The Goldster Magazine Show

Psychotherapist Jennifer Cox believes that women are never allowed to truly express their anger, and this is making them ill.  After a lifetime of being told to repress it, to hide away and fear it, anger has begun to manifest in female bodies in myriad ways that cannot be controlled. Do you agree? Jennifer has drawn her conclusions from talking to women from all walks of life and ages in her work as a therapist. The tendency of women to shrug off anger and not make a fuss is dangerous because an autoimmune condition ravages and, she witnesses the devastation daily. The symptoms include anxiety, depression, migraine and depression.  Women are twice as likely as men to suffer depression and three times more likely to experience migraines. “Anger is eating us up, from the inside out,” she writes.

“We’ve been conditioned not to recognise our rage, so it burns behind the scenes. And from there, it’s destroying us.”  Last year, Jennifer founded the Women and Mad movement which gained more then 10,000 followers in the first six months.  Are you angry? How do you identify it? And what do you do about it?

To find out from a true, charismatic expert in this alarming issue join Jennifer Cox with Humphrey Hawksley on the Goldster Magazine Show at 1pm British time on Tuesday October 8th 2024. 

How do we place a value on happiness?  Can we measure our sense of well-being and fulfilment through science? Richard Layard is founder and former director of the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics. He has been editor of the annual World Happiness Report which examines the state of happiness at various stages of life. Richard’s latest co-authored book is Wellbeing: Science and Policy which uses science to establish what matters most to us. The book shows how well-being can be scientifically measured, what creates it and how feeling good it can be made even better throughout the whole span of human life. In 2011, he launched a campaign called Action for Happiness, asking the question: Why can’t we all be more content? And he takes on politicians who consistently argue that people are mainly interested in the economy and their incomes.

“It’s not the economy, stupid,” he argues. “It’s people’s wellbeing.”   Richard is campaigning for a shift in how public money is spent, balancing what makes people feel good against what they believe are their material needs. “We can be happier if our individual aim is to make others happy,” he says.  “Let each of us be, as best we can, a creator of happiness.”  Can you measure your own happiness? Does it matter?

To find out join the Goldster Magazine Show with Professor Lord Layard and Humphrey Hawksley at 1pm British time, Tuesday October 15th 2024. 

Those Goldster members who have been with us since 2020, will remember that one of our earliest Book Club discussions was about Amor Towles’s novel A Gentleman in Moscow. Four years on we are returning to discussing the work of this masterful modern writer. 

Rules of Civility was Towles’s debut novel, set in New York City in 1938. It follows the story of a watershed year in the life of an uncompromising twenty-five-year-old, who has the fabulous name of Katey Kontent. The Daily Telegraph reviewer commented “A cross between Dorothy Parker and Holly Golightly, Katey Kontent is a priceless narrator in her own right - the brains of a bluestocking with the legs of a flapper and the mores of Carrie Bradshaw”.

The story begins at New Year in a Greenwich Village jazz bar, where Katey and her roommate Eve meet Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with vivid blue eyes and a winning smile. This chance encounter barrels both young women into a dramatic, rollercoaster of a year, encountering changes neither of them could have imagined just a few weeks earlier. Katey, who is one of Towles’s most endearing characters, embarks on a journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool through the upper echelons of New York society in search of a brighter future. 

Goldster Magazine Book Club events are open to all, whether you’ve had the chance to read the book or not. These events are not recorded, everyone is unmuted and everyone gets the chance to meet other Goldster members. Join Lucinda and fellow Goldster members at 1pm on Tuesday 29 October. 

Austin Williams is an architect, author and podcaster who imagines our society and cities far into the future. For many years he has worked closely with Baroness Claire Fox at the Academy of Ideas, organising regular weekend-long events of debate, argument and fun. He is frequently a contradictory voice on a range of issues from climate change, sustainability and development.  As one critic noted, "Austin Williams has a gift for lobbing well-directed grenades."  

