Think Again – a Big Think Podcast
237 episodes - English - Latest episode: almost 4 years ago - ★★★★★ - 556 ratingsWe surprise some of the world's brightest minds with ideas they're not at all prepared to discuss. With host Jason Gots and special guests Neil Gaiman, Alan Alda, Salman Rushdie, Mary-Louise Parker, Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Saul Williams, Henry Rollins, Bill Nye, George Takei, Maria Popova, and many more . . .
You've got 10 minutes with Einstein. What do you talk about? Black holes? Time travel?
Why not gambling? The Art of War? Contemporary parenting?
Some of the best conversations happen when we're pushed outside of our comfort zones. So each week on Think Again, we surprise smart people you've probably heard of with hand-picked gems from Big Think's interview archives on every imaginable subject. The conversation could go anywhere.
SINCE 2008, BIG THINK has captured on video the best ideas of the world’s leading thinkers and doers in every field, renowned experts including neurologist Oliver Sacks, physicist Stephen Hawking, behavioral psychologist Daniel Kahneman, authors Margaret Atwood and Marylinne Robinson, entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson, painter Chuck Close, and philosopher Daniel Dennett.
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Episodes
186. Josh Clark (podcaster) - It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
March 16, 2019 10:00 - 1 hourI like to think. If I didn’t, this would be the wrong job for me. But I realize that as open-minded as I like to consider myself, I’ve taken a thick, black sharpie to certain areas of the philosophical map, scrawling “here there be monsters” and leaving them be. We’re all like this to some extent—it’s the flip side of interest—even if you’re super-curious, the things that interest you most become safe spaces. Comfort zones. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you want to keep learnin...
185. Martin Hägglund (philosopher) – What happens to freedom when time is money
March 09, 2019 11:00 - 52 minutesWhat gets a wolf or a pigeon up in the morning? No offense to wolves or to pigeons, but it’s probably not the desire to make the world a better place. As far as we know, humans are unique in the freedom to decide what’s worth doing with our finite time on Earth. But as my guest today argues, we often steal that freedom from one another or sell it off without even realizing it—our finite lifetime, the one thing we have of real value, is devalued by capitalism and for those who have it, by re...
184. Mitchell S. Jackson (writer) – Notes from the other America
March 02, 2019 11:00 - 55 minutesWe’re all living inside concentric circles of private and public, inner and outer. From the time we’re small we start to understand that these circles aren’t always friendly to one another. There’s friction at their borders. The stuffed bunny that keeps your heart whole gets you tormented at school. The people you love most don’t look or sound like the cool people on TV. And neither do you. This is true to some extent for all of us, but if you’re growing up black in the other America—the one ...
183. Will Hunt (explorer) – into the Earth: the mysteries and meanings of underground spaces
February 23, 2019 11:00 - 50 minutesThe first time I attempted to play Minecraft with my then-seven-year-old son, we immediately dug ourselves into a pit deep in the Earth and could not get out. In spite of the crappy 8-bit graphics, all of our primal, H.P. Lovecraftian terrors of the underground were activated. We were trapped! We were lost! We might die down here! Will Hunt, on the other hand, has been climbing eagerly since childhood into dank and disorienting tunnels, caves, sewers, and other underground spaces, from aband...
182. Ha Jin (writer) – the wild and tragic life of China's greatest poet, Li Bai
February 16, 2019 11:00 - 48 minutesLet’s start with a very old poem : On the bank of Caishi River is Li Bai’s grave Surrounded by wild grass that stretches to clouds. How sad that the bones buried deep in here Used to have writings that startled heaven and moved earth. Of course poets are born unlucky souls But no one has been as desolate as you. When you think of an an ancient poet, what do you picture? Wandering? Drinking? A lot of ups and downs? That certainly describes the life of Li Bai, one of the most brilliant an...
181. Marlon James (writer) – don’t get too comfortable
February 09, 2019 11:00 - 54 minutesAt this point, it’s very rare to read something and find myself thinking: This is something new. This is unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It doesn’t have to be written in hieroglyphs or be some kind of three-dimensional interactive reading experience with pull-out tabs and half the pages upside down. That kind of formal experimentation, in my experience as a reader, more often ends up being gimmicky and annoying than exhilarating. In fact, paradoxically, the “wow this is something new” ...
180. Benjamin Dreyer (copy chief of Random House) – Really actually truly great English
February 02, 2019 11:00 - 57 minutesThere are two kinds of people in this world: Those who don’t give a damn about grammar, style, or syntax, and those who write aggrieved letters to publishing houses about split infinitives. My guest today, Benjamin Dreyer, is neither. As the Copy Chief of Random House, it is his unenviable task to steer the middle way between linguistic pedantry and letting these writers get away with bloody murder. Scratch “bloody”—redundancy. Before reading his hilarious and practical new book DREYER’S E...
