London is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to London.

Ok fine, that’s actually Douglas Adams talking about space – but you get the point. London is a big city with a lot going on. To the outsider (and to many insiders) it can feel difficult to really tap into everything that London has to offer. This is why we’ve put together a events calendar for August, featuring a variety of interesting talks and exhibitions – all for £10 or less.

In chronological order…

1st November: How Can We Decide Who the Experts Are? at Foyles Charing Cross. We often appeal to experts. But which experts should be relied upon? (Free) 

1st November: The Annual Equality Lecture: Jack Halberstam at the British Library. This lecture will explore the history of trans* communities, questioning their association with exclusively political goals and a quest for recognition, and offers new and different aesthetic avenues to trans* lives and images. (£4.50-£9)

4th November: Digital Conversation: Games, Literature and Learning at the British Library. A panel discussion exploring how video games such as Minecraft, can be used to engage learners of all ages with literature, libraries and museums, facilitating new understandings and interpretations of classic literary works. (£3-£6)

5th November: AI Weapons, War and Ethics with Gresham College. This lecture will explore fully autonomous weapons, the products of AI technology, and the arguments for and against their use. (Free) 

6th November: Female Trail Blazers – Women in Design: From Aino Aalto to Eva Zeisel at the V&A. Discover the extraordinary stories of the unsung women designers who’ve shaped our world as we know it. (Free)

7th November: After Geoengineering at Foyles Charing Cross. Geoengineering—large-scale, manual intervention in the Earth’s systems—might buy us time, remove carbon, offset industrial damage. Yet we’re right to fear that such technologies will be used to maintain the status quo. (Free) 

7th November: The Sound Inside the Silence: Travels in the Sonic Imagination at the British Library. Poet and broadcaster Seán Street shows how we ‘read’ the world through sound, and that everything – from the printed word to landscapes and specific places, be they urban, rural or maritime – are texts that evoke a response within us. (£4.50-£9)

8th November: The Imitation Game + Q&A at the Science Museum. Join us for an evening dedicated to Alan Turing, code-breaker and father of modern computing. (£8)

8th November: Why Do Scientists Lie? at Foyles Charing Cross. This lecture is about why scientists lie and what can be done about it—but, paradoxically, we will find that thinking about scientific lies helps us better understand how scientists reach the truth. (Free) 

12th November: Maths and Voting with Gresham College. We live in a democracy in which we all have a chance to vote. But does voting mean that the views of the majority are truly represented when it can be shown (mathematically) that all voting systems have flaws? (Free)

15th November: Passionate Speech: On the Uses and Abuses of Anger in Public Debate at Foyles Charing Cross. The speaker discusses two types of anger: the arrogant anger of those who arrogate special entitlements, and the liberatory anger that can be used to good effect in the struggles for equality and recognition. (Free) 

From 16th November: Medicine: The Wellcome Galleries at the Science Museum. Three thousand medical artefacts from the extraordinary collections of Henry Wellcome and the Science Museum Group (Free)

22nd November: Epistemic and Practical Dependence and the Value of Skills at Foyles Charing Cross Road. Modern smart technology is taking over many skilled tasks that used to be carried out by humans. Should we worry about becoming progressively deskilled? (Free) 

24th November: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism at Conway Hall Ethical Society. Anarchism routinely gets a bad press. It is seen as meaning chaos and disorder — or even nothing at all. (£5-8)

27th November: Stephen and Martyn Poliakoff in Conversation at the Science Museum. One is a BAFTA, Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning director and playwright. The other is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering and the 2019 winner of the Faraday Prize. Chaired by The Art of Innovation curator Tilly Blyth, the brothers Poliakoff come together to discuss the connections between science and art. (Free)

29th November: The Gamification of Public Discourse at Foyles Charing Cross. Social media has turned conversation into a game, where we compete for points in the form of likes, retweets, and follower counts… (Free) 

We’ll share our December event calendar soon. If you have anything you’d like to add, please get in touch at hello@t-lis.org.