Timothy Morton on the hyper-object, pesticides and food, plus typography and gender

The fact of the matter is we live in co-existence with our environment: our cities, our neighbourhood, animals, trees and plants… as well as our ex-lovers, however many billion corpses and the world's garbage and excrement. In the age of the Anthropocene, ecological collapse — and a pandemic — what does it mean to be 'all in this together', especially when there's no getting out of it? Timothy Morton, a Texan-based philosopher and Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University, joins Blueprint For Living to help us with these questions and introduce us to the idea of the 'hyper-object'. With ecology in mind, we'll turn to ecologist Francisco Sanchez-Bayo, whose work traces the impact of pesticides on our environment and the world's insect populations. Then it's time to think about type. Letters have no gender, but that hasn't stopped our species ascribing them masculine and feminine qualities. It's a phenomenon type designer and scholar Marie Boulanger examines in her debut book, XX XY: Sex, letters and stereotypes. Afterward, Colin Bisset introduces us to the curious story behind the inventor of the dishwasher, Josephine Cochrane.