Episodes
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Tweet of the week, 1 November 2026
This week's tiny mystery caller inhabits only a few eucalypt forests on the edge of just one state – the Forty-spotted Pardalote
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The Year that Made Me: Dr Rose McGready, 2026
Dr Rose McGready is a leading authority on maternal malaria and an expert on refugee health. Rose grew up in Canberra, nearly qualified to swim in the 1982 Commonwealth Games, and has spent the last 32 years living at the Thai-Myanmar border, where she has established locally-run clinics that…
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Houdini's Halloween Escape
On October 31st in New York, fans of Harry Houdini, the world famous - and long-deceased - showman, gathered in his former home in preparation for a seance to try and contact him. Houdini, who was born Eric Weitz in Hungary, died on October 31st 1926 and for the first decade his wife Bess held a...
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How Matt Brown helps men break the cycle of domestic violence
When Taimalelagi Mataio Faafetai (Matt) Brown was working as a barber in Aotearoa New Zealand, he found that men felt comfortable opening up to him while he cut their hair. As a survivor of family violence, Matt found that many of his clients had similar histories, and saw first hand the...
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Extra Intrigue: political star returns to Venezuela and the staggering economics of Anthropic
In the November edition of Extra Intrigue Jeremy Dicker explains the significance of the return to Venezuela of María Corina Machado, the popular pro-democracy politician and Nobel Prize winner.
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Serbia's new leaderless government
On November 1 2024, a collapse at the Novi Sad railway station killed 16 people. The building project was closely associated with the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) government and president Aleksandar Vučić. Outrage over that incident sparked a student-led protest movement that led this week to…
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Tweet of the week, 25 October 2026
This week's magnificent mystery caller feeds on fruits in our east coast forests – the Wompoo Fruit-Dove.
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The film festival "dedicated to the worst cameras in the world"
The Shot on Shit Film Festival is a short film festival with one key eligibility criterion: the film has to be made with “a non-professional camera - the shittier, the better!”. Shot On Shit is the brainchild of The Collective of Underground Movie Lovers, a film club dedicated to screening...
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The Year that Made Me: Nicholas Brown, 1996
When Nicholas Brown couldn't find work as an Indian-Australian actor in the 2000s, he moved to India, the homeland his parents had rejected, and became a Bollywood star. But his success brought it's own burden, as Nicholas tried to navigate how to exist authentically as a gay man, in a country...
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The mutation that bent blood: A history of sickle cell and the search for a cure
Right now there are between 20 to 30 trillion red blood cells coursing around your body, delivering oxygen to your organs and transporting carbon dioxide to your lungs for disposal. All being well, your red blood cells are donut shaped, with a dimple in the centre on both sides. But a single...
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How social media misinformation campaigns change our conversations
As the US midterms approach, videos of people on the street expressing their support for candidates have appeared on social media platforms with millions of views. And while they seem authentic, they were actually distributed by internationally managed bot accounts, and funded by opaque entities....
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Why Germany is yet to apologise for Namibia genocide
The German Reich was the colonial power in what is now Namibia from 1884 to 1915. In 2021, the German Government officially acknowledged “atrocities … that, from today's perspective, would be called genocide”. From 1904 to 1908, German colonial rulers waged a war of extermination against the…
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Hostage Families seek a reckoning in Israel Election
Tensions are high in the lead up to Israel's first national election since October 7, 2023. And some of the loudest voices are those of hostage family members, using the election to seek justice and accountability for the fate of their loved ones. Journalist Jessica Steinberg reporting on the…
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Tweet of the week, 18 October 2026
This week's mystery caller migrates from southeast Asia to feed over our summer wetlands – the Whiskered Tern.
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The Year that Made Me: Suzie Miller, 1995
Suzie Miller is one of the world’s most influential contemporary playwrights. In The Year That Made Me, Suzie publicly shares for the first time why 1995 was a year she didn't think she would survive, and why it changed the course of her life. A former lawyer who has a degree in science and grew…
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How to rob banks (and other such places)
FC aka Freakyclown has spent 3 decades breaking into banks and secure government locations, and he gave a keynote address at Melbourne's CyberCon 2026 on Friday. FC is an ethical hacker, who works for organisations that want him to reveal their security weaknesses to them. He's the co-founder of...
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Lab leaks are a lot more common than you might think
The death of a Russian lab worker at an anti-plague research institute earlier this month has raised fresh concerns about the global implications of lab leaks. Initial local reporting suggested that the worker died of pneumonic plague following a lab accident, but Russian health authorities deny...
