Latest Stories

Trees
Audio

Botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger tells Anne that the lives of trees and human beings are inter-related all the way down to the molecular level.

Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold
Video

Mountain climber Tommy Caldwell takes us inside Alex Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan.

Length: 
2:57
Ways to help Jay
Audio

In 2015, Jay Costello was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a treatable but incurable blood cancer. His family couldn't handle it alone, so his daughter Megan started asking for help online, fundraising via a GoFundMe page. 

Length: 
07:11
Kambui Olujimi: The Drop, from the series InDecisive Moments, 2017. Glass, approx. 30 x 20 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist.
Photo Gallery

It’s hard to wrap your head around climate change. How do you really take in the concept of planetary change over decades or even centuries? Visual artist Kambui Olujimi explores different ideas about time in his one-man show “Zulu Time.”

Length: 
7:08
earth
Dangerous Ideas

Historian Iain McCalman’s Dangerous Idea? The Anthropocene — the idea that humans have fundamentally changed our global climate. It’s scary, but we’re also seeing people come together in unprecedented ways to solve planetary problems.

Length: 
2:32
Resevoir
Articles

We've heard plenty about micro-dosing with LSD — in articles, books, even on this show. But psychiatrist Anna Fels has a new micro-dosing proposal. Not with a drug – with lithium.
 

Mind/body
Articles

Remember debating the mind-body duality in college? You probably argued the meaning of Descartes’ adage “I think, therefore I am” in your dorm. Maybe you even delved into the idea of what is consciousness. But for Lauren Slater, author of “Prozac Diary,” the mind-body argument isn’t just a debate or an intellectual pursuit.

Doors across borders.
Articles

The Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid sets his newest novel, "Exit West," in a world of permanent mass migration, in a city ripped apart by civil war. He told Steve Paulson he modeled it on his own city — Lahore, Pakistan.

Length: 
16:13
Lady Liberty
Interactive

Historian Carol Anderson walks us through the timeline of truly free and fair elections in the United States, a period she says lasted from the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 until a fateful Supreme Court decision in 2013.

Length: 
10:44
Voting Day
Articles

Could we make our elections more secure, more inclusive, or just more fun? Depends on who you ask, and we asked a lot of people.

"We Have Always Lived in the Castle" By Shirley Jackson (Penguin Classics)
Bookmarks

Laurence Jackson Hyman, son of the famed horror author Shirley Jackson, recommends her 1962 classic tale for its scares, suspense, and strangeness. 

striped floor
Articles

In collaboration with David Lynch, Mark Frost co-created one of the most enduring fictional universes of all time — Twin Peaks. Bookending the series' return to TV in 2017 after 25 years, Frost has written two innovative novels that take a deep dive into the history of the surreal logging town. 

Guy under stress
Articles

According to one estimate there may be as many as 50 million workers in the on demand economy, and they're not all Uber drivers or freelancers. Economist Guy Standing has a word for this new and very insecure economic class: "the precariat."

Robot boy
Articles

Alexander Weinstein’s “Children of the New World” is a collection of cautionary tales about extreme emotional attachment to software and silicon.  

Prince
Sonic Sidebar

Chuck Klosterman thinks the Internet has ruined a lot of things, including death.

Books on books on books
Dangerous Ideas

Why do we keep dividing the world of books into different genres — like romance novels, science fiction and literary fiction? Novelist Lauren Beukes says we should simply get rid of the whole idea of genre.

Length: 
1:46
Rashid Johnson, Antoine’s Organ, 2016.
Articles

Rashid Johnson is a rising star in the art world. Using signature materials like shea butter and black soap, he explores themes of race, yearning and escape, and grapples with what it means to come of age as a black artist and intellectual.

Length: 
8:55
Gavin and the Proud Boys
Articles

Investigative journalist Alexandra Hall examined the "Proud Boys," a men's organization whose founder preaches libertarian ideals, the rejection of feminism, and the "veneration of the housewife," which translates to the belief that most women belong at home.

Length: 
34:17
trains for the train sounds, Paris
Sonic Sidebar

Cities are full of music — but can cities also BE music? David Rothenberg gives us a tiny history of how composers have used cities to make music, beginning with Pierre Schaeffer’s “Musique concrète.”

Length: 
03:04
horoscope
Articles

Astrology, the Myers-Briggs test, and even Buzzfeed place you into the same archetype as thousands of other people. So why turn to them? It comes down to crafting a personal narrative using archetypes.

Length: 
10:05
Chloe Benjamin
Articles

Author Chloe Benjamin on how the magical worlds of her novels are rooted in her daily life.

Length: 
15:50
The midwives of "Call the Midwife" (BBC)
Audio

Anne Strainchamps joins a group of women, Laurie, Jane, Carol and Liz, to watch the premiere of Season 7 of "Call the Midwife" and talk about birth.  

Length: 
5:24
Cracked cover
Articles

Even this many years later, it’s hard to underestimate what a popular and controversial writer David Foster Wallace still is. There’s even an entire field of "David Foster Wallace Studies" — one of its leaders is Clare Hayes-Brady.

Length: 
12:05
Code
Audio

Machines that program themselves are all around us and they get smarter every day. But are you ready for the master algorithm that can tell a machine how to learn anything?

Length: 
10:15
Apps
Dangerous Ideas

App Intelligence? Santa Fe Institute president David Krakauer says we're on the verge of abdicating our free will to everyday apps.

Length: 
3:04
Right-wing provocateur Gavin McInnes
Articles

A men's club where "racist" is an insult but "chauvinist" is a mantra.

Niki poses with some of her staff. She makes accommodations for employees struggling with prior convictions or legal status.
Audio

A few years ago, Niki Okuk started a tire recycling company in Los Angeles. Run along the lines of a worker-owned cooperative, the employees are people who would ordinarily have a hard time finding any job. 

Length: 
11:01
Black hole
Articles

Researchers revisit the controversial but potentially life-changing treatment first explored in the 1960s.

#MeToo
Articles

For years, women in science have battled discrimination, old boys’ clubs and gendered stereotypes. Now they’re blowing the whistle on sexual harassment, and some eminent career scientists are being held to account.

Length: 
8:09
Adolph Hitler
Audio

If hate moved next door, would you recognize it? Edgar Feuchtwanger was a young Jewish boy living in Munich when Adolf Hitler moved into the building across the street. Edgar recalls the horror of watching Hitler's rise to power.

Length: 
6:57

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