4.8 • 2K Ratings
🗓️ 26 March 2020
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Pandemics are as old as human civilisation, from the Plague of Athens to mysterious diseases that ravaged armies throughout history. But there's a lot you probably don't know about them. Why did "dancing plagues" erupt repeatedly in Medieval Europe as a result of "hot blood"? Why is calling it the "Spanish Flu" an egregious historical injustice? How do mathematical modellers incorporate Italian vs. American culture into their forecasting and predictions? And what did Isaac Newton manage to do while he was "working from home" during the plague pandemic of 1665?
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Power Corrupts is written and narrated by Brian Klaas. The executive producer and sound editor is George McDonagh.
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0:00.0 | Thank you for listening to Power Corrupts. We make this show because we think it's important not to make money, |
0:05.4 | but it does cost money to make episodes. If you want to help us stay editorially independent, |
0:10.5 | please consider supporting our work in one of two ways. |
0:14.0 | First, pre-order my new book, Corruptible, Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us, |
0:19.0 | which comes out on November 9, 2021. |
0:22.0 | It's an exploration of the bizarre fascinating ways in which humans relate to |
0:26.0 | power that ranges from everything from corrupt beehives to the time I took a ski lesson with a man who |
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0:58.8 | show I'll be forced to bombard you with ads about socks and job recruitment schemes and mortgage websites and nobody wants that. |
1:05.0 | But seriously, thank you for listening and for your support. |
1:10.0 | A pandemic is just where a disease is prevalent over a very wide area, so usually a whole country or the world, but it's a subjective term. |
1:20.0 | This is Zaria. |
1:21.0 | Hi, I'm Zaria Gullvet. I'm a'm a freelance science journalist based in London. |
1:26.0 | The word pandemic is one of the scariest words in the English language. |
1:30.0 | It's on everyone's mind at the moment too, and for good reason. |
1:33.1 | The world is facing a coronavirus outbreak that has the potential to be both devastating and |
1:37.9 | deadly. |
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