PODCAST · education
English Plus
by Danny Ballan
Dive into rigorous explorations of the English language, professional communication, and critical thinking. Designed for ambitious learners, university students, and professionals, English Plus goes beyond vocabulary to deliver practical knowledge that empowers your academic and career journey. The flagship audio experience hosted by Danny Ballan.This show is brought to you by CES (Cadmus Education Studios): Shaping the Future of Learning.
Episodes
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FLOW | The Anatomy of Missing Someone: The Arrow, the Missing Limb, and the Empty Wilderness
Where Is the Hole When You Miss Someone? Four Languages of Absence. The episode explores missing someone as a feeling with a specific “location,” then compares how English, French, Spanish, and Arabic map absence differently. English “I miss you” (from missan, failing to hit) frames missing as an...
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The Impact of Social Media on Society and Culture
Join us on English Plus Podcast as we take a deep dive into the impact of social media on society and culture. In this episode, we'll discuss both the positive and negative aspects of social media, touching on topics like connectivity, activism, mental health, and misinformation. We'll also…
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The Butterfly Effect | The Storms You'll Never See - FLOW | For the Love Of Words
A butterfly moves its wings in one part of the world, and weeks later a storm gathers on the other side of it. It sounds like a fairy tale, but it began as mathematics. In this episode, we follow the delicate, dizzying idea that the smallest things we do may quietly rewrite lives we'll never meet…
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UpGrade | Coping with Stress and Mental Fatigue
You can sleep eight hours and still wake up tired. Why? In this new UpGrade episode, we climb three levels of English about one of the most universal experiences there is: being stressed and mentally drained. We start with the simple, honest words you need at the elementary level, add the color…
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FLOW | Опустить руки | The Arms Give Up First
Russian locates surrender in the body, not the mind. And its grammar quietly admits that despair is something that happens to you rather than something you decide. Let's look at what the research says about which half of that is actually learned. Mentioned in this episode: Support us on Patreon...
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FLOW | Read the Room | The Language With No Words
We tell people to read the room as if it were the most natural thing in the world. But a room isn't a book. It has no words, no pages, no lines. So how do we read it? In this episode, we take a closer look at one of the most quietly profound skills a human being can have — and why learning to…
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Unlearn | The Flawed Guide to Genuine Growth
In this episode of our Unlearn Series, we take apart the entire machinery of fake self-improvement: the perfect guru and why we trust the mask, the myth of the fixed and finished self, and toxic positivity as a counterfeit of real growth. Then we build something better in its place. Drawing on…
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FLOW | Ephemeral | The Beauty That Can't Stay
We use it to describe the things we love and lose — a sunset, a season, a moment we wish we could keep. But what if the fleeting nature of a thing isn't the tragedy we think it is? In this episode, we sit with a word made of a single day, and ask whether permanence would have ruined the very…
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FLOW | Kasr al-khatir | The Bone Nobody Can X-Ray
Arabic doesn't say you hurt someone. It says you broke something inside them. And it keeps a matching verb for the repair — a bone-setting word that also gave the world algebra. Let's go inside the fracture Mentioned in this episode: Visit our website to keep the learning going. Support us on...
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Elevator | Discussing Diet and Nutrition Trends: The English to Talk About Food, Health, and Hype Without Falling for It
One year a food is a miracle “superfood,” the next it's quietly dropped and something new takes its place. Diet and nutrition trends move fast, the headlines shout, and it can be genuinely hard to know what to believe. In this Progressive English lesson, we're not here to tell you what to eat —...
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FLOW | A Drop in the Ocean | What the Ocean Is Made Of
We reach for it when we feel small: my effort is just a drop in the ocean. It's a phrase built to make us feel that nothing we do could ever be enough. But what if we've been reading it backwards this whole time? In this episode, we look again at the drop, at the ocean, and at the humbling…
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BML | The Reply-All Requiem | Danny's Petty Manifesto
In this episode of Danny's Petty Manifesto, The Satirist opens with a modest proposal: what if "reply all" were reclassified under the legal framework of digital assault? From there, he traces the surprisingly ancient lineage of humanity's need to broadcast the mundane — from the town crier...
