billion a year on it and its practitioners are now insinuating themselves into the mainstream. There are methods based on ancient or far-eastern medicine, as well as ones invented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many are promoted as natural treatments. What they have in common is that there is no hard evidence that any of them work.

Treatments like homeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic are widely available and considered reputable by many. Ever more bizarre therapies, from naturopathy to nutraceuticals, ear candling to ergogenics, are increasingly favoured. Endorsed by celebrities and embraced by the middle classes, alternative medicine's appeal is based on the spurious rediscovery of ancient wisdom and the supposedly benign quality of nature.
Surrounded by an aura of unquestioning respect and promoted through uncritical airtime and column inches, alternative medicine has become a lifestyle choice. Its global market is predicted to be worth $5 trillion by 2050.

Suckers reveals how alternative medicine can jeopardise the health of those it claims to treat, leaches resources from treatments of proven efficacy and is largely unaccountable and unregulated. In short, it is an industry that preys on human vulnerability and makes fools of us all.

Suckers is a calling to account of a social and intellectual fraud; a bracing, funny and popular take on a global delusion.

Website Down

Apologies, but the Little Atoms website is down again at the moment, due to an unusually high number of downloads of our last two podcasts.

Am trying to get it back up asap, although this might be the end of the month.....

Little Atoms with Douglas Murray

On tonight's show we are joined in the studio by Douglas Murray.

Douglas Murray is a bestselling author and commentator based in the UK. His most recent book is the critically acclaimed Neoconservatism: Why We Need It, which Christopher Hitchens praised in the Washington Examiner as "a very cool but devastating analysis" and which caused Andrew Roberts to hail him 'The right's answer to Michael Moore', continuing, 'This book shows how to fight and win the War on Terror'.

He appears regularly on the television and radio across Europe and America. He is a trustee of the newly founded European Freedom Fund and a member of the Advisory Board of the European Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism. Since April 2007 he has been Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion in Westminster, London.

Join us at the usual time, 19.00-19.30 GMT on Resonance 104.4FM in London, or www.resonancefm.com worldwide.

Little Atoms with Richard Wilson

On this week's show, Neil Denny is joined in the studio by Richard Wilson.

Richard Wilson read Philosophy at University College London and his first book, Titanic Express, recounts his search for the truth about the death of his sister Charlotte, who was killed in Burundi in 2000. He now works for a human rights organisation and lives in London.

Richard's latest book is Don't Get Fooled Again: The Sceptic's Guide to Life.

Little Atoms with Ben Goldacre

On this week's show, Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy are joined in the studio by Dr Ben Goldacre, making his second appearance on the show.

Ben Goldacre is a writer, broadcaster and medical doctor from the UK who is best known for his Bad Science column in the Guardian, examining the claims of scaremongering journalists, quack health products, pseudoscientific cosmetics adverts, and evil multinational pharmaceutical corporations, as well as wider themes such as the medicalisation of everyday life and the psychology of irrational beliefs.

Ben studied Medicine at Magdalen College Oxford where he also edited Isis, the Oxford University Magazine. He left in 1995 with a First: before going on to clinical medicine at UCL, he was a visiting researcher in cognitive neurosciences at the University of Milan, working on MRI brain scans of language and executive function, and was also funded by the British Academy to do a Masters degree in Philosophy at King's. Ben now works full time for the NHS, appears regularly on radio and TV, and has written for publications as diverse as Time Out, the British Medical Journal, New Statesman and The Lancet, as well as writing and presenting 'The Rise of The Lifestyle Nutritionists' and 'The Power of Placebo' in 2008 on BBC Radio 4.

Ben's first book, Bad Science, was published in September by Forth Estate.