There are a lot of comedians whose work I'm partial to, but I have a special place in my pantheon for Garry Shandling. He was funny, unsparing, compassionate, psychologically acute and epistemologically astute all at once, an uneasy combination

Gravity Waves Explained by Physicist Anthony Aguirre

Mar 15th, 2016 53m 44s

If the news coverage of recently discovered gravitational waves left you with lingering questions, you've come to the right place. Theoretical physicist Anthony Aguirre, our go-to guy on all things general relativistic, provides some great insi

Gwendolyn Mok: Pianist and Musical Medium

Feb 23rd, 2016 1h 18m

Gwendolyn Mok may have flunked her first Juilliard audition at the age of 5, but that was just a speed bump en route to a distinguished recording and concert career. Gwen sees herself as a kind of medium, doing her best to channel the spirit an

George Yancy: Philosophizing While Black

Nov 22nd, 2015 1h 16m

“As a black male in the United States,” says George Yancy, “to do philosophy in the abstract would be to deny the reality of my own existence.” Yancy grew up in a tough North Philadelphia housing project, where young men were far more likely to

Molecular Biologist Kevin Esvelt: Gene Drives, CRISPR Critters and Evolutionary Sculpting

Nov 15th, 2015 1h 25m

It's one thing to genetically modify an organism in the lab. It's another thing entirely to spread those modifications in the wild, altering whole populations or even species. A new technology, the “CRISPR gene drive,” promises to do just that,

Comic Book Artist Dean Haspiel: Superheroes, Antiheroes, Fantasy and Autobiography

Oct 11th, 2015 1h

If you're going to tell cool stories in comic books, it helps to have had a colorful life and interesting friends. Dean Haspiel has had both. His dad was a writer, occasional street vigilante and confidante of Marilyn Monroe. Mom's pals include

Jonathan Gottschall: "The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch"

Sep 27th, 2015 1h 21m

Jonathan Gottschall's career as a college English prof was on the rocks, and he was desperate to do something completely different. So in his late 30s he left the classroom for the cage, taking up mixed martial arts and training for an amateur

Jonathan Ames: From Writer to Sitcom Showrunner

Sep 20th, 2015 59m 30s

"I was an obscure novelist and then I was given the keys to this production, and I had to learn on the spot.” And learn he did, helming HBO's "Bored to Death" for three hilarious seasons and now "Blunt Talk" on Starz. Jonathan Ames describes th

Is Most Scientific Research Wrong? Psychologist Mike Frank on the "Reproducibility Crisis"

Sep 13th, 2015 1h 20m

It's been called the "decline effect," "the proteus phenomenon," and "the reproducibility crisis": the startling realization that a lot of seemingly solid scientific research doesn't pan out under repeated testing. The latest blow to scientific

Policing: Myths Vs. Realities with Seth Stoughton

Aug 30th, 2015 1h 18m

Cop shows and tough-on-crime rhetoric often depict a world so brutish that police have no choice but to play rough and kick butt, but Seth Stoughton says we've been misled. The former cop turned law professor and policing expert contends that c

Huang Ruo: A Composer's Journey

Aug 23rd, 2015 1h 11m

Huang Ruo's career wasn't his to choose. His fortune-teller grandfather and composer father did that for him, and at the age of 12 he was bundled off to a distant music conservatory in Shanghai as his mother wept. Sad as that may sound, it all

Anil Ananthaswamy on Neuroscience and Our Sense of Self

Aug 16th, 2015 1h 21m

People suffering from Cotard's Syndrome think they're dead. Victims of body integrity identity disorder believe their own limbs don't belong to them, and schizophrenics feel their thoughts aren't their own. By chipping away at our sense of a un

Composers at Cabrillo: Hannah Lash, Missy Mazzoli and Nico Muhly

Aug 9th, 2015 1h

The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music brings together some of the best and brightest composers working today. I spoke to three from this year's lineup as we listened to some of their pieces. Harpist/composer Hannah Lash confided her love

Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on “The Look of Silence”

Aug 2nd, 2015 1h 15m

Viewers of Joshua Oppenheimer's jaw-dropping documentary "The Act of Killing," about the men who conducted Indonesia's genocidal anti-communist purges in 1965, might well have concluded that it was an impossible act to follow. Yet its sequel is

The Civil War Isn't Over: David Blight and Tony Horwitz

Jul 12th, 2015 1h 6m

I used to think that the Civil War ended at Appomattox. But the next 150 years of conflict – including the events of recent months – make it clear how naive I was. Yale historian David Blight explains how the nation dropped the ball when it aba

Racial Passing in the USA: Historian Allyson Hobbs

Jun 28th, 2015 1h 11m

The recent case of Rachel Dolezal – the “black” activist outed as white – may have seemed novel, but she's actually part of an old tradition of racial passing in this country. How long has passing been going on and how has it changed over the y

Sara Solovitch: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright

Jun 21st, 2015 59m 6s

Sara Solovitch grew up playing classical piano, a dedicated student and aspiring performer. But she quit at 19, undone by chronic jitters. Thirty years later, she decided to face her old fears, start over and brave the concert stage again. She

Astronomer Robert Kirshner: Supernovas, Dark Energy and The Fate of the Universe

May 17th, 2015 1h 6m

Astronomer Robert Kirshner is an expert in supernovae – those spectacular exploding stars that can outshine a galaxy. It's a specialty he chanced on in grad school, and his timing was perfect. The field was really taking off, and it was superno

Writer-Illustrator Sydney Padua: Babbage, Lovelace and the First Computer

May 10th, 2015 57m 38s

A century before the first electronic computers, there was the Analytical Engine, a giant, coal-powered mechanical brain. Sounds like a steampunk fantasy, but it was the real deal: a general-purpose computer capable not only of number-crunching

Biophysicist Jeremy England: A New Theory of Evolution

May 3rd, 2015 1h 8m

We know life is made of molecules, but how did those molecules come together in the first place? Was it more than a series of rare and highly improbable coincidences--the parts just falling into place? MIT biophysicist Jeremy England thinks so.

Philosopher John Searle on Perception, Mind, Matter and Consciousness

Apr 19th, 2015 1h 3m

One of America's most prominent philosophers says his field has been tilting at windmills for nearly 400 years. Representationalism – the idea that we don't directly perceive objects in the world, only our mental images of them – has bedeviled

Kazuo Ishiguro: “The Buried Giant,” Memory, Lies and Forgetting

Apr 12th, 2015 57m 59s

Kazuo Ishiguro returns to the show to talk about his first novel in 10 years. The Buried Giant may sound like fantasy fiction, with its ogres, dragon and nod to Arthurian legend, but if so it's fantasy in the same sense that Ishiguro's previous

Black Hole Mischief: Is Relativity in Trouble?

Mar 29th, 2015 1h 2m

It wasn't long after Einstein amazed the world with his theory of general relativity in 1915 that physicists were busily working out its more outlandish implications. And none freakier than the spacetime disruptions we now call black holes. Bla

Eugene S. Robinson: Fighting, Writing, Rocking and Ass-Kicking

Mar 22nd, 2015 1h 42m

Eugene Robinson has been a body builder, disco dance instructor, streetfighter, bouncer, mixed-martial artist, rocker, author, journalist and actor. We talked about his early days fending off bullies in Brooklyn, training at martial arts, becom

Physicist Max Tegmark: Mathematics and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

Mar 15th, 2015 1h 18m

Just as some of us are getting used to the idea of the multiverse, along comes Max Tegmark telling us that we're not thinking big enough. According to Max, there are actually multiple multiverses containing endless copies of and variations on t