Tom Lutz tells Jim Fleming that human beings are great crybabies. Lutz is the author of “Crying: The Natural & Cultural History of Tears.”
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Did you know that 7 Up was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Good thing they changed the name. That's one of the fascinating facts from Tristan Donovan's book, "Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World." Donovan takes us on a guided tour of the secret history of fizzy water.
American by birth, Vijay Iyer is trying to create a new kind of music, a synthesis of Western jazz and Indian music.
Caltech physicist Sean Carroll thinks big...really big. And not just about quantum physics, the multiverse and the other weird ideas in his field. He also loves philosophy and wonders whether there's any underlying meaning to our lives. In this wide-ranging conversation, Carroll talks with Steve Paulson about science, the universe and what he calls "poetic naturalism."
People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
Simon Winchester talks with Jim Fleming about the short-sightedness of placing cities where the planet doesn't think they should be.
In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.
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