Latest Stories

A portal to the future
Articles

Science journalist Claudia Hammond unlocks the weirdness of how we experience time — including our fixation on the future — in a book called "Time Warped."

Length: 
12:58
Gazing into the future, forever
Audio

Canadian cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki makes the case that as a culture, we may for the first time in history be more focused on what is going to happen in the future than on what is happening right now.

Length: 
10:19
Nesmith and the guys
Articles

If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the Monkees, the pop group with a hit TV show. Michael Nesmith wore the green stocking cap. Since then, he’s reinvented his career several times over. He (sort of) invented country rock. And the music video.

Length: 
12:41
Cross in the sky
Articles

Writer Rod Dreher on how his faith compelled him to return home in search of forgiveness.

Length: 
10:37
Street arrow
Articles

Psychologist Robert Enright breaks down cognitive steps to letting go of trauma.

Length: 
10:38
Not playing
Articles

John Cage’s "4’33” was first performed on August 29th, 1952, by pianist David Tudor. He came out on stage, sat at the piano, and did not play. The audience was not impressed. Kyle Gann tells the story in “No Such Thing as Silence."

A whiskey drink
Dangerous Ideas

Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that human vices are just as important as human virtues in shaping evolution.

Tents of scientists during Antarctic summer
Audio

When Jane Willenbring was a young scientist working in Antarctica, she was the target of constant hazing by her team leader. Years later, she filed a complaint. David Marchant was recently found guilty of sexual harassment by Boston University.

Length: 
4:36
Ada and the Memory Engine.
Video

Lauren Gunderson is currently the most produced playwright in America. And she has written at least half a dozen plays about the forgotten women who changed science. She says we're living in a golden age for these remarkable stories.

Length: 
11:06
Jet Lag
Articles

Christopher J. Lee says jet lag has become more than a temporarily scrambled body clock. It’s become a way of life.

Jukebox hero
Sonic Sidebar

In 1985, The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean started traveling around the country to find out how Americans spend their Saturday nights. One thing she discovered? How many Saturday night songs there are.
 

stove
Sonic Sidebar

To The Best Of Our Knowledge producer Doug Gordon explains what it’s like to live with obsessive compulsions.

Length: 
3:04
Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid c.1640 (CC0)
Audio

When Donna Zuckerberg noticed references to classical writers popping up on neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites, she decided to investigate. Why are they so invested in the classics?

Length: 
09:06
Black Lives Matter is just one movement whose online presence took root among black Twitter users.
Audio

One person’s bubble can be another person’s safe space — a place where you don’t have to pretend and where you can feel supported and understood. For many black Americans, that place is Twitter. Media scholar Meredith Clark explains why.

Length: 
10:33
Phos-chek drop during the 2013 Springs Fire
Articles

Reflecting on the devastating fires in California, we revisit a conversation with a longtime "hotshot" crew firefighter, Mary Pauline Lowry.  

Length: 
11:08
The Foo Show set, in virtual reality.
Video

What's it like to host a talk show in virtual reality? We talk avatars with Will Smith, host of “The Foo Show.”

Length: 
14:31
Wooden Japanese figures
Articles

Author Min Jin Lee grew up Korean-American and she thought she knew her ancestors.  But when she moved to Tokyo, she discovered a history she didn’t know. The history of Koreans in Japan.

 Kazuo Ishiguro
Articles

Kazuo Ishiguro just won the Nobel prize. Here's the best stuff he's said to us.

Plastic crochet corals from the "Crochet Coral Reef" project by Christine and Margaret Wertheim and the Institute For Figuring.
Articles

What if the geometric structure of the universe has been hidden, for centuries, in crochet? Margaret Wertheim can help you get there with a ball of wool, a crochet hook, and some non-Euclidean geometry.

The beauty of nature.
Articles

Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at MIT. He's kind of obsessed, in his own way, with understanding the universe. Specifically, he’s interested in what he calls “the beautiful question." Is the universe naturally, inherently beautiful?

Torah and jad - exhibits in Big Synagogue Museum, Wlodawa - Poland. (CC BY 2.5)
Audio

The story of one famous mathematician’s obsession with the ancient and mystical and numerical world of the Kabbalah, from Shlomo Maital of the podcast "Israel Story."

Student activist and Raza studies student Pricila from the film "Precious Knowledge."
Articles

Teachers Curtis Acosta and Jose Gonzalez explain the origins of Tucson's Mexican-American Studies program—and how their personal histories in school led them to teach these courses.

Length: 
16:38
Philip K. Dick sitting in chair
Sonic Sidebar

Jonathan Lethem considers Philip K. Dick one of his literary heroes.  Lethem talks about how Dick was able to combine his brilliant imagination with his original mainstream ambitions to produce the groundbreaking literary science fiction that he's known for.

Length: 
4:48
hall of mirrors
Articles

The central question of Philip K. Dick's fiction is "What is reality?" Literary critic Umberto Rossi explains that Dick's work often contains many possible realities.

Length: 
12:44
Chuck Klosterman
Articles

When you talk about people's personalities, he says, there's not many things more interesting than what they really want and can't get.

Flowering headphones
Articles

NPR music critic Ann Powers reflects on how Americans have used music to talk around their awkward feelings related to sex and race.

Football game
Articles

Author Steve Almond wrestles with the ugly undertones of America's favorite sport.

Still from  "The Glass Castle"
Articles

It's a rite of passage to find our parents embarrassing, particularly as we start to carve out distinct identities in those early years away from home. For Jeannette Walls, the moment was a bit more extreme. 

Length: 
11:07
Traveling into the phone
Articles

Doug Rushkoff believes personal technology is having an insidious effect on our relationship with time. He calls it “present shock.”

Super punch.
Dangerous Ideas

After spending time with a real-life superhero in Seattle called Phoenix Jones, author Jon Ronson wonders if people like him can actually fight crime.

Length: 
3:03

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