Climate, trust, politics, communication. Some would say we live in a period of crisis several areas of society and life. How can we make sense of the present moment, and where do we go from here?

Plus, we hear about the short list for this year's Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize and ask what that tells us about scientific publishing.

Matthew Sweet is joined by

Timothy Morton, whose most recent book is Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology Jessica Frazier, Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford Clare Chambers, Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge Jessica Wade, Royal Society University Research Fellow and Lecturer in Functional Materials at Imperial College London and one of the judges for They are all appearing at the How the Light Gets in Festival of Ideas this weekend in London - more information at howthelightsgetsin.org Plus Mark Solms, neuroscientist and editor of the newly published Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud

The Royal Society Trivedi Science Book Prize 2024 which will be announced on October 24th. The books shortlisted are:

Eve: How The Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution by Cat Bohannon Your Face Belongs to Us: The Secretive Startup Dismantling Your Privacy by Kashmir Hill The Last of Its Kind: The Search for the Great Auk and the Discovery of Extinction by Gísli Pálsson Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith Everything Is Predictable: How Bayes’ Remarkable Theorem Explains the World by Tom Chivers

Producer: Luke Mulhall