MEGALITHS!!!!
After the week it's been, we could all do with a break from the present. This week, we're venturing into Europe past -- about six thousand years ago, to a time when mysterious stone structures were springing up all around the continent. Today we call them megaliths, and there's a lot we still don't know about them. But one woman has been on a quest to work out how these extraordinary monuments spread around Europe. Archaeologist Bettina Schulz Paulsson is on the line from Gothenburg to talk about how early Europeans were exchanging knowledge and culture a good few millennia before the EU was invented. Also: a reverse art heist, a blow for the anti-vaxxers , and how to say no to big business.
WEB OF LIES
This week on the Europeans: bad Italian wifi, a bad Danish bank, and badly behaved Spanish politicians. And spiders, lots of spiders. The Financial Times' Madrid correspondent Michael Stothard is on the line (kind of) to explain Spain's growing plagiarism scandal. And as part of our new partnership with the uber-cool magazine Are We Europe, we chat with its editor Kyrill Hartog about their latest issue The Ocean Between Us, all about Europe's complicated relationship with America.
Check it out here — and if you too believe that print is not dead, buy a copy! www.areweeurope.com
Build your own Europe, baby
This week on The Europeans, two interviews about building things from scratch. We speak to in-house IKEA designer Sarah Fager in Älmhult, Sweden, about the philosophy that drove the company’s late founder Ingvar Kamprad to take over the world with his flatpack furniture. And in Milan, Andrea Venzon is on the line to give us the lowdown on the new pan-European political movement he’s just set up, Volt. Plus: gassed monkeys, dabblings in erotica by Jean-Claude Juncker, and a whole lot of oranges.