Spoken Wikipedia Podcast

Matthew Brettingham (1699 – 19 August 1769), sometimes called Matthew Brettingham the Elder, was an English architect who supervised the construction of Holkham Hall, and became one of the best-known architects of his generation, despite coming from modest origins. Much of his principal work has since been demolished, particularly his work in London, where he revolutionised the design of the grand townhouse. As a result, he is often overlooked today, remembered principally for his Palladian remodelling of numerous country houses, many of them situated in the East Anglia area of Britain. As Brettingham neared the pinnacle of his career, Palladianism began to fall out of...

Civil Air Transport (CAT) was a Nationalist Chinese airline, later owned by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that supported the United States' covert operations throughout East and Southeast Asia. During the Cold War, missions consisted in assistance to "Free World" allies according to the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1949. The CIA-owned airline Air America, which primarily operated in Southeast Asia (particularly in Laos and Vietnam), was a spin-off of CAT, as was the CIA's Taiwan-based aviation maintenance facility, Air Asia. Read by Ftxs. Recorded November 28, 2017; the article may have changed since. The article as it stood when recorded...

A billboard (bill-bord) (also called a hoarding in the UK) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertisements to passing pedestrians and drivers. Typically brands use billboards to build their brands or to push for their new products. The largest ordinary-sized billboards are located primarily on major highways, expressways, or principal arterials, and command high-density consumer exposure (mostly to vehicular traffic). These afford the greatest visibility due not only to their size, but because they allow creative "customizing" through extensions and embellishments. Posters are another...

Clement of Rome (Latin: Clemens Romanus; Ancient Greek: Κλήμης Ῥώμης, romanized: Klēmēs Rōmēs; died c. 100), also known as Pope Clement I, was the Bishop of Rome in the late first century. He is considered to be the first of the Apostolic Fathers of the Church. Little is known about Clement's life. Tertullian claimed that Clement was ordained by Saint Peter. Early church lists place him as the second or third bishop of Rome. Eusebius, in his book Church History mentioned Clement as the third bishop of Rome and as the "co-laborer" of Paul. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus described Clement as the suc...

A dynamo is an electrical generator that creates direct current using a commutator, and uses self-powering electromagnets for the stator field rather than permanent magnets. Dynamos are self-starting by using residual magnetic field left in the iron cores of the electromagnets (i.e. field coils). If a dynamo were never run before, it was usual to use a separate battery to excite or flash the field of the electromagnets to enable self-starting. Dynamos were the first practical electrical generators capable of delivering power for industry, and the foundation upon which many other later electric-power conversion devices were based, including the...

The 1900 Galveston hurricane (otherwise known as the Great Galveston hurricane and the Galveston Flood and known regionally as the Great Storm of 1900 or the 1900 Storm) was a catastrophic tropical cyclone that became the deadliest natural disaster in the history of the United States. The strongest storm of the 1900 Atlantic hurricane season, it left between 6,000 and 12,000 fatalities; the number most cited in official reports is 8,000. Most of these deaths occurred in and near Galveston, Texas, after the storm surge inundated the coastline city with 8 to 12 ft (2.4 to 3.7 m) of water. As of 2026, it remains the fourth deadliest Atlantic hurricane on record...

Perth (Nyungar: Boorloo) is the capital and largest city of the state of Western Australia. It is the fourth-most-populous city in Australia, with a population of over 2.2 million in the city and 2.3 million within Greater Perth as of 2023. The world's most isolated major city by certain criteria, Perth is part of the South West Land Division of Western Australia, with most of Perth's metropolitan area on the Swan Coastal Plain between the Indian Ocean and the Darling Scarp. The city has expanded outward from the original British settlements on the Swan River, upon which its central business district and port...

Tallinn is the capital and largest city of Estonia. Located on a bay in northern Estonia, on the shore of the Gulf of Finland of the Baltic Sea, it has a population of 452,563 as of 2026, making it the third most-populous city in the Baltics. As of 2024, the population of the Tallinn metropolitan area is estimated at 646,315. Tallinn is the main governmental, financial, industrial, and cultural centre of Estonia. It is located 187 kilometres (116 mi) northwest of the country's second largest city, Tartu, however, only 80 kilometres (50 mi) south of Helsinki, the capital city of Finland. It is also 320 kilometres (200 mi) west of...