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Nepal's arduous climb to recovery
Six weeks after flash flooding hurtled through northern Nepal, the government has concluded it's search and rescue mission for the thousands of people still missing. But as the government begins the slow process of recovery, how will it support and restore the lives of the 32,000 displaced Nepali...
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The first African credit rating agency
This month the African Union launched the Africa Credit Rating Agency. The continent's first ratings agency aims to level the playing field for banks, companies, sovereign wealth funds and other institutions seeking to access credit. Africa is generally seen as a riskier lending prospect than…
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Tweet of the week, 11 October 2026
This week's mystery caller floods back to Australia from the north to enjoy our summer months – the Sacred Kingfisher.
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The Year that Made Me: Lorrie Graham, 1975
Photojournalist Lorrie Graham was the first female photography cadet at The Sydney Morning Herald in 1975, and over the five decades since became “one of Australia’s most distinctive and influential photojournalists”.
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The "Platypus Man": Harry Burrell, forgotten vaudeville naturalist
The Australian Museum holds an archive of photos, specimens and films taken by Harry Burrell, a vaudeville performer turned amateur naturalist, who changed the way the world understood the platypus. Harry used his vaudeville showmanship to display the quirks of the platypus in a specially built...
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Sylvia Plath Stole My Boyfriend: Liz Hicklin in the spotlight
At the tender age of 95, Liz Hicklin keeps expanding her repetoire — from author and poet, to comedian and now star of a one-woman show about being a footnote to history, as the girlfriend who dated Ted Hughes before Sylvia Plath Guest: Liz Hicklin, writer and star of Sylvia Plath Stole My...
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Raygun on Breaking Badly
Dr. Rachael Gunn aka Raygun represented Australia in women's breaking at the Paris 2024 Olympics. While she scored no points from the Olympic judges, she instantly scored a starring role at the centre of a social media firestorm debating her Australiana inspired routine. Recently Raygun told her...
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The race to keep time on the moon
100 word including guest & book
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Indonesia's disappearing glaciers
Indonesia is home to two of the world's last surviving tropical glaciers, which are found near the top of a 4882 metre mountain in Papua Province. The glaciers used to cover much of the Surdiman mountain range but they're disappearing rapidly and predictions for when they will finally disappear...
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Nobel Prize winner Karl Deisseroth on the discovery that revolutionised neuroscience
This year’s Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine was jointly awarded to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel, for their work in optogenetics, a method for controlling nerve signals with light. Their research began by isolating a light-responsive cell from pond algae, and now makes…
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Tweet of the week, 4 October 2026
This week's mystery caller towers above its fellow wetland species – the Black-necked Stork.
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The Year That Made Me: Dr Anyier Yuol, 2010
Dr Anyier Yuol will never forget the day she arrived in Australia: it was the day Guy Sebastian and Shannon Noll faced off in the 2003 Australian Idol grand final. Anyier arrived in Australia on a humanitarian visa from Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya aged 10. Her parents, refugees from the civil…
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Theatre takes young audiences inside the tent of unaccompanied refugees
According to UNICEF, the United National Children’s Fund, there are an estimated 50 million refugee and displaced children around the world.
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Sunday Intrigue October - Switzerland playing Switzerland and Brazil elections
This month on Sunday Intrigue, Jeremy Dicker, managing editor of International Intrigue, looks back at Switzerland's referendum on whether to enshrine a strict definition of neutrality in its constitution. And Brazil goes to the polls for the first round of the presidential election on October 4,...
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Just can't do it? Nike falls off S&P 100 after 18 years
Nike might be the largest sportswear brand in the world, but earlier this month, the iconic American company fell off the S&P 100 after a solid 18 year run, and a 78% drop in share price since 2021. The loss of the brand’s blue chip status indicates that its prestige is slipping along with its...
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Operation Kingfisher: Sandakan revisited
For more than 80 years it was thought that the Australian military had failed to rescue Australian prisoners of war held by the Japanese in Borneo because of a lack of political will and resources. Almost 30 years ago, historian Lynette Ramsay Silver revealed that there had been a secret rescue...
