Youssef Rakha discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Youssef Rakha is an Egyptian author working in Arabic and English. He is the author of The Book of the Sultan’s Seal; The Crocodiles; Paulo, which was longlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction and won a Sawiris Cultural Award; and The Dissenters, which was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. His new book is Postmuslim, which is available at https://peninsulapress.co.uk/products/postmuslim

1. Beer in the Snooker Club (1964) by Waguih Ghali. Evidently the first Egyptian novel to be written in English, a massive early influence, and an occasion to revisit the normalization debate. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/05/beer-in-snooker-club-ghali-review
2. The 1977 song Zahma by the legendary singer Ahmad Adaweya. Composed by the equally legendary Hany Shenouda and the unrecognized bard Hassan Abu Etman. A landmark song that massively influenced urban folk and pop music and, for me at least, defines the sound of Cairo. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djqFU71juWM
3. The Mummy, aka The Night of Counting the Years (1969) by Shadi Abdel Salam. A one-of-a-kind film on which I wrote a whole monograph. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064703/
4. Samir Rafi’s 1949 painting Life’s Tragedy, and Cairo’s Surrealist/Marxist Art et Liberte movement (1938–1948). https://www.barjeelartfoundation.org/collection/lifes-tragedy-samir-rafi/
5. The Egyptian tradition of melodic Quran recitation as exemplified by the one-man opera known as Mustafa Ismail. One very short example of what he can do, from Surat Fatir: Verse 22. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LvOH_D0CTI0
6. Egypt’s cultural Golden Age in the Life magazine-like photography of Farouk Ibrahim. https://www.thenationalnews.com/mena/egypt/2023/03/21/farouk-ibrahim-the-most-famous-egyptian-photographer-youve-never-heard-of/

This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Jean Findlay discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Jean Findlay is the author of Chasing Lost Time – the Life of CK Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy and Translator published in 2014 by Chatto and Windus, London, and by FSG, New York. The Queen's Lender was awarded the Hawthornden Fellowship 2018 and Lavigny International Writer’s Fellowship 2019. Her new book is The Bohemian Queen: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bohemian-Queen-Queens-Europe-2026/dp/1910895849.

1. The origin of the term Bohemian https://villagepreservation.org/2013/04/16/how-bohemians-got-their-name/
2. That Europe had a war that lasted Thirty years https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/30-years-war-1618-48-and-second-defenestration-prague
3. Sectarianism didn’t originate in Glasgow and Edinburgh https://fpc.org.uk/northern-ireland-still-a-deeply-divided-society/
4. There are 250 types of bumble bees www.bumblebeeconservation.org
5. People have been using fake news to slander and discredit public figures since the beginning of time https://theconversation.com/medieval-england-loved-rumours-conspiracies-and-fake-news-about-queens-227111
6. That Gregorian Chant hits a sound level that heals your body https://www.tfp.org/how-gregorian-chant-benefits-the-health-of-the-bodyand-soul/

This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm

Roie Oknin discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Roie Oknin is an author, multidisciplinary artist, and medical student. He is the author of Ramen, Existential Crises, his debut novel, which is available at https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Ramen-Existential-Crises-by-Oknin-Roie/9789655962765. Alongside his literary and artistic practice, he works as an ophthalmology researcher and holds a B.A. in Psychology and a B.Sc. in Neuroscience.

1. Colour words: The order in which languages develop basic colour words.
2. Honey process coffee: Despite the name, it has nothing to do with honey.
3. How we see colour: How we perceive millions of colours using signals from only three types of cone cells in our retina.
4. The prosecutor’s fallacy: How easily we confuse two probabilities that sound almost identical but mean very different things.
5. Evolution: Why it is not really the ladder, as we often imagine, but a branching process with no intended endpoint.
6. The stockings experiment: A social psychology experiment involving identical pairs of stockings, showing how little access we may have to the reasons behind some of our own decisions.

This podcast is powered by ZenCast.fm