TOPIC 01
Why We Pay to Be Frightened
A hundred years of horror films
The stolen vampire of 1922, the shower scene that locked cinema doors, the $15,000 film that beat Hollywood — and the science of why our brains buy tickets to fear.
The question: why do we pay to feel afraid?
TOPIC 02
Where Did the Free Time Go?
The story of the working week · B2 + C1/C2
In 1930 Keynes promised us a fifteen-hour week. Productivity kept the promise; the calendar didn't. The fight for the 8-hour day, the missing dividend, and the four-day-week trials.
The question: who took the fifteen-hour week?
TOPIC 03
The Boy Who Stayed Awake
The science of sleep
Eleven days without sleep for a school science fair — the dissolving mind, the fourteen-hour recovery, and what the third of your life you spend unconscious is actually doing.
The question: how little sleep can you get away with — and who pays the bill?
TOPIC 04
The Battle for Your Attention
The attention economy
The inventors of the like button and the infinite scroll now lock their own phones away. Simon's 1971 prophecy, the slot machine in your pocket, and the fight to get your evenings back.
The question: who is optimising this hour — you, or the feed?
TOPIC 05
The Accidental World Language
The story of English
A conquered kitchen dialect that swallowed two empires' worth of words and became the world's bridge — now owned three-to-one by the people who learned it. Including you.
The question: whose language is it now?
TOPIC 06
The Bliss Point
The story of engineered food
The man who optimised spaghetti sauce, the locked ward that proved formulation drives appetite, and the black octagons that fought back — amateur biology versus professional engineering.
The question: who designed your choices — and who may redesign them?
TOPIC 07
What If?
Absurd questions, real physics
A NASA roboticist left to draw stick figures, then began answering the questions adults refuse to take seriously — the baseball thrown at the speed of light, the swim in a nuclear fuel pool, the day everybody jumps at once. Twenty questions, twenty answers, guessed aloud before they open.
The question: when should you trust your instincts — and when should you just do the arithmetic?
TOPIC 08
What Makes a Good Life?
Eighty-five years of watching
In 1938 scientists began following 724 young men — Harvard undergraduates and boys from Boston's poorest streets — to see what a life needs in order to go well. Four directors and eight decades later, the answer was on nobody's scoreboard.
The question: what actually predicts a life that goes well?
TOPIC 09
The Stone at the Bottom of the Sea
What money actually is
A Pacific fortune lost in a storm and spent for generations; gold shuffled across a New York vault and relabelled; six months in which Ireland had no banks and paid for everything with handwritten promises.
The question: if money is only trust, who exactly are you trusting?
TOPIC 10
The Man Who Forgot Tomorrow
How memory really works
The 1953 operation that stole a man's future and revealed how memory is built; the single verb that put broken glass into a film that never had any; and why rereading fails while remembering hurts.
The question: how much of what you remember actually happened?
TOPIC 11
The Dogs That Gave Up
The science of optimism and pessimism
A 1967 experiment in which dogs stopped trying to escape; the three habits of explanation that split optimists from pessimists; 129 salespeople who failed the normal test; and the prisoner who warned that hope can kill.
The question: is the way you explain failure something you can change?
TOPIC 12
The Golden Record
A message to anyone, anywhere
In 1977 humans put greetings, music, a kiss and an hour of a woman's brainwaves on a gold disc and sent it into interstellar space. Then you build your own record — and decide what the universe should know about us.
The question: what would you say to someone who will never answer?
TOPIC 13
Hinge Moments
The night the world waited
Just after midnight in 1983, a Soviet officer saw five missiles on his screen and had minutes to decide whether to believe them. Then you meet four more people whose single choice mattered — and find the hinge moment in your own life.
The question: should the big decisions be left to machines, or to people?
TOPIC 14
The Man Who Decided to Believe
William James · C1 + A2
In 1870 a brilliant young doctor cannot get out of bed. One sentence in his notebook changes his life — and starts an argument about belief and evidence that is still open.
The question: when, if ever, is it reasonable to believe without proof?
TOPIC 15
The Freedom Nobody Could Take
Viktor Frankl · C1 + A2
A doctor who studied hope loses his work, his book and his family. He keeps asking one question: what is left that is still mine? A follow-on to The Man Who Decided to Believe.
The question: what can never be taken from us — and is that enough?
TOPIC 16
One Now, or Two Later?
The science of willpower
Children, marshmallows and a fifteen-minute wait at Stanford; the famous follow-up that promised to predict a life; and the broken promise about crayons that changed what the test means.
The question: is waiting a sign of self-control — or of trust?
TOPIC 17
The Stranger on the Train
Why we should talk to people we don’t know
Chicago commuters told to talk to a stranger, the “liking gap” that follows every conversation, and 20 million LinkedIn users who showed how acquaintances help us find jobs.
The question: why do we sit in silence when talking would make us happier?
TOPIC 18
Twenty-One Days?
How habits really form
A plastic surgeon’s remark about new faces, 96 volunteers in a UCL study who took 66 days on average (and up to 254), and the soldiers whose hardest habit stayed behind in Vietnam.
The question: is a habit inside you — or in the world around you?
TOPIC 19
The Real Lord of the Flies
Are people basically good?
Six Tongan schoolboys shipwrecked for fifteen months, 17,000 wallets handed in across 40 countries, and street cameras that caught strangers stepping in — three tests of a very dark novel.
The question: are people, deep down, selfish — or good?
TOPIC 20
The Knowledge
How experts are made
The London cabbies whose brains grew as they learned 25,000 streets, the Berlin violinists behind the “10,000-hour rule”, and the study that found what practice can’t explain.
The question: is expertise made by practice — or by something else?
TOPIC 21 · B2/C1
Nothing Like a Dream
Victor Hugo & Les Misérables · B2/C1 + A2/B1
The famous line about dreams and the future, traced to the exact page of the novel; the writer trapped by gunfire in Paris in 1832 who finished his book in exile; and the two-day uprising that failed — before France became a republic anyway.
The question: can a dream that fails still create the future?
TOPIC 21 · A2/B1
Nothing Like a Dream
Victor Hugo & Les Misérables · the easier version
The same true story, told more simply: a famous sentence about dreams, a writer who lived far from home for almost nineteen years, and young dreamers on a Paris barricade in 1832.
The question: is it good to have a very big dream?