Brisbane ( BRIZ-bən; Turrbal/Yagara: Meanjin) is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Queensland and the third-most populous city in Australia, with a population of about 2.8 million. Brisbane lies at the centre of South East Queensland, a bio-geographical and urban region with an estimated population of 4.1 million as of 2024. The central business district is situated within a peninsula of the Brisbane River approximately 15 kilometres (9 mi) from its mouth at Moreton Bay. Greater Brisbane sprawls across the hilly floodplain of the Brisbane River Valley between the Pacific Ocean and the Taylor and D'Aguilar mountain ranges, encompassing several l...

Wii Sports is a 2006 sports simulation video game developed and published by Nintendo for the Wii video game console. The game was released in North America along with the Wii on 19 November 2006, and in Japan, Australia, and Europe the following month. It was included as a pack-in game with the console in all territories except Japan and Korea, making it the first sports game included with the launch of a Nintendo system since Mario's Tennis for the Virtual Boy in 1995. The game was later released on its own as part of the Nintendo Selects collection of games. Wii Sports is...

The Pax Mongolica (Latin for "Mongol Peace"), less often known as Pax Tatarica ("Tatar Peace"), is a historiographical term modeled after the original phrase Pax Romana which describes the stabilizing effects of the conquests of the Mongol Empire on the social, cultural and economic life of the inhabitants of the vast Eurasian territory that the Mongols conquered in the 13th and 14th centuries. The term is used to describe the eased communication and commerce that the unified administration helped to create and the period of relative peace that followed the Mongols' vast and violent conquests. The conquests of Genghis Khan...

Klaus Martin Schwab (German: [klaʊs ˈmaʁtiːn ʃvaːp]; born 30 March 1938) is a German mechanical engineer, economist, and founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF). He was the WEF's chairman from January 1971 until his resignation in April 2025. Read by Viktor O. Ledenyov. Recorded January 25, 2016; the article may have changed since. The article as it stood when recorded: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=701571520 Article today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Schwab Original recording: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Klaus_Schwab.ogg License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). This episode is a format-shifted (MP3) c...

The emu (; Dromaius novaehollandiae) is a species of flightless bird endemic to Australia, where it is the tallest native bird. It is the only extant member of the genus Dromaius and the third-tallest living bird after its African ratite relatives, the common ostrich and Somali ostrich. The emu's native ranges cover most of the Australian mainland. The Tasmanian, Kangaroo Island and King Island subspecies became extinct after the European settlement of Australia in 1788. The emu has soft, brown feathers, a long neck, and long legs. It can grow up to 1.9 m (6 ft 3 in) in height. It is a robust bipedal...

Sydney is the capital of the state of New South Wales and the largest city in Australia. The metropolis surrounds Sydney Harbour and extends about 80 kilometres (50 mi) from the Pacific Ocean in the east to the Blue Mountains in the west, and about 80 kilometres (50 mi) from Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park and the Hawkesbury River in the north and north-west, to the Royal National Park and Macarthur in the south and south-west. Greater Sydney consists of 658 suburbs, spread across 33 local government areas. Residents of the city are colloquially known as "Sydneysiders". The estimated population in June 2025 was 5,638,830, which is about 66% of...

The 1910 London to Manchester air race took place between two aviators, each of whom attempted to win a heavier-than-air powered flight challenge between London and Manchester. The race had first been proposed by the Daily Mail newspaper in 1906. The £10,000 prize was won in April 1910 by Frenchman Louis Paulhan. The first to make the attempt was Claude Grahame-White, an Englishman from Hampshire. He took off from London on 23 April 1910, and made his first planned stop at Rugby. His biplane subsequently suffered engine problems, forcing him to land again, near Lichfield. High winds made it impossible for Grahame-White to continue his journey, a...

The prime minister of Australia is the head of government of the Commonwealth of Australia. The prime minister is the chair of the Cabinet of Australia and thus the head of the federal executive government. Under the principles of responsible government, the prime minister is a member of, and accountable to, the Commonwealth Parliament. The current prime minister is Anthony Albanese of the Australian Labor Party, who assumed office on 23 May 2022. The role and duties of the prime minister are not specified in the Australian Constitution, but rather, are defined by constitutional convention deriving from the Westminster system and responsible...

