Blueprint For Living - Separate stories

While some of today's cruise ships are as bulky and graceless as factories, many of the smaller vessels follow a similar blueprint to the ship that started it all, the SS Prinzessin Victoria Luise.

In anticipation of the arrival of the American 'family' restaurant chain, Guy Rundle - Crikey columnist, chronicler of urban decline and its ever-diminishing pockets of resistance - reflects on the American ‘restaurant experience’ and the corrosive effect of franchise-chain capitalism on living culture.

Urban planning has become the latest target of conspiracy theorists. In recent weeks, the 15-minute city concept — where neighbourhoods provide life's essentials in 15 minutes by foot or bike — has become a harbinger of big brother in conspiracy-land.Misinformation has triggered fierce protests against 15-minute city plans in the UK and Canada, with the City of Oxford even having to clarify they wouldn't be erecting physical barriers to separate citizens.Brent Toderian, a keen urbanist and Vancouver's former chief planner, is here to help us understand how the polite world of urban planning crashed into conspiracies.

Architecture is a man's profession. That's what a young African American girl in Harlem, New York, grew up thinking. But Norma Merrick Sklarek would soon prove she could be a top-tier architect and in doing so, would become a pioneering figure in the history of American architecture.--This episode was first broadcast on August 6, 2022.

Feast on a strawberry sorbet you can pair with a raspberry beret.In part two of Annie's mini-workshop on sugar syrup, Annie shows Jonathan how to whip together a sweet summertime treat with a splash of Campari in the latest edition of Kitchen Rudimental. 

It's hard to imagine how revolutionary the arrival of the match was. Now we can't imagine life would without them. In this week's Iconic Designs Colin Bisset looks at the invention of the match.

Tamar Adler on what to do with leftover pizza, how to use the Marcella Hazan tomato sauce onion and how to take the moralising out of no-waste cooking.

What do the instagrammable ruins of today – the aesthetic of exposed brick, subway tiles, filament bulbs, rough woodwork and welded pipe – suggest about our cultural moment? Tom Wilkinson, author of Life in Ruins: The fetishization of decay in contemporary architecture, reflects on the meaning of the aesthetic of decay in today's urban landscape.

Chef Annie Smithers questions the wisdom of turkey, gravy, potatoes, Brussels sprouts on a 40 degree day and opts instead, for grilled prawns, nuoc cham, white nectarines, a summer fruit pavlova and a gooseberry fool.Find more of Annie's past Kitchen Rudimentals here.

An assembly of twelve festive icons and Colin Bisset's reflections on how the world's great designers might re-imagine them.