Much of Austin’s latest writing has been examining how China is building cities and societies. His books include New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future and China’s Urban Revolution on how China is pioneering the concept of the eco-city. Austin is also a book lover who runs the Bookshop Barnie discussions at the famous Foyle’s bookshop in Charing Cross Road. These salon type discussions challenge the author to justify their work in front of an invited audience of specialists and critics. Unlike most book launches where the most challenging task for the author is to sign so many autographs, Bookshop Barnies force them to take a stand for their ideas. Among his guests have been Peter Hitchens, David Goodhart and David Aaronavitch.

This will be a feisty and fascinating conversation. Join Austin Williams with Humphrey Hawksley – a previous Bookshop Barnies guest – at 1pm November 5th 2024 on the Goldster Magazine Show.

Dr Orit Gal is an entrepreneur, advisor, and senior lecturer in Strategy & Complexity at Regent’s University London. She specialises in analysing trends and identifying potential for systemic change within complex environments. Her extensive experience includes collaborations with tech startups, non-government organisation, innovative policy think-tanks, and corporate market research. Her current research focuses on the future of cities, exploring the interplay between technological efficiency, social friction, and the inherent serendipity of urban life. Having the opportunity to closely observe decision-makers operating in messy, dynamic, and highly complex environments, she has focused her work on exploring the intersection between complexity science and operational design.

Her website is called Social Acupuncture which explains and teaches Complexity Science, with a mission to break down obstacles and push through change. Whether running a city, an organisation, or a social campaign, the greatest challenges standing in your way are always complex, says Orit. Involving numerous players and constrained by multiple interdependent forces, they form systemic patterns that are seemingly impossible to break. Tackling them requires creative new approaches that not only address their complex nature but are uniquely designed to take advantage of it.  

To find out more, join Dr Orit Gal with Humphrey Hawksley at 1pm British time on Tuesday November 19th 2024 on the Goldster Magazine Show.

Angela van Breemen is a soprano soloist, a poet, a wildlife activist and she has just published her first novel. For those Goldster creative writers, how does that feel?  Past Life’s Revenge is a crime thriller with a twist of surrealism. Since childhood, David Harris has suffered from debilitating nightmares. He has sought the advice of psychiatrists and other health professionals without obtaining any relief. When he meets an attractive young psychic, Emma Jackson, she encourages him to seek the help of her friend Anna Tungsten, a hypnotherapist. As the story unfolds from here, David realises he had to exact revenge and stop a murderer from killing again. Angela has recently released her first album In the Breezewith lyrics drawn from her poetry. But how does anyone blend a love for dark psychological drama with the melody of Celtic music. And if the red squirrel is the most endangered and the Scottish Wildcat the rarest species in Britain, what are their counterparts in Ontario, Canada. To find out all this and more, join Angela van Breemen with Humphrey Hawksley at 1pm Tuesday December 3rd 2024 on the Goldster Magazine Show.

Dr Barry Webb is a literary scholar with a wealth of knowledge on numerous authors, spanning multiple genres and eras. With a profound understanding of the power of literature, he has a knack of guiding readers below the surface of the chapters and sentences to show how the art of writing can bring things so vividly to life –- whether modernism, post-war fiction, literary biography or a solid cosy crime whodunnit. He is specifically known for his deep exploration of 20th Century fiction, and Barry’s recent focus has been on the mostly forgotten, but once highly praised novelist R.C. Hutchinson who wrote between 1930 and 1971.  He gained a reputation for an evocative writing style, creating complex characters and opening an intriguing window into the human condition. Yet, despite being awarded TheSunday Times Gold medal for fiction, the W.H.Smith award for the best novelist of the year, being short-listed for the Booker Prize, and several of his seventeen novels becoming best-sellers, Hutchinson’s name has not withstood the test of time compared to his contemporaries. How exactly does this unpredictable world of writing actually work.  Ask Barry about any of your favourite authors whether they be Richard Osman, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen or Patricia Highsmith of The Talented Mr Ripley fame. Why do some endure, like Shakespeare and Chaucer, and why do some vanish from our conversation. To get answers, join Barry Webb with Humphrey Hawksley on the Goldster Magazine Show at 1pm British time on Tuesday December 10th 2024.