Latest Stories

Chimpanzee
Audio

African chimps store caches of big rocks to throw at certain trees. And some scientists wonder, are those trees sacred to them?

Length: 
16:03
Barren wastes
Articles

Journalist and essayist Roy Scranton has been called "our Jeremiah of the Anthropocene." His book "We’re Doomed. Now What?" is a hard-headed — often terrifying — look at how climate change could transform our planet, and how that impact might shape our daily thoughts and experiences.

Length: 
13:35
man on mars
Articles

Fear about the future of the planet keeping you up at night? Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin has a solution: it’s time to settle Mars. 

Length: 
8:25
A man and woman share a plate of bacon.
Audio

There’s a popular joke on the internet whenever a gender reveal party goes awry or a wife complains about babysitting her husband: Are straight people okay? Author Jane Ward investigates.

Length: 
11:39
Still from "Talking about Adultery" with a woman's exposed garter.
Articles

Filmmaker Bara Jichova Tyson had every reason to be cynical about romance after what she saw growing up under Communist rule. But it turns out love can come along when you least expect it — including while you're filming a movie about cheating and failed relationships.

Length: 
12:26
the new coffee date, on zoom
Articles

Living in this COVID-19 quarantine makes it especially tough for those looking for love, or at least a good date. But according to dating coach Logan Ury, there may be a silver lining to this enforced isolation — maybe even the jolt they need to break out of bad dating habits.

Length: 
10:06
A wall with the asexual flag colors
Audio

One of the first assumptions we make about a relationship is that it begins with sexual attraction. But what about desire without sex? Angela Chen explores the contradictions — and the possibilities — of asexuality in her new book.

Length: 
11:18
forest
Sonic Sidebar

Claire Peaslee is a naturalist who lives in Point Reyes, California, a place decimated by recent forest fires that sits literally on top of the San Andreas Fault. Yet she finds hope there through pilgrimage.

Length: 
4:22
A hospital staffer
Articles

Rafael Campo is a doctor who's also a prize-winning poet. He sees medicine and writing as two different modes of healing. And during the pandemic, writing poetry has been his way to bear witness to the many people who lost their voices to COVID-19.

Length: 
13:41
Budding hope
Articles

Hope can seem saccharine. Bland. Trite. But talking about hope with Andre Willis, a philosopher of religion, might make you realize you're not thinking big enough when you think about what hope means.

Length: 
14:32
Fruit bodies of the fungus Psilocybe pelliculosa
Articles

After the excesses of the 1960s — and an ensuing moral panic — psychedelic research was outlawed by the United States government for decades. But today, the research is blossoming as a promising treatment for depression and anxiety.

Length: 
14:30
Math of the universe
Video

For centuries, people have considered mathematics the purest form of knowledge — and our best bet for deciphering the universe's hidden order. Steve spoke with two people who love math: physicist James Gates and science writer Margaret Wertheim.

Length: 
14:59
exercise
Articles

Exercise is good for you. And while that might seem pretty obvious, Dr. Claudia Reardon says that it goes deeper than that — specific exercises can actually act as effective treatments for specific mental illnesses.

Length: 
8:41
fish
Articles

Lulu Miller's book “Why Fish Don’t Exist” — which examines ichthyologist David Starr Jordan — is a meditation on the shadow side of scientific classification, and the dangers of trying too hard to impose order on chaos.

Length: 
12:01
Audio

Putting aside the question of whether there's any validity to it, the ancient science of astrology has a lot in common with contemporary data science. In fact, data scientist Alexander Boxer calls astrology humanity’s very first set of algorithms.

Length: 
8:25
Eel
Articles

Eels are philosophically and scientifically slippery — they're still some of the most mysterious creatures on the planet. Journalist Patrik Svensson has been obsessed with them, and wound up writing a surprise bestseller — “The Book of Eels.”

Length: 
13:43
Audio

Wade Davis has been called the Indiana Jones of anthropology. He says the aboriginal people of Australia have a fundamentally different way of seeing the world than we do in modern society.

Length: 
8:07
Clock of the Long Now
Audio

Alexander Rose tells Anne Strainchamps about the Clock of the Long Now — an all mechanical clock being constructed in the high desert of Western Texas designed to run for ten thousand years.

Length: 
10:29
Clocks and clocks and clocks
Audio

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme talks to Steve Paulson about the nature of time and the human obsession with clock time.

Length: 
8:12
Aluna rendering
Audio

British artist Laura Williams talks with Anne Strainchamps about Aluna — her design for the world's first tidal-powered moon clock.

Length: 
9:03
Clock
Dangerous Ideas

He’s one of the most frenetically productive, wired guys on the planet, but digital media theorist Douglas Rushkoff is backing away from the clock.

Length: 
3:45
Spruce Grain Picea #0909-11A07 (9,550; Sweden) Rachel Sussman
Articles

Photographer Rachel Sussman has documented 30 of the oldest living things in the world. Beautiful and romantic, her photos document both the adaptation and fragility inherent to surviving for tens of thousands of years. 

Length: 
9:25
sunny protest
Audio

Lynne Segal, the British feminist icon, has a theory about happiness: it's both personal and political. She advocates radical happiness — finding joy in collective action.

Length: 
10:43
people
Articles

Social scientists are finding that generating happiness in your life may have less to do with an arbitrary number — like your bank account or how many Instagram followers you have — and more to do with how well you connect with the people around you.

people on the horizon
Audio

Psychologist Laurie Santos created a college course to teach students how to use what scientific research has discovered about what makes us happy and why. It became the most popular class in the 300 year history of Yale.

Length: 
11:37
kisses
Audio

Kathryn Bond Stockton is an English professor and queer theorist and a self-professed lover of kissing. She wrote a whole book just to make out what kissing means in our lives.

Length: 
13:27
Ross Gay
Articles

In a dark world, poet Ross Gay recommends "stacking delights." Share what you love, he says — not what you hate.

Length: 
12:46
Audio

Ebony Thomas doesn't see Hermione from the Harry Potter series as Black. But a whole new generation of young Black girls do, and they're using fan fiction and online communities to re-imagine a witch they can identify with more deeply.

Length: 
11:05
Articles

Inspired by "Alice in Wonderland" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," L.L. McKinney's Nightmare-Verse fantasy series reimagines Alice is a young Black girl from Atlanta. She told Steve Paulson that this Alice’s superpower is self confidence.

Length: 
13:51
Lots of choices
Audio

153 flavors of ice cream. An acre of cold cereals. Why do supermarkets have so many choices? Or do they? Where we might see hundreds of flavors, varieties and brands of food, food journalist Simran Sethi sees a scary kind of sameness.

Length: 
13:18

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