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Kosovo clears the ground for an era of renewal
After 27 painstaking years of painstaking and dangerous work, the HALO Trust is finally able to wrap up it's work clearing landmines and cluster bombs in Kosovo. Guest: Major General James Cowan, CEO of the HALO Trust
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Hawking bio reveals the human behind the genius
Stephen Hawking's celebrity status often framed him as a superhuman genius. But in a new authorised biography, Hawking: His Life and Work, author Graham Farmelo weaves a very human story of a man who was both extraordinary and deeply flawed. Guest: Graham Farmelo, author of Hawking: His Life and...
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Tweet of the week, 27 September 2026
This week's mystery woodland caller is Australia's smallest bird – the Weebill.
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Tasmanian devils once lived alongside humans in WA's Juukan Gorge
Despite the name, Tasmanian devils once lived across mainland Australia. Including, according to new research, the arid Pilbara region in the north west of Western Australia. Remains found at Juukan Gorge suggest that Tasmanian devils may have scavenged from human camps in the region for tens of...
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Outside islanders: author Winnie Dunn on representation in publishing
Winnie Dunn became the first Tongan-Australian to publish a novel with her 2024 debut Dirt Poor Islanders, a coming-of-age story about a Tongan-Australian girl growing up in Western Sydney. Now she has been invited to give the 2026 Ray Mathew Lecture at the National Library of Australia, and she...
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From 'frustratingly discreet' to tell-all, the rise of Australian performance politics
It is unlikely that a political memoir published today would be described as 'frustratingly discreet', rather today’s former politicians often publish juicy tell-alls after leaving office, with shocking behind-the-scene revelations and an occasional stab at former rivals. As Josh Black explains…
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Togo's Foreign Minister on how they changed the world's maps
Earlier this month, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution to change the world’s maps. It encourages use of the Equal Earth Map rather than the Mercator, which was designed more than 450 years ago to help sailors navigate. But flattening a globe onto a map comes with distortions....
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Cambodia's multi-billion dollar scam industry
Many of the online scams that target Australians and people across the world have come from Cambodian scam centres, and the enormous scale of the illegal industry is difficult to fathom. While the Cambodian government has shut centres down, they are the tip of the iceberg of the country's...
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How to solve Australia's housing crisis
“Will the Albanese government's faltering steps towards national leadership on housing turn into a confident stride or stagger to a halt?” That’s the question asked in a new book by Matt Lloyd-Cape titled Our Place: How to Solve the Housing Crisis and Rebuild the Australian Dream, and it’s...
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The Year that Made Me: Michael Robotham, 1979
Michael Robotham grew up in small towns in regional New South Wales before securing a coveted cadetship with Fairfax Media in 1979, aged 17. After cutting his teeth covering crime and courts for afternoon newspapers he made the jump to London's Fleet Street in the mid-1980s. The end of the Cold…
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Tweet of the week, 20 September 2026
This week's mystery caller inhabits a variety of wet habitats right across Australia – the White-faced Heron
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The Year that Made Me: Mem Fox, 1982
Children's author Mem Fox grew up the daughter of missionaries in what was then Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. She attended the local school as the only white child before local authorities forced her parents to enrol her in a school for white children. After a stint at drama school in London...
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Face-to-face with Carlos the Jackal, the world's first super terrorist
In a small cell in a Poissy Central Prison, just outside Paris, is a 76-year-old man serving multiple life sentences for terrorist acts. The man is Illich Ramirez Sanchez, better known as Carlos the Jackal, one of the world's first international terrorists and perpetrator of horrific attacks...
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Rewiring Asia's democracies
The UN marks the International Day of Democracy on 15 September every year. But you could be forgiven for missing the celebrations because, let’s face it, democracy’s having a tough time around the world. Regional Director at Asia Centre Dr. Jamez Gomez however marked the day with an op-ed that...
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The National Communication Museum's 'Radical Computing' exhibition is a love letter to the personal computer
A new exhibition at Melbourne’s National Communication Museum celebrates the personal computer, and the people who tinkered with, hacked and stretched computers and code into the everyday technology we now take for granted. 'Radical Computing' takes us from computers entering our homes in the...
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Turi King and the human stories behind our DNA
Turi King is a superstar in the world of genetics, uncovering the identity of Richard III's body and analysing the Hitler's DNA. But in her latest book she shares the human stories that reflect the important role that DNA has come to play in the world, and where it might take humanity in the...
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How researchers figured out Australia's pre-colonial population was grossly underestimated
For a lot of the 20th century, a commonly cited estimate said there were around 300,000 Indigenous people living across Australia prior to invasion. But new research says the Aboriginal population was “more likely 2–3 million” in 1788. Another recent study on the 1789 smallpox epidemic was...