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BML | Every Conversation Is an Elevator Pitch Now
Somewhere along the way, conversation became a pitch. We open with a hook, deliver our value proposition, keep it short, keep it emotional, and wrap it up before anyone checks their phone. We do it at work, and we do it with strangers, but the strange and sad part is that many of us now do it…
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BML | Universal High Income Sounds Wonderful Until You Ask Who Signs the Check
A billionaire predicts that in ten to twenty years, nobody will need to work, money will stop mattering, and governments will simply pay everyone enough to live well. He may even be right about the machines. This episode isn't about whether the robots can do it. It's about what happens to you the...
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BML | The Boring People Built Everything: Why We Stopped Celebrating Scientists, Poets, and Teachers
Somewhere along the way, the people who cure diseases, write the books that outlive us, and teach children to read stopped being celebrated and started being described as "boring." Meanwhile, attention and money have flowed toward a kind of fame that produces very little that lasts. In this...
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BML | The AI Slop Panic Is Hiding Something: We Already Let Machines Choose What We Consume
We've all done it. We spot the tell-tale AI phrasing, screenshot it, post it with a face of disgust, and get a small hit of moral applause. But here's the uncomfortable part: the thing that put that post in front of us was also a machine. We handed over curation years ago without a single…
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BML | The Brand Called You: When Who You Are Started Beating What You Do | Between the Lines
Somewhere out there is the most gifted person alive at something you love, and you will probably never hear their name. That single unfair fact is the doorway into today's deep dive. We trace the strange journey of the word "brand" from a burn mark on the side of a cow to the operating system of...
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Education in the Age of AI 01 | The Factory That Taught Us to Sit Still
Before we can talk about artificial intelligence, we have to talk about the machine we already built. This episode traces the design history of modern education: the tablet houses of ancient Sumer, the anxiety Socrates had about writing, the Chinese exams that invented high-stakes testing, the...
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My Life Is Full, Just Not by Your Standards | Between the Lines
You know the face. The little tilt of the head, the soft and sorrowful eyes, the gentle "you really should get out more" delivered like a diagnosis. It usually shows up the moment someone learns you'd rather read, write, learn, and chase ideas than do whatever counts as "really living" this…
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A History of Sex as a Business 10 | Where Do We Go From Here: Laws, Justice, and Human Dignity
What if there is no policy solution to this question that doesn't require us to make genuine tradeoffs between values we all hold — and what if the measure of our seriousness about this issue is precisely our willingness to sit with that difficulty rather than retreat to comfortable certainties?…
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A History of Sex as a Business 09 | The Digital Turn: Platforms, Algorithms, and OnlyFans
What happens when an industry that has been managed through physical geography for five thousand years suddenly loses its geography — when a brothel is a website, a street is an app, and the transaction can happen across continents? This is the question that the digital transformation posed to...
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A History of Sex as a Business 08 | The Business Model: How the Industry Actually Works
If you wanted to build a business that generates enormous profit from other people's bodies, that is extraordinarily resistant to law enforcement, and that reliably replenishes its own labor supply — what would it look like? Because that business exists, and understanding its mechanics is the…
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A History of Sex as a Business 07 | The 20th Century: Wars, Migration, and the Criminalization Wave
What if the twentieth century's most passionate campaigns to protect women from commercial sex actually made the women in it less safe, less visible, and harder to reach with help — and what if the people running those campaigns knew it and kept going anyway? That is not a comfortable question.…
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A History of Sex as a Business 06 | Victorian Shadows: The Underground Economy of the Empire
What do you do with a society that publicly proclaims that respectable women are pure, modest, and above the desires of the flesh — and privately maintains an enormous industry staffed by hundreds of thousands of women who are treated as the exact opposite? If you are Victorian Britain, you do…
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A History of Sex as a Business 05 | The Colonial Export: Race, Empire, and the Global Trade
What happens to the already brutal economics of commercial sex when you add the logic of empire — the idea that an entire category of people exists for the use and benefit of another? The answer, as this episode will show you, is that you get something considerably worse. Not just worse in scale,...
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A History of Sex as a Business 04 | Courtesans, Kings, and the Politics of Pleasure
What does it mean to have enormous cultural influence, genuine artistic accomplishment, and significant social presence — while still being ultimately defined by your availability to men of means? That is the central question of this episode, and it is one that I find genuinely troubling in the...