The pintail or northern pintail (Anas acuta) is a duck species with wide geographic distribution that breeds in the northern areas of Europe and across the Palearctic and North America. It is migratory and winters south of its breeding range as far as the equator. Unusually for a bird with such a large range, it has no geographical subspecies, although the possibly conspecific duck Eaton's pintail is considered to be a separate species. The Northern Pintail is a large duck, and the long central tail feathers of the male give the species its English and scientific names. Both sexes have...

Michael Eugene Porter (born May 23, 1947) is an American businessman and professor at Harvard Business School. He was one of the founders of the consulting firm The Monitor Group (now part of Deloitte) and FSG, a social impact consultancy. He is credited with creating Porter's five forces analysis, a foundational framework in strategic management that remains widely used in both academia and industry. He is generally regarded as the father of the modern strategy field. He is also regarded as one of the world's most influential thinkers on management and competitiveness as well as one of the most influential business strategists...

Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years. More rigorously, it is the mean and variability of meteorological variables over a time spanning from months to millions of years. Some of the meteorological variables that are commonly measured are temperature, humidity, atmospheric pressure, wind, and precipitation. In a broader sense, climate is the state of the components of the climate system, including the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, lithosphere and biosphere and the interactions between them. The climate of a location is affected by its latitude, longitude, terrain, altitude, land use and nearby water bodies and their...

Adelaide ( AD-il-ayd; Kaurna: Tarndanya [ˈd̪̥aɳɖaɲa]) is the capital and most populous city of South Australia, as well as the fifth-most populous city in Australia. The name "Adelaide" may refer to either Greater Adelaide (including the Adelaide Hills) or the Adelaide city centre; the demonym Adelaidean is used to denote the city and the residents of Adelaide. The traditional owners of the Adelaide region are the Kaurna, with the name Tarndanya referring to the area of the city centre and surrounding Park Lands, in the Kaurna language. Adelaide is situated on the Adelaide Plains north of the Fleurieu Penins...

A supreme deity, supreme being, supreme god, or simply just God (often with capital G), is a deity within theistic belief systems which is believed to be the ultimate cause of all things in existence. As such, it is seen as the creator, sustainer, and ruler of the universe. God is often thought of as incorporeal and independent of the material creation. Conceptions of God vary considerably. Many notable theologians and philosophers have developed arguments for and against the existence of God. In monotheistic religious belief systems, God is usually viewed as the principal foundation of faith. Atheism rejects the...

Melbourne ( MEL-bərn, locally [ˈmæɫbən] ) is the capital and most populous city of the Australian state of Victoria and the second-most populous city in Australia. The city's name generally refers to a 9,993-square-kilometre (3,858 sq mi) area, comprising an urban agglomeration of 30 local government areas. The name is also used specifically to refer to the local government area, also named the City of Melbourne, whose administrative area is centred on the Melbourne central business district and some immediate surrounds. The city occupies much of the northern and eastern coastlines of Port Phillip Bay. As of June 2025, the population of the c...

E.V.O.: Search for Eden is a 1992 action-adventure game developed by Almanic Corporation and published by Enix for the Super NES. Combining traditional platforming mechanics with experience and leveling mechanics originating from role playing games, E.V.O.: Search for Eden involves the player navigating a creature through a number of side-scrolling levels while undergoing bodily evolution to cope with ever-changing environments. It is heavily based on Almanic's original title, 46 Okunen Monogatari ~The Shinka Ron~ ( 4.6 Billion Year Story: The Theory of Evolution), released in Japan in 1990 for the PC-9801. Spanning a period of over a billion years, the game's...

The Royal Automobile Association of South Australia (RAA) is an Australian motoring club founded in 1903. The RAA provides services for members, including vehicle inspection, insurance, and roadside assistance. The RAA originated as the Automobile and Motor Cycling Club of South Australia in 1903. The term "Motor Cycling" was dropped in 1904. The organisation was formally incorporated as an association in 1911. It received royal patronage in 1928. Finally, the name 'Royal Automobile Association of South Australia' was adopted in 1959. Read by Viktor O. Ledenyov. Recorded March 25, 2016; the article may have changed since. The article as it stood when recorded: https://en.wikipedia.org/w...

