Hello, my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics.

Welcome to another of our episodes in which we ask some of our panelists

to tell us about the things that they've been reading, thinking, doing as we prepare for the summer.

The summer is already on us and this is a chance for you to hear about some of the things

that we think you might like to read and might be interested in.

My name is Aaron Rapport. I am the resident US foreign policy expert.

So sometimes on the podcast I get to discuss things which explode, which is shockingly

a lot of what US foreign policy revolves around either blowing things up or trying to prevent things from being blown up.

My name is Colby Smith. I've been working as an intern on the Talking Politics podcast this last year.

I'm currently an M Phil student focusing on currency politics.

I'm John Norton. I'm an engineer by background and for about 20 years I've been working on

the long-term impact of the Internet on society. That's what I do.

Though for the most part I'm reduced to talking about more mundane things like

number of votes cast and poll numbers.

I've written a blog for a long time and I suppose the reason I still obsessed

with the blogosphere rather than social media is because I don't like the idea

of public discourse being conducted entirely in privately owned online spaces.

Hi, I'm Maharafya Tal and I come on here to talk about American politics sometimes.

What I mostly work on is corporations as political actors.

The first book is actually a bit of a busman's holiday since it's very serious.

It's about political philosophy. It's a book by Gerald Gauss called The Tyranny of the Ideal

and I would describe it as a so far a less polemical version of Karl Popper's work on the open society.

...