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A History of Sex as a Business 03 | The Middle Ages: God, Sin, and the Licensed Brothel
What do you do when you believe something is sinful, you believe you can't stop it, and you realize you might as well make money from it — and somehow convince yourself this is the reasonable position? This is, roughly speaking, the theological and administrative position that much of medieval...
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Talking About Childhood Memories in English: Vocabulary, Narrative Tenses & Storytelling Tips
Let me start with a strange little experiment. Don't overthink it — just answer honestly in your head. What is one smell that instantly sends you back to childhood? Not a memory you decided to have. One that ambushes you. For some people it's bread baking. For others it's chlorine from a swimming...
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FLOW | The Beauty That Can't Stay — Ephemeral
What if the reason it's beautiful is the very reason it can't last? We reach for this word, ephemeral, when something lovely is slipping away from us. A perfect evening. A season of our lives. A mood in a room that we know, even as we're standing in it, we will never quite have again. Ephemeral.…
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Dead Silence: Why Dismissal Hurts Writers More Than Criticism
Here is a confession that will cost me nothing, because no one who needs to hear it is listening: I can survive a bad review. What I cannot survive, apparently with any grace at all, is a room that has quietly decided I was never in it. Let's start there, because I think we've been misdiagnosing...
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A History of Sex as a Business 02 | Greece, Rome, and the Architecture of Desire
What if one of the most celebrated intellectual cultures in human history — a civilization that gave us philosophy, democracy, and the foundations of Western thought — built its social life around a system that turned most of the people providing pleasure into property? That is not a rhetorical...
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A History of Sex as a Business 01 | In the Beginning: Sex, Temples, and the First Economies
What if the first known economy built around sex wasn't sinful, wasn't shameful, and wasn't even considered unusual — what if it was, in the most literal sense of the word, sacred? That question is the starting point for everything we're going to explore in this series. And I want to be honest…
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Five Years From Now: The Language — and the Logic — of Career Planning
Here's the question. You're in a job interview — or maybe a performance review, or a conversation with a mentor you deeply respect — and someone asks you: "Where do you see yourself in five years?" And you feel it. That particular combination of blankness and panic that comes from knowing you…
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Weather the Strom | FLOW
What if surviving something was never about winning against it — but about simply still being there when it's over? Think about this for a second. Because we talk about hard times like they're battles. We fight our illnesses. We beat the odds. We conquer our fear. And there's a courage in that...
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The Superstar Machine: How Fame Really Gets Made (It's Not Luck, and It's Not a Conspiracy)
The Barista Who Should Be Selling Out Arenas There's a specific kind of heartbreak that only happens in coffee shops. You're waiting for your order, half-listening to the background music, and you realize the voice coming through the speakers belongs to the person making your drink. She recorded…
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Why I Quit Streaming Platforms (And Saved My Sanity)
Have you ever spent weeks building a beautiful, intricate ship in a bottle, pouring over every tiny detail with tweezers and a magnifying glass, only to walk down to the beach, throw it into a chaotic, garbage-filled ocean, and hope someone, somewhere, happens to fish it out before it shatters...
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Doctor's Orders: The English You Need When Your Body Is Speaking Up
Let me paint a picture for you. You wake up in the middle of the night with a sharp pain in your lower right abdomen. You're in an English-speaking country. You need to go to the emergency room. The nurse at the reception desk asks you: "Can you describe your symptoms?" And you — a person who...
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Does Poetry Matter Anymore? Finding Meaning in a Fast-Paced World
Let’s imagine for a moment, together, you and I, something that may happen to you every single day, way too many times, actually. You’re scrolling through your phone, probably waiting for your coffee to brew or sitting in traffic (as a passenger, I hope), and you swipe past a quote. It’s…
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The Unboxing of Us: Why We Judge People Faster Than Headphones
Think, for a moment, about the last time you bought a pair of headphones. You didn't just walk into a store, point at a random cardboard box, and hand over your credit card. Oh, no. If you’re anything like the rest of us living in this hyper-connected digital age, you embarked on a sacred,...
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Talking Tech: How to Sound Smart (and Human) When Discussing AI
Here's a question I want you to sit with for just a moment: if someone asked you right now, in English, to explain what artificial intelligence actually is — not recite a definition, but genuinely explain it the way you'd explain it to a smart friend over coffee — could you do it? Really? Because...
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The Social Media Mirror: Helping Your Teenager See Themselves Clearly Again
The Mirror That Lies It's a Tuesday night, somewhere past eleven. The house has gone quiet in that particular way houses go quiet when everyone has agreed, by silent treaty, that the day is over. But behind one closed door, a screen is still glowing. You know the glow. You've seen the thin blue...
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The Burden of Tomorrow: Is It a Sin to Just Want to Be Happy?
Let’s start with a confession, shall we? The other morning, I was standing in my kitchen, waiting for the toaster to pop, watching a golden ray of sunshine hit the countertop. It was quiet. The kind of quiet that feels like a heavy, expensive blanket. I was happy. Genuinely, uncomplicatedly happy...
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The Art of the Con 2 | The Mirror
Here’s a strange claim, and I’m going to spend the next half hour proving it to you. The single most persuasive thing you can do in a conversation is also the single quietest. It involves almost no clever words. It works better the less you perform it. And odds are you’ve spent your whole life...
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The Quiet Rebellion of Nuance: Why We Refuse to Go Viral
I have a confession to make. Last Tuesday, at approximately 2:14 PM, I was staring at a spreadsheet of our content analytics, nursing my third cup of coffee, and I seriously considered selling my soul to the digital devil. I was looking at the numbers for a deeply researched, carefully nuanced...
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The Art of the Con 1 | The Confidence Game
Let me start with a question, and I want you to actually answer it in your head before we go on. Have you ever met someone — a stranger, total stranger — and within about ten seconds decided you’d follow them anywhere? Or the exact opposite: shaken a hand and thought, quietly, I will never turn…
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The Omniscience Illusion: Why Keep Learning When AI Knows Everything?
Have you ever found yourself staring blankly at a blinking cursor, opening a new tab, and quietly asking a chatbot to draft a birthday message for your own mother? Or maybe you’ve caught yourself halfway through a slightly challenging thought, only to mentally sigh and think, “You know what? I’ll...
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How to Actually Speak English — Fluency, Confidence, and the Skills Nobody Teaches You
Let me ask you something before we get into this. When you picture someone who speaks English fluently — really fluently — what do you see? Someone who never pauses. Someone whose words come out smooth and fast, no stumbles, no hesitation. Someone who sounds, to put it plainly, like they were…
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Lost in the Terminal? How to Navigate Any Airport in the World — And Sound Like You Know What You're Doing
Have you ever stood in the middle of a massive airport, staring at a departures board, unsure which terminal you're supposed to be in, which queue you need to join, and what exactly the gate agent just announced over that crackling PA system? If the answer is yes — welcome to the club. Airports…
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How to Apologize in English and Actually Mean It: The Words That Repair, From Simple Sorry to Sincere Amends
Why is it that "I'm sorry" is one of the first phrases we learn in any language, and yet a real, sincere apology is something most adults are genuinely bad at? We learn the word as toddlers and then spend the rest of our lives avoiding the actual act. Here is the thing that makes this lesson...
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How to Prepare for a Job Interview in English: The Words, Phrases, and Confidence to Get Hired
Why is it that a person who can chat happily for hours suddenly forgets how to speak the moment someone says, "So, tell me about yourself"? Those four little words have ended more confident smiles than almost any other phrase in the working world. Here is the good news, and it is genuinely good…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Dive into rigorous explorations of the English language, professional communication, and critical thinking. Designed for ambitious learners, university students, and professionals, English Plus goes beyond vocabulary to deliver practical knowledge that empowers your academic and career journey. The flagship audio experience hosted by Danny Ballan.This show is brought to you by CES (Cadmus Education Studios): Shaping the Future of Learning.
HOSTED BY
Danny Ballan
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does English Plus have?
English Plus currently has 1000 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is English Plus about?
Dive into rigorous explorations of the English language, professional communication, and critical thinking. Designed for ambitious learners, university students, and professionals, English Plus goes beyond vocabulary to deliver practical knowledge that empowers your academic and career journey. The...
How often does English Plus release new episodes?
English Plus releases new episodes frequently with a large back catalog of 1000 episodes. Check the episode list for recent publication dates.
Where can I listen to English Plus?
You can listen to English Plus on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts English Plus?
English Plus is created and hosted by Danny Ballan.
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