2015 Salon London Transmission Prize

WINNER OF THE 2015 TRANSMISSION PRIZE. The Salon London Transmission Prize recognizes speakers’ work to reach a wider audience and has been been split between two winners this year– Margaret Heffernan and Julian Baggini. … Baggini, author of The Virtues of the Table (Granta), takes on people’s obsessions, preconceptions and need for food and giving audiences philosophical answers in his presentation.

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The Utopia Experiment

Imagine living in a community where people stay for anything from between a few weeks to a few months, where each member has a skill that she will teach to others and contributes work, not money. Its founder, the science writer Dylan Evans, describes it in The Utopia Experiment as “a cross between Plato’s Academy and The Beach”. It ended up more like Lord of the Flies meets I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!. Within a year of his arrival in 2006, Evans found himself in a psychiatric hospital, his savings spent and his long-crossed bridges from academia smouldering in the distance. Evans’s account is a gripping, slow-motion car-crash. You can’t take your eyes off it, try as you might to hide them behind your hands.

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