Little Atoms with Noam Chomsky

On this week's Little Atoms Neil Denny and Padraig Reidy talk to Noam Chomsky.

Noam Chomsky has been described as the world's greatest public intellectual. Born in 1928 in Philadelphia, Chomsky earned his academic stripes as a young linguistics professor at MIT in the 1950s. His theory of transformational grammar, forged at this time, posits that the capability to form structured language is innate to the human mind. But the general public first came to know Chomsky for his outspoken opposition to the Vietnam war. For more than 40 years, he has been the academy's loudest and most consistent critic of US policies at home and abroad.

Chomsky has written more than 40 books, includng American Power and the New Mandarins, Manufacturing Consent, Hegemony or Survival, Deterring Democracy and Failed States, and continues to lecture frequently, as prolific a provocateur as ever.

Little Atoms with Dr Anthony Daniels AKA Theodore Dalrymple

On this week's show Neil Denny talks to Dr Anthony Daniels.

Dr Anthony Daniels is a recently retired doctor and psychiatrist formerly working in a hospital and prison in Birmingham, England. Writing under the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, he is a prolific author of numerous essays and opinion pieces carried in the Wall Street Journal, Cato Institute, The Spectator, Daily Telegraph, New Criterion, City Journal and New English Review. his books include Life at the Bottom, Our Culture, What's Left of It: The Mandarins and the Masses, Junk Medicine: Doctors, Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, and In Praise of Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.

Little Atoms with Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer is Editor at Large for Seed Magazine and the author of Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Wired, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. Jonah is also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab, and writes a highly regarded blog, The Frontal Cortex.

Jonah's latest book, The Decisive Moment, was published by Canongate in February.