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Empire of Sweat

Adam Gopnik on the joys of New York's Russian and Turkish baths - the sweat, the snarky dialogue and the spicy Georgian soup.

Adam Gopnik muses on why he'll always love the steam baths in New York.

'My own pet answer,' Adam says, 'justified by intuition and half-heard rumours, is that it helps sleep to have a low internal body temperature. All that sweating lowers my own burning inner furnace and makes me more able to sleep.' This is, he admits, 'a perfectly sound scientific explanation that I have no intention of checking.'

Producer: Adele Armstrong
Sound: Peter Bosher
Production coordinator: Liam Morrey
Editor: Tom Bigwood

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9 minutes

Last on

Sun 21 Jul 2024 08:48

Broadcasts

  • Fri 19 Jul 2024 20:50
  • Sun 21 Jul 2024 08:48

Podcast