Sonic Spinball, also known as Sonic the Hedgehog Spinball, is a 1993 pinball video game developed by Sega Technical Institute and published by Sega for the Sega Genesis. It is a spin-off of the Sonic the Hedgehog series. Players control Sonic the Hedgehog, who must stop Doctor Robotnik from enslaving the population in a giant pinball-like mechanism. The game is set in a series of pinball machine-like environments with Sonic acting as the pinball. It was developed by the American staff of Sega Technical Institute, as the Japanese staff was occupied with developing Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. When Sega...

The governor-general of the Commonwealth of Australia is the federal representative of the monarch of Australia, currently Charles III. The governor-general has many constitutional and ceremonial functions in the Australian political system, in which they have independent agency. However, they are generally bound by convention to act on the advice of the prime minister and the Federal Executive Council. They also have a significant community role, through recognising meritorious groups and individuals, bestowing honours and awards, attending public events, serving as a patron of local organisations, and representing the country as a whole. The current governor-general is Sam Mostyn, who...

A skyline is the outline or shape viewed near the horizon. It can be created by a city's overall structure, or by human intervention in a rural setting, or in nature that is formed where the sky meets buildings or the land. City skylines serve as a pseudo-fingerprint as no two skylines are alike. For this reason, news and sports programs, television shows, and movies often display the skyline of a city to set a location. The term The Sky Line of New York City was introduced in 1896, when it was the title of a color lithograph by Charles Graham...

The song thrush (Turdus philomelos) is a thrush that breeds across the West Palearctic. It has brown upperparts and black-spotted cream or buff underparts and has four recognised subspecies. Its distinctive song, which features repeated musical phrases, has frequently been referenced in poetry. The song thrush breeds in forests, gardens and parks. It is partially migratory, with many birds wintering in southern Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. The species has also been introduced into New Zealand and Australia. While it is not globally threatened, serious population declines have been observed in some European regions, potentially due to changes...

Heike Kamerlingh Onnes (Dutch: [ˈɦɛikə ˈkaːmərlɪŋ ˈɔnəs]; 21 September 1853 – 21 February 1926) was a Dutch experimental physicist who became the first to liquefy helium, cooling it to near 1.5 kelvin (K). For this work, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1913. In 1911, using liquid helium to investigate the electrical conductivity of solid mercury, Kamerlingh Onnes found that its electrical resistance vanishes at 4.2 K, i.e. superconductivity. Read by Viktor O. Ledenyov. Recorded January 28, 2016; the article may have changed since. The article as it stood when recorded: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=701394047 Article today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heike...

The RACQ, formally the Royal Automobile Club of Queensland, is a mutual organisation and the largest club by membership in Queensland, with 1.7 million members as of January 2026. RACQ distributes insurance under the RACQ Insurance brand. Read by Viktor O. Ledenyov. Recorded March 16, 2016; the article may have changed since. The article as it stood when recorded: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=710327683 Article today: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RACQ Original recording: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Royal_Automobile_Club_of_Queensland.oga License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0). This episode is a format-shifted (MP3) copy...

Technological utopianism, often called techno-utopianism or technoutopianism, is any ideology based on the premise that advances in science and technology could and should bring about a utopia, or at least help to fulfill one or another utopian ideal. A techno-utopia is therefore an ideal society, in which laws, government, and social conditions are solely operating for the benefit and well-being of all its citizens, set in the near- or far-future, as advanced science and technology will allow these ideal living standards to exist; for example, post-scarcity, transformations in human nature, the avoidance or prevention of suffering and even the end...

Michael Cole Jensen (November 30, 1939 – April 2, 2024) was an American economist who worked in the field of financial economics. From 1967 to 1988, he was on the University of Rochester's faculty. Between 2000 and 2009 he worked for the Monitor Company Group, a strategy-consulting firm which became "Monitor Deloitte" in 2013. Until 2000, he held the position of Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration at Harvard University. Jensen died in Sarasota, Florida on April 2, 2024, at the age of 84. He was one of the most influential financial economists of all time. Jensen made three major contributions, each of which have had large impacts. First, his body of work ha...

