Just three of the questions we’ll cover at our annual ideas and music festival, HowTheLightGetsIn, from 22 - 25 May 2020. In its home of Hay-on-Wye by the Welsh border, the festival will host four days of debates and talks between the world’s leading thinkers across philosophy, science, politics, art and life.

Check out the programme so far here.

Whether we like it or not, we find ourselves in a period of radical change, from the climate crisis to political populism. The festival’s theme, Uncharted Territory, seeks to find ways of thinking that will help us turn the deep uncertainty of the present into promise and potential for the future. Each debate takes on one of the biggest issues that are transforming the world around us, in search of ways to grasp the future and forge new paths ahead.

In the wake of the strange discoveries of quantum physics, The Limits of Material asks what the world is really made of – our minds, material stuff, or something in the middle?

New Faces of Rebellion will examine whether modern forms of activism, with no real leaders and spread by the Web, herald a bright future for democracy or are destined to incoherence and failure.