Scientists know what life does, but what life is… that’s a mystery, says astrobiologist Marcelo Gleiser. And geologist Bob Hazen believes we need a radically new understanding of how life evolved, which begins not with cells but with rocks.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
Not long ago, we thought decoding the human genome would reveal the secrets of life. That proved to be a fantasy. Now scientists are learning how to grow life outside the body — and as science writer Phil Ball discovered, even create mini-brains in a vat.More
Melanie Challenger is a naturalist who spends a lot of time in wild places. She’s intimately familiar with birth and death, and she believes any understanding of what it means to be human must start by tuning into our animal nature.More
Deborah Harkness is the author of the bestselling novel “A Discovery of Witches” and also a professor of European history, so she knows all about the lore of witches and vampires. She tells Anne Strainchamps about the real history of magical belief.More
Four hundred years ago, London was full of magicians, but they weren’t like the wizards of Harry Potter. These were practitioners of “service magic.” Historian Tabitha Stanmore uncovers this surprising story in her book “Cunning Folk.” More
Polls suggest that most Icelanders believe in elves and magical creatures. And that fascinates writer Nancy Marie Brown, who’s been to Iceland dozens of times. So she did her own investigation of elf stories and the nature of belief.More
Lulu Miller's latest project is a "Radiolab" podcast series for children: "Terrestrials." She explains for how nature and child-like sensibility can help adults rediscover a sense of wonder.More
When it comes to wonder and awe, historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, the author of “Doubt” and “The End of the Soul,” says there’s another, even older tradition we can all access – poetry.More
Psychologist Dacher Keltner says that awe is a unique experience, distinct from all other emotions, and it can make us feel better in a lot of ways.More
Jamelle Bouie is a New York Times columnist and political analyst for CBS News with a knack for providing historical context for present-day debates. It’s given him a distinctive voice among today’s pundits.More
Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah are the producers and hosts of "Throughline" from NPR. They explain why history belongs in the news and how they fell in love with it.More
"Praise houses" were places where Black people would gather in secret to affirm their African identity and cultural practices. Artist-activist Charmaine Minniefield explains how her Praise House Project pushes back against the erasure of history.More
When producer Angelo Bautista was growing up, he dreamed of being in the internet. Not on the internet, but inside of it. Now, he's torn about social media. He's still addicted to scrolling, but posting about his own life — that's another story. But if nobody sees you on the internet, do you exist? More
Social critic Alissa Quart says the American ideal of the self-made, rugged individual is built on a lie. In her book "Bootstrapped," she argues that even the people who preached the gospel of self-reliance, like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau, didn’t live up to it themselves. More
Just over 200 years ago, a group of renegade German writers and philosophers came together in a small town and forever changed who we think we are. Andrea Wulf tells this story in her book “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.” More
When you look online, you might think the most important pursuit in life is self-creation — optimizing, curating, branding yourself. Social critic Tara Isabella Burton says our current obsession with personal identity has deeply religious roots, which then got co-opted by advertisers and the self-help movement.More
Infinity comes in different sizes. The idea of a world with more than one kind of infinity is glorious and also incomprehensible. Can you add, subtract and divide with infinity? More
The Netflix documentary “A Trip to Infinity” is a wild ride, filled with animated shorts by artists from 11 different countries illustrating the concept of infinity and where to find it.More