Better Known Ivan Wise

Alex Edmans discusses with Ivan six things which should be less well known.

Alex’s new book is May Contain Lies, about misinformation, and so, in a reversal of the usual format, he discusses six ideas and beliefs which have been overexposed.

Alex Edmans is Professor of Finance at London Business School. Alex has a PhD from MIT as a Fulbright Scholar, and was previously a tenured professor at Wharton and an investment banker at Morgan Stanley.

Alex has spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos, testified in the UK Parliament, and given the TED talk What to Trust in a Post-Truth World and the TEDx talks The Pie-Growing Mindset and The Social Responsibility of Business with a combined 2.8 million views. He serves as non-executive director of the Investor Forum, on the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Responsible Investing, on Royal London Asset Management’s Responsible Investment Advisory Committee, and on Novo Nordisk’s Sustainability Advisory Council.

Alex’s book, Grow the Pie: How Great Companies Deliver Both Purpose and Profit, was a Financial Times Book of the Year and has been translated into nine languages, and he is a co-author of Principles of Corporate Finance (with Brealey, Myers, and Allen). His latest book is May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It, available at https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520403932/may-contain-lies.

His six things which should be less well-known are:


Mothers should exclusively breast-feed their babies
You can be an expert in anything if you devote 10,000 hours to it
Starting with why is the secret to success
Diverse teams always perform better
More information makes you more informed
Grit is more important than IQ in driving achievement


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Jonn Elledge is a New Statesman columnist, and a contributor to the Big Issue, the Guardian, the Evening Standard, and a number of other newspapers. He was previously an assistant editor at the New Statesman, where he created and ran its urbanism-focused CityMetric site, and spent six happy years writing about cities, maps and borders and hosting the Skylines podcast. He has written over a hundred editions of the Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything. His new book is A History of the World in 47 Borders: The Stories Behind the Lines on Our Maps. He previously wrote The Compendium of (Not Quite) Everything: All the Facts You Didn't Know You Wanted to Know and, with Tom Phillips, Conspiracy: A History of Bollcks Theories, and How Not to Fall for Them.



Babylon 5 https://www.douxreviews.com/2015/08/babylon-5-series-review.html



Life & Fate by Vasily Grossman https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v29/n20/john-lanchester/good-day-comrade-shtrum



The Truth about Markets by John Kay https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1036&context=economics-faculty-publications



Why there was no Danish holocaust https://www.history.com/news/wwii-danish-jews-survival-holocaust



Nehru's affair with Lady Mountbatten https://www.indiatoday.in/india-today-insight/story/from-the-india-today-archives-1980-mountbattens-and-nehru-friendship-in-high-places-2413716-2023-07-30



Ethiopian food https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/ethiopian-food-best-dishes-africa/index.html




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Henry Oliver discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Henry Oliver is a writer, speaker, and brand consultant. He writes regularly for outlets like the New Statesman, The Critic, and UnHerd. He writes the popular Substack The Common Reader, which was recently mentioned in the Atlantic. His book Second Act is about late bloomers. In 2022, he was given an Emergent Ventures grant.



Izaac Walton https://newcriterion.com/article/the-right-angle/



Wren churches https://sixinthecity.co.uk/news/2023/03/51-wren-churches/



Lyrics of Noel Coward songs https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n13/rosemary-hill/mushroom-cameo



Lichfield https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/The-City-of-Lichfield/



Byron Janis Bach recording https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdL3-xwoFik



Elizabeth Jenkins https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/sep/07/elizabeth-jenkins-obituary




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Jamaica Kincaid discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Jamaica Kincaid was born in St. John’s, Antigua. Her books include At the Borrom of the River; Annie John; Lucy; The Autobiography of My Mother; My Brother; Mr Potter; and See Now Then. She teaches at Harvard University and lives in Vermont. Her new book is an Encylopedia of Gardening for Colored People at https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/9780374608255?gC=5a105e8b.



Let Love Come Between Us by James and Bobby Purify https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32CgFcOSbxw



26 of the 50 United States bear the names of Native Americans https://thoughtcatalog.com/james-b-barnes/2014/10/26-states-that-were-named-by-native-americans-was-your-state/



The Travels of William Bartram https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/americas-first-great-enviromentalist-florida-william-bartram-180983452/



The first paragraph of the 3rd Chapter of the Life of Frederick Douglas https://www.sparknotes.com/lit/narrative/full-text/chapter-iii/



Ervartung, a mono-drama opera with music by Arnold Schoenberg https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2002/feb/01/artsfeatures.classicalmusicandopera



The seed packet was invented by The Shakers, an English Protestant sect, who immigrated to America and made many beautiful and useful things for the home. Their beliefs were quite severe regarding sex so no children were produced to ruin the beautiful and useful things they made for the home https://digventures.com/2018/02/11-things-we-still-use-that-were-invented-by-the-shakers/




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Caroline Eden returns to discuss with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Caroline Eden is a writer and book critic contributing to the Financial Times, Guardian and
the Times Literary Supplement. Her new book is Cold Kitchen: A Year of Culinary Journeys. Her earlier books include Samarkand, Black Sea and Red Sands, winner of the prestigious André Simon Award and a Book of the Year for the New Yorker.



Ukrainian borsch



Uzbek melons



Russian pirozhki



Polish pierogi 



Armenian lavash



Turkish boza




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Caroline Crampton discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.

Caroline Crampton is the author of The Way to the Sea: The Forgotten Histories of the Thames Estuary (Granta, 2019). Her award-winning podcast, Shedunnit, is distributed by BBC Sounds. Her journalism has appeared in the New Statesman, The Times and the Guardian. An experienced broadcaster, she has appeared on BBC Two, Sky News, BBC Radio 2 and BBC Radio 4. Her new book is A Body Made of Glass: A History of Hypochondria.



The Lime Street Cutting https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/stunning-pictures-reveal-rarely-glimpsed-22659098



The adult novels of Eva Ibbotson https://shereadsnovels.com/2012/11/25/madensky-square-by-eva-ibbotson/



Beremeal flour https://baronymill.com/



The inverted story or "howdunnit" https://www.novelsuspects.com/articles/inverted-detective-stories-when-you-already-know-whodunnit/



The 1944 Powell and Pressburger film A Canterbury Tale https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/powell-pressburger-kent-locations-canterbury-tale



Clumber spaniels https://www.akc.org/dog-breeds/clumber-spaniel/




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