Braille ( BRAYL; French: [bʁaj] ) is a tactile writing system used by blind or visually impaired people. It can be read either on embossed paper or by using refreshable braille displays that connect to computers and smartphone devices. Braille can be written using a slate and stylus, a braille writer, an electronic braille notetaker or with the use of a computer connected to a braille embosser. For blind readers, braille is an independent writing system, rather than a code of printed orthography. Braille is named after its creator, Louis Braille, a Frenchman who lost his sight as a result of a...

"Bring Us Together" was a political slogan popularized after the election of Republican candidate Richard Nixon as President of the United States in the 1968 election. The text was derived from a sign which 13-year-old Vicki Lynne Cole stated that she had carried at Nixon's rally in her hometown of Deshler, Ohio, during the campaign. Richard Moore, a friend of Nixon, told the candidate's speechwriters he had seen a child carrying a sign reading "Bring Us Together" at the Deshler rally. The speechwriters, including William Safire, began inserting the phrase into the candidate's speeches. Nixon mentioned the Deshler rally and the...

Fondue (UK: FON-dew, US: fon-DEW, French: [fɔ̃dy], Swiss Standard German: [fɔ̃ːˈdyː] ; Italian: fonduta) is a Swiss dish of melted cheese and wine served in a communal pot (caquelon or fondue pot) over a portable stove (réchaud) heated with a candle or spirit lamp, and eaten by dipping bread and sometimes vegetables or other foods into the cheese using long-stemmed forks. As a way to increase cheese consumption, it was promoted as a Swiss national dish by the Swiss Cheese Union (Schweizerische Käseunion) in the 1930s. Since the 1950s, the term "fondue" has been generalized to other dishes in...

Kirby's Adventure is a 1993 platform game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). It is the second game in the Kirby series after Kirby's Dream Land (1992) on the Game Boy and the first to include the Copy Ability, which allows the main character Kirby to gain new powers by eating certain enemies. The game centers around Kirby traveling across Dream Land to repair the Star Rod after King Dedede breaks it apart and gives the pieces to his minions. Masahiro Sakurai returned as director after serving the same role for Kirby's Dream Land...

Felix Nikolaus Alexander Georg Graf von Luckner (9 June 1881, Dresden – 13 April 1966, Malmö), sometimes called Count Luckner in English, was a German nobleman, naval officer, author, and sailor who earned the epithet Der Seeteufel (the Sea Devil), and his crew that of Die Piraten des Kaisers (the Emperor's Pirates), for his exploits in command of the sailing commerce raider SMS Seeadler (Sea Eagle) during the First World War. After the war, Luckner became a war hero in Germany and was renowned around the world for his seamanship and chivalrous conduct during the war, which resulted in a minimal loss of life on bot...

The Milgram experiment was a series of social psychology experiments that were conducted in the early 1960s by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram, who intended to measure the willingness of study participants to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience. Participants were led to believe that they were assisting in a fictitious experiment, in which they had to administer electric shocks to a "learner". These fake electric shocks gradually increased to levels that would have been fatal had they been real. In the first version of the study, the "learner" could be...

Nickelodeon Animation Studio is an American animation studio owned by Paramount Skydance Corporation via CBS Studios. It has created original animated television programs for Nickelodeon, Nicktoons, and Nick Jr., such as SpongeBob SquarePants, Dora the Explorer, The Fairly OddParents, Rugrats, Blue's Clues, Hey Arnold!, The Ren & Stimpy Show, Rocko's Modern Life, Invader Zim, The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Avatar: The Last Airbender, and The Loud House, among various others. Since the 2010s, the studio has also produced its own series based on pre-existing IP purchased by Paramount Skydance Corporation, such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Winx Club...

William Ellis Newton, VC (8 June 1919 – 29 March 1943) was an Australian recipient of the Victoria Cross, the highest decoration for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to a member of the British and Commonwealth armed forces. He was honoured for his actions as a bomber pilot in Papua New Guinea during March 1943 when, despite intense anti-aircraft fire, he pressed home a series of attacks on the Salamaua Isthmus, the last of which saw him forced to ditch his aircraft in the sea. Newton was still officially posted as missing when the award was made in October 1943. It la...