RNZ: Saturday Morning

Barbara J. King is emerita professor of anthropology at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia, and a freelance science writer. King is a frequent guest on national and international radio shows discussing matters of animal cognition, emotion, and welfare. She and her husband are heavily involved in cat rescue work. Her latest book, Personalities on the Plate: The Lives and Minds of Animals We Eat, is about how animals ranging from fish and octopus to goats, pigs, chickens and cows think and feel - and what that means for our food choices.

Theodore Dalrymple is the nom de plume of Anthony Daniels, a physician and psychiatrist who, most recently, practiced in a British inner-city hospital and prison. Dalrymple has written a column for The Spectator (London) for many years and writes regularly for National Review. He's a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. Dalrymple's most famous work was Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass (2001). He's just published his first collection of short stories, called The Proper Procedure and Other Stories.

A selection of this mornings feedback.

Amy Tan is a US writer who struck it big with her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, published in 1989. The book - centred on four Chinese immigrant mothers and their four American-born daughters - spent over 40 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. Her other novels are The Kitchen God's Wife, The Hundred Secret Senses, The Bonesetter's Daughter, Saving Fish from Drowning, and The Valley of Amazement (2013) - all New York Times bestsellers. She is also the author of a memoir, The Opposite of Fate, two children's books, The Moon Lady and Sagwa, The Chinese Siamese Cat and numerous articles for magazines, including The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, and National Geographic. Her latest book, Where the Past Begins: A Writer's Memoir, has just been published.

It's Swan Lake - but not as you know it. Irish director Michael Keegan-Dolan has taken a fresh look at the storyline, swapped Tchaikovsky's original score for Irish folk music, added a dash of Nordic noir, and set it all in the midlands of Ireland. His show, Swan Lake / Loch Na heala, draws on ancient myths and weaves them with the contemporary world for a show that features love, betrayal, transformation, priestly abuse, corruption, mental illness, and violence. But Keegan-Dolan is promising an ending which he says "is really, really beautiful". Swan Lake / Loch Na heala will be performed in Wellington in March next year as part of the NZ Festival.

After a fall left her with a serious leg injury that took years to heal, San Francisco-based Kiwi Kim Chambers took up swimming as both physical and mental therapy. She didn't just stick to lengths of a pool after hooking up with the Dolphin Club, a group of hardcore swimmers who swim the freezing waters of the San Francisco Bay. Chambers had been swimming seriously for only four years when she became one of the world's top marathon swimmers. Her achievements include what's been called the toughest swim in the world - from the Farallon Islands, a remote outcrop nearly 50km off the coast of San Francisco, through icy waters, strong winds, heavy swells and great white sharks, back to the Golden Gate Bridge. Outside magazine called her the world's most badass swimmer. A documentary of Chambers' legendary swim, Kim Swims, will be released in Aotearoa next year.

Professor Kathy Campbell is a geologist, paleo-ecologist and astrobiologist. The broad theme of her research is paleoecology - the interaction of ancient organisms with their surrounding environments. She was educated at the University of California (BSc), U Washington (MSc), and U Southern California (PhD) and has been at Auckland University since 1997. Campbell has just become the director of a new Centre for Fundamental Inquiry based at the university, bringing academics from different disciplines together to answer life's enduring mysteries, including the possibility of alien life. She has also just received almost a million dollars in Marsden funding to investigate hydrothermal deposits in the earliest-known hot springs, to help solve a question that's driven her academic career: Did life begin on land or in the sea?

Christopher Pugsley is a respected and much published military historian - but what is not as well known is that he has a passion and a deep knowledge of film history. Pugsley's new book, The Camera in the Crowd, is the result of nearly three decades of research - the story of film in New Zealand for its first 25 years, 1895-1920, told largely through the footage that has survived in the archive of Nga Taonga Sound & Vision. It covers the last years of the Victorian era and the first two decades of the 20th century - a period that encompassed great political, technological and cultural changes, including the First World War. It tells of the cameramen, of the film they took - not only at home but also of the Kiwi 'Diggers' in the First World War - and how the public reacted to it.

One year ago, award-winning UK journalist Luke Harding met former MI6 officer Christopher Steele to discuss the then president-elect Donald Trump's connections with Russia. One month later, in January 2017, Steele's explosive dossier alleged that the Kremlin had been 'cultivating, supporting, and assisting' Trump for years.

Kim Hill reads emails and text messages from listeners to the Saturday Morning programme.

Kate Camp has published six collections of poetry - her latest, The Internet of Things, was released earlier this year, and was this week named as a poetry finalist on the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards long-list. Camp was the recipient of the 2016 Katherine Mansfield Fellowship, which saw her spend most of the year in Menton, a town on the French Riviera. She'll talk to Kim about her French experience.

Owen King is a graduate of Vassar College and the MFA programme at the Columbia University School of the Arts. He is the author of the novels Double Feature, We're All in This Together and the co-editor of Who Can Save Us Now? Brand-New Superheroes and Their Amazing (Short) Stories. He is the son of horror writing icon Stephen King, who has authored more than 50 books. Owen and Stephen have paired up to write their latest work, Sleeping Beauties, which examines a world where women have succumbed to a sleeping sickness, leaving men to their own devices.

A New Zealand academic is leading a study called Women on Porn - the largest ever study solely focused on the range of women's experiences and views of pornography in the United Kingdom.

Jonathan Sinclair has been the British High Commissioner to New Zealand since August 2014, and leaves the role this week; he'll eventually return to London. He joined the UK Foreign Office in 1996 after completing a Masters in International Relations and short stints in media and tourism. He has previously served in India and the USA and, in London, has done a wide range of roles where foreign and domestic policies and politics intersect, including on Europe, national security, and trade and investment.

John Collins founded the New York-based experimental theatre company Elevator Repair Service 26 years ago and next year the ensemble brings the show The Select to Aotearoa. The play is a dramatisation of Ernest Hemingway's classic 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises. The story is set after the First World War and explores the angst of the post-war generation through a group of British and Americans attempting to drink away their troubles on a trip to Spain for the running of the bulls. The Select (The Sun Also Rises) runs from February 24 to March 1 in Wellington, as part of the NZ Festival.