A Point of View

David Cannadine reflects on the enduring appeal of the teddy bear in contemporary culture. Why, he wonders, have they been such popular toys and featured so prominently in literature and song since they were first named after Theodore Roosevelt over a hundred years ago. Producer: Sheila Cook.

David Cannadine reflects on the history of American presidential inaugurations since Abraham Lincoln's, and compares presidents' speeches at the start of their first and second terms in office. "Second inaugurals...are often less up-beat and up-lifting, since it's no longer possible for a president, having already been four years in office, to offer a new deal or to proclaim, as President Obama did in 2009 that 'change is coming to America'".Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self laments what he sees as an absence of rational urban planning in our big cities and a fashion for dramatic skyscrapers driven by short term commercial values. "It occurred to me that the contemporary metropolitan skyline is really only a fireworks display of decades-long duration: a burst of aerial illumination intended to provoke awe, but doomed eventually to subside into darkness." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self wants to "nudge society in the direction of considering suicide acceptable" when the alternative is a slow and painful end. "I don't say any of these things idly," he writes, "like many of us in middle age, my last few years have been heavily marked by an increasing awareness of both my own mortality and that of those who I love." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self looks back over 2012 and reflects on the confused relationship between Britain and the US. Love and hate, he argues, are there in equal measure. Taking as his starting point the Tom Stoppard plays his American mother took him to see in the 1970s, he says our relationship with our friends across the pond has changed little in 40 years. Producer: Adele Armstrong.

"Are you full yet? Stuffed? Fit to burst?" asks Will Self as he appeals to the post-Christmas glutton to consider a major lifestyle change in the year ahead."What I think we should all do", he says, "is throw up our very obsession with food itself, and enter the New Year purged". He takes us on a tour of foodie history, and explores how we've gone from being a culinary backwater to "the most food-obsessed nation in Europe - if not the world". Producer: Adele Armstrong.

Will Self warns against the false prophets of the new priesthood of economics who base their analyses and predictions on "spurious notions of human behaviour". "In place of the vulgate we require the holy books of economics to be written in the language we actually speak, and along with this we should actively seek a liberty of individual conscience, so that we communicate directly with Mammon, freed from the intercession of a priesthood who, when not arguing about how many angels can be fitted on the head of a pin, are spending our money producing elegant but utterly spurious mathematical models of possible future angel-on-pin scenarios." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Will Self reflects on the effect of digital technology on his perception of the passage of time. "Perhaps the reason I feel quite so liberated from the present while more and more attached, not to the individually recalled 'good old days', but to a collectively attested and ever-present past, is because the hard drive of my computer is overloaded with digital images of the places I've been and the people I've met, all of them time-coded to within a tenth of a second." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Onora O'Neill reflects afresh on questions of trust, a decade after her Reith lectures on the subject. She argues that rather than asking, "how can we restore trust" in general, following recent scandals and failures, we should ask specific, practical questions about how better to measure trustworthiness. "Placing and refusing trust intelligently is not a matter of finding guarantees or proofs; we often have to assess complex and incomplete evidence, which the masters of spin and PR may be massaging to make things look better than they are." Systems of accountability or transparency can be ineffective or even counter-productive whereas easily assessable communication is "important and often indispensable." Producer: Sheila Cook.

Mary Beard reflects on why universities are being consumed by "customer satisfaction" surveys. "When you're paying up to £9000 a year for the privilege of being at university, you want to make it pretty clear if you feel you're not getting your money's worth", she writes. But the deluge of forms - asking students for their views on the content, presentation, organisation of the course and the quality of the handouts will - she argues, do little to improve "the learning experience". She admits having a "tweak of nostalgia for that old era before the tick-box, when brave students would tell their famous professors to their face that their lectures were rubbish"! Producer: Adele Armstrong.