Novelist Siri Hustvedt knows how the creative process feels. Neuroscientist Heather Berlin knows what it looks like in the brain. Together with Steve, they explore the emerging science of creativity.More
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Science and Technology
Marine biologist Shane Gero has spent decades listening to whale conversations. Through Project CETI, he’s found recent success using technologies like artificial intelligence to better understand what whales are saying. More
Scientists at Project CETI exploring the sounds of whales have found a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.” Carl Zimmer, author and science writer for The New York Times, puts the latest whale communications research and news into perspective.More
A Maori conservationist in New Zealand, Mere Takoko is arguing for granting personhood for whales, who she says are her Indigenous Polynesian ancestors.More
Roger Payne revolutionized the science of whale biology by discovering the songs of humpback whales. In this 1995 interview, Payne (who died in 2023) described the thrill of touching a whale, and why he fears for the future of whales.More
Daniel Bergner felt frustrated and helpless back when one of his closest family members — his brother — was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. So Bergner decided to report out other possibilities for his brother’s healing.More
Maia Szalavitz is an expert in addiction. She is also someone who has experienced it personally as a young woman. It was during that time that she came upon a concept that is only now changing how we think about recovery on a mass scale —harm reduction.
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These are tough times for people who care about insects. Roughly 40 percent of insect species face extinction. Poet Heather Swan is haunted by this specter of ecosystem collapse, but she’s also determined to live with love and even hope in a perilous time.More
Biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber says life is all about eating and being eaten, which may sound gruesome, but to him, it’s a miraculous process. He’s the author of “Being Edible: Toward a Mystical Biology.”More
Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born. More
Marjolijn van Heemstra is the poet laureate of Amsterdam. As her anxiety about climate change and other problems ratcheted up, she found solace in the larger cosmos and became a "dark sky" activist.More
Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.More
“Bad River” is Mary Mazzio’s documentary about a small tribe, the Bad River band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and their legal battle to get rid of an oil pipeline. She examines the conflicting ideas we have about how to live on the land and even whether it can be owned.More
Sutton King wants to change the culture around psychedelic medicines by confronting historical wrongs and getting Indigenous people into key decision-making roles in the psychedelic industry. More
Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of hunting for medicinal drugs, often in Indigenous cultures. Historian Lucas Richert tells the story of how one company went bioprospecting for peyote.More
Tool-making? Agriculture? Language? French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene believes there’s an even more basic cognitive skill that gave humans an evolutionary jump start — geometry.More
Math superstar Jordan Ellenberg reveals the geometrical underpinnings of pretty much everything — from pandemics to voting districts to the 14th dimension. If geometry is indeed "the cilantro of math," Ellenberg could convert even the most die-hard hater to the joy of shapes.More
Christopher Benfey tells Anne Strainchamps why there was a hummingbird craze in 19th century Massachsetts, how artists and poets used them as symbols, and why they seem like winged jewels.More