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Understand from BBC Radio 4 - unravelling the complexities of the biggest stories and subjects that really matter right now.

New legislation promises to slash the sewage released into rivers, but will it become law?Reported and presented by Kate Lamble Producer: Elle Scott Sound Design: Andy Fell Executive Producer: Joe Kent Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams Commissioning Editor: Dan ClarkeRinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

The data scientist, the ex-detective and the politician trying to clean up our rivers.Reported and presented by Kate Lamble Producer: Elle Scott Sound Design: Andy Fell Executive Producer: Joe Kent Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams Commissioning Editor: Dan ClarkeRinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

The view from inside the Environment Agency, the body which enforces environmental standards for water companies in England. Reported and presented by Kate Lamble Producer: Elle Scott Sound Design: Andy Fell Executive Producer: Joe Kent Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams Commissioning Editor: Dan ClarkeRinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

Rivers work when everything is in balance, but what happens when things are thrown off course? Peter Hammond draws on his past as an academic specialising in machine learning to spot a problem everyone else has missed and expose what he believes is a national scandal.

We can all look the same picture, but what you make of it depends on who you are. Kate Lamble attempts to untangle the financial engineering that underpins parts of the water industry.Reported and presented by Kate Lamble Producer: Elle Scott Sound Design: Andy Fell Executive Producer: Joe Kent Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams Commissioning Editor: Dan ClarkeRinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

The 'Dossier of Despair' that reveals what's happening to some of Britain’s rivers. A retired police detective, a former machine learning academic, an ex-water industry insider and their neighbours join forces to dig for data. But will anyone listen to the campaigners calls for change?Reported and presented by Kate Lamble Producer: Elle Scott Sound Design: Andy Fell Executive Producer: Joe Kent Commissioning Executive: Tracy Willimas Commissioning Editor: Dan ClarkeRinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

The centuries old battle between public good and private profit that’s still being fought today. Kate Lamble holds her nose and plunges into the long history of the water industry and some of the many conflicts that have shaped it.Reported and presented by Kate Lamble Producer: Elle Scott Sound Design: Andy Fell Executive Producer: Joe Kent Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams Commissioning Editor: Dan ClarkeRinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

After watching their local river grow murky and lifeless, two retired neighbours decide to take on the water industry and its regulators. The unlikely sleuths begin a ten-year battle to clean up our rivers.On the banks of the River Windrush in Oxfordshire, Kate Lamble meets campaigners Ash Smith and Peter HammondReported and presented by Kate Lamble Producer: Elle Scott Sound Design: Andy Fell Executive Producer: Joe Kent Commissioning Executive: Tracy Williams Commissioning Editor: Dan Clarke Rinsed is a BBC Studios production for BBC Radio 4

This is the story of a sewage scandal. How a centuries old battle between public good and private profit created an almighty stink. And who pays to clean it up.

Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. With time spent reading - and even reading ability - starting to nosedive, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading changed humanity, and what might happen if we stop.In this episode James digs into the question of whether literacy led to the invention of democracy, asks whether reading helps us proof ourselves against misinformation, and asks what happens to our politics if reading dies out? Contributors include - Jung Chang, author - Robert Darnton, historian - Steven Pinker, professor of psychology at Harvard University - Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter - John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times - Nick Harris, ideas editor at the New Statesman - Professor Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLAProducer - Beth Sagar-Fenton Editors - Chris Ledgard & Alasdair Cross