179. Edith Hall (classicist) – from Aristotle to Oprah and back again: how to live your best life
January 26, 2019 11:00 - 59 minutesWe’ve been talking a lot lately on this show about happiness. What it is, where we can get more of it, why it does not yet seem to be available on the Internet. Author Ruth Whippman presented some compelling evidence that the way most Americans are pursuing happiness is making us unhappier. Buddhist master teacher Joseph Goldstein talked about a way of training yourself to be more generous, and the happiness this has brought to his life. In her new book ARISTOTLE’S WAY, classicist Edith Hall...
178. Douglas Rushkoff (freelance intellectual) – It's not the technology's fault
January 19, 2019 11:00 - 54 minutesFor me, the very best Onion article of 2018 was this one about Jeff Bezos revealing Amazon’s new headquarters to be the entire Earth, as an Amazon-branded glass sphere clicked into place, encasing forever the horrified inhabitants of our planet. More than a grain of truth in that one, eh? At this point, with all that’s happened over the past few years, I think you either have to be delusionally optimistic by nature or have strong vested interests in the tech industry to think that all is wel...
177. Joseph Goldstein (Buddhist teacher) – Lighten Up: mindfulness, enlightenment, and everyday life
January 12, 2019 11:00 - 1 hourLove, money, health, great sex, peace of mind—however you define it, happiness in this world is impermanent and unreliable. But we’re all invested in the illusion that we’re just one career move or one Amazon purchase away from permanent bliss. To quote Darth Vader: Search your feelings—you know it to be true. Life is sometimes exhilarating and sometimes devastating, but it’s always, always in flux. This is the first noble truth of Buddhism. That everything in this life is unreliable and un...
176. Area 51 and the epistemology of the unexplained - Jeremy Kenyon Lockyer Corbell (filmmaker)
December 22, 2018 11:00 - 1 hourBetween subjective experience and the things most people can accept as objective facts, there yawns a cavernous gulf. Imagine you’re on a stage in front of 50,000 strangers trying to explain what it felt like to fall in love for the first time. There are ways of going about it, but it sure ain’t easy. The facts most of us agree upon—things like gravity, our own mortality, global warming—they rest on reason, evidence, science. Clunky and fussy though they sometimes are, these are the best tool...
175. Helen Riess (psychiatrist) – Empathy in the brain and the world
December 15, 2018 11:00 - 46 minutesEmpathy is the basic stuff of human connection. It’s how we hear and are heard by one another. It’s how we deal with one another as people rather than objects. But with massive, relentless trouble in the world, the 24 hour news cycle, the pressure to choose political and social sides, and the struggles of our everyday lives, empathy is sometimes in short supply. My guest today is the psychiatrist and research scientist Helen Riess. She’s an associate clinical professor at Harvard and runs th...
174. Ruth Whippman (writer) – A mindful, productive, super-positive nation of nervous wrecks
December 08, 2018 11:00 - 47 minutesIn the years before the election of the impossible president rent forever the very fabric of being, the band Radiohead was busy channeling something many of us were feeling but nobody was really talking about. A kind of ambient, multivalent state of anxiety that seemed to characterize life in the mid-to-late ’90s. Listening to Radiohead was therapeutic. Your own awkward, unpresentable panic somehow dissolved into their sonic ocean, where it was transformed into sexy, transcendent beauty. It f...
173. Wesley Yang (writer) - The Souls of Yellow Folk
December 01, 2018 11:00 - 56 minutesSuch and such “doesn’t suffer fools gladly”. That phrase has always bugged me a bit. It’s like someone has just squeezed a pillow infused with an admiration-scented vapor that then hangs in the air for just a second, leaving you to wonder: Who is this remarkable personage? And who are these fools, so unworthy of his regard that he doesn’t even have to suffer them? Well maybe he suffers them. But not gladly. And yeah, it’s usually a “he”. I don’t suffer that phrase gladly. But it’s trying to ...
172. A trans family in the holy land
November 24, 2018 11:00 - 42 minutesEverybody is always in a state of transition. All the time, your cells are dying and replacing themselves. Your mind, your emotions, your goals, your sense of self—all of these are shifting from year to year as you age. In families where there are children, the changes are even more visible and dramatic. Bodies change, voices change, identity is always in flux. But we also have an instinct to mask these changes. To find ways of minimizing them to fit in. My guests today have a story to tell a...
171. Michelle Thaller (NASA astronomer) on the multiple dimensions of space and human sexuality
November 17, 2018 11:00 - 59 minutesThis morning on the way to the school bus, my almost 11 year old son was explaining to me that if you shrunk an elephant down to the size of a mouse, it would shiver, then die, because of its slow mitochondria, due to something called the Rule of Squared Threes, which he also proceeded to explain. Then he explained something about neutron stars, claiming that they are essentially a giant atom, which I don't think is actually true. Then he started on another topic and I explained that this was...
170. Lynsey Addario (photojournalist) – on art, love, and war
November 10, 2018 11:00 - 57 minutesThink about all the images you see in a day. The advertisements. The photos and videos as you search the web or scroll through social media, if you do that. Now think back a century and a half or so to when photography was new. Imagine the first time a British monarch saw a picture of an Inuit family, or vice versa. What did they make of each other? What did it remake in themselves? My guest today, photographer Lynsey Addario, has spent over two decades traveling the world taking intimate and...
169. Ben Marcus' reality is only slightly askew from our own
November 03, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourA "grow light" for humans that cooks a guy's face. A pharmaceutical mist that puts you in the right mood for mourning the victims of terrorism. The year of All Hell Breaks Loose. The Year of the Sensor. Mudslides. Hurricanes. People who flee and people who stubbornly stay put. A terrible structure. A grand experiment. Creams and lotions that induce false prophecies. People who tumble into other people's marriages after they're dead. Every inch of the earth as a graveyard. More pharmaceuticals...
168. Michael Palin (writer and comic) – So long as there was laughter, I was safe
October 27, 2018 10:00 - 55 minutesI recently spent several hours on a transatlantic flight zooming in and out of the interactive map of the Earth on my seat's personal entertainment unit. Exploring tiny islands in the polar North…impossible inland seas in the middle of Central Asian deserts…Places so remote and strange that they fire the imagination. In 2018, It's not easy to wrap your mind around the fact that not all that long ago no human and no satellite had ever set eye on many of these places. For all anybody knew, much...
167. Gary Shteyngart (writer) - Reality catches up to dystopian fiction
October 20, 2018 10:00 - 54 minutesGary Shteyngart's new novel Lake Success is the evil doppelgänger of the Simon and Garfunkel song 'America'. In what is surely destined to become one of those legendary novel openings, right up there with "it was the best of times, it was the worst of times," we meet Barry Cohen, "a man with 2.4 billion dollars of assets under management . . ." in a Greyhound Bus Terminal at 3:20 am, bleeding from his face and drunk on $20,000 of Japanese whiskey. Shteyngart is one of my favorite writers ever...
166. Manoush Zomorodi (journalist) — How blockchain might save journalism. Maybe.
October 13, 2018 10:00 - 51 minutesWhy would two intelligent women running a hugely successful podcast at one of the most respected studios in the audio world, quit to start a small journalism company built on blockchain, a technology very few people have ever heard of? To quote someone on Twitter yesterday paraphrasing Bill Clinton sounding pretty harsh, actually: "It's the business model, stupid." As we keep learning the hard way, as long as we get our journalism from Facebook and 24 hour cable news, we're suckers for infota...
165. Man Booker prize winners Olga Tokarczuk (author) and Jennifer Croft (translator) — As fact and fiction blur, America’s finally ready for Olga Tokarczuk
October 06, 2018 10:00 - 49 minutesDoes it ever strike you as odd that we manage to inhabit two completely different realities at once? On one level, we have common sense and reason that orient us in the world. We make narrative sense of our own life and self and we go about our day with a provisional yet perfectly satisfactory sense of what the hell we're doing. And on another level, we know basically nothing. Forget about dark matter and multiple universes. Just glance into the eyes of that stranger on the train—there's a wh...
164. Jill Lepore (Historian) – Why America keeps going to pieces
September 29, 2018 10:00 - 49 minutesAs Alexander Hamilton put it, the American Experiment puts to the test the question “of whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice…or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” This question surfaces throughout Jill Lepore’s brilliant new history of the United States: These Truths. Our conversation took place during the live-streamed, virally-watched Senate Judiciary ...
163. Four Letter You – Merve Emre (scholar and critic)
September 22, 2018 10:00 - 40 minutesDid you ever see the 1951 Disney version of Alice in Wonderland? Where the caterpillar, voiced by actor Richard Haydn, sits laconically on his giant toadstool, wreathed in hookah smoke, peers at Alice under his drooping eyelids and says: Who….Aaaaaaah…..you….? Even as kid, I felt the existential impact of that question. Not, "hey kid, what's your name?" But who, fundamentally, are you as a person? What are you like? Were you born that way? How much of that can you change? All those chilling,...
162. Emily Nemens (Editor, The Paris Review) — The Literary Industrial Complex
September 15, 2018 10:00 - 47 minutesI have a confession to make: Literary magazines have always kind of intimidated me. Give me an 800 page, impenetrable work of literature any day. Like Captain Ahab, I’ll pursue it relentlessly unto the ends of the earth until it unfolds its briny secrets. But facing a shelf of lit mags at The Strand Bookstore, I always feel either underdressed or overdressed. Like a dream where you’re naked at the Vienna Opera or in head-to-toe Ralph Lauren at a Sonic Youth concert. Maybe all this started whe...
161. Congo: This Seemingly Impossible Knot – Daniel McCabe (documentary filmmaker)
August 18, