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BBC Radio 4

NEW in Understand: Rinsed

What's happened to our rivers is a real stinker of a scandal. Kate Lamble investigates.

Understand from BBC Radio 4 - unravelling the complexities of the biggest stories and subjects that really matter right now.

Understand

The centuries old battle between public good and private profit that’s still being fought today. 

Kate Lamble holds her nose and plunges into the long history of the water industry and some of the many conflicts that have shaped it.

Reported and presented by Kate Lamble
Producer: Elle Scott
Sound Design: Andy Fell
Executive Producer: Joe Kent
Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams
Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke

Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

Rinsed: 2. Water Works

After watching their local river grow murky and lifeless, two retired neighbours decide to take on the water industry and its regulators. The unlikely sleuths begin a ten-year battle to clean up our rivers.

On the banks of the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, Kate Lamble meets campaigners Ash Smith and Peter Hammond

Reported and presented by Kate Lamble 
Producer: Elle Scott
Sound Design: Andy Fell
Executive Producer: Joe Kent 
Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams
Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke 

Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

Rinsed: 1. The Bridge

This is the story of a sewage scandal. How a centuries old battle between public good and private profit created an almighty stink. And who pays to clean it up.

Rinsed: Trailer

Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading - and even reading ability - starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.

In this episode James digs into the question of whether literacy led to the invention of democracy, asks whether reading helps us proof ourselves against misinformation, and asks what happens to our politics if reading dies out? 

Contributors include
- Jung Chang, author
- Robert Darnton, historian
- Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University
- Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter
- John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times
- Nick Harris, ideas editor at the New Statesman
- Professor Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA

Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton
Editors - Chris Ledgard & Alasdair Cross

How Reading Made Us: 3. How Reading Made Our Politics

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading - and even reading ability - starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.

In this programme, James asks whether the spread of novel reading in the 18th century caused a moral revolution, whether a book played a role in the abolition of slavery, and whether the rise of reading, a solitary and slightly lonely activity, was one of the factors setting us on the path to our atomized and isolated modern society. 

Contributions from:

- Jung Chang, author
- Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University
- Sarah Maxwell, founder of Saucy Books
- Robert Darnton, historian
- Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter
- Joseph Henrich, professor of anthropology at Harvard University
- Maryanne Wolf, professor and Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA

Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton
Editor - Chris Ledgard

How Reading Made Us: 2. How Reading Made Our Feelings

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. After all, everyone can read. Even small children. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. 
 
For centuries people have been reading more and more. Recently the trend has gone into reverse. The number of people who pick up a book has been falling steadily for twenty years. Now half of adults no longer read regularly. 
 
How will this change us? 

Over three episodes, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading made us, and what might happen if we stop.

In this first programme, James finds out how unnatural the process of reading is, and the complex alchemy our brains create to make words on the page make sense to us, and asks what we gain - and lose - when we learn to read.

Guests include:

- Professor Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA
- John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times
- Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter
- Dr Joseph Henrich, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University

Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton
Editor - Chris Ledgard

How Reading Made Us: 1. How Reading Made Our Brains

The story of how reading made us and what might happen if we stop - with James Marriott.

How Reading Made Us: Trailer

As James Naughtie concludes his series about the ideas tying America's birth 250 years ago to the United States today, he examines freedom, asking whose freedom, and what kind?

He begins in Gettysburg, attending a re-enactment on the battlefield made famous by an address from President Abraham Lincoln in which he asked whether the United States "could long endure". That question is being asked again now, as Americans experience profound disagreements over many of the ideas in this series - economic opportunity, justice, freedom; even what it means to be an American. As he hears, American history itself has become a battlefield. And so speaking to historians with different perspectives, and senior political leaders from both parties, James assesses how dangerous this moment is for United States.

Producer: Giles Edwards

An American Journey: 4. Life and Liberty

James Naughtie continues his look at the ideas tying America's founding to the modern United States, as he looks at what it means to be an American.

In Chicago, he joins the Columbus Day parade - an exuberant celebration of Italian-American identity - and hears about the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities like Chicago. In Wisconsin, he visits the birthplace of the Republican Party, and in Ohio the Governor shows him the spot where Abraham Lincoln heard he had been formally confirmed as President-Elect. James considers how the social movements of the 1960s moved the centre of gravity of American politics from economic to social issues, with all that meant for political polarisation.

Producer: Giles Edwards

An American Journey: 2. A More Perfect Union

James Naughtie continues his look at the ideas tying America's founding to the modern United States, asking how 'justice' has been understood by different generations of Americans.

In this third episode, James travels to Alabama in the American South, to understand how the Civil Rights movement sought to connect American reality with the promises in its founding documents. He hears from people in Texas on both sides of the debate about abortion, revealing how a movement built to oppose abortion rights brought millions of Christians into politics and dramatically shifted the politics of America's highest court. And in Midwestern Wisconsin, he hears how political division has come to the administration of justice itself.

Producer: Giles Edwards

Rinsed: 1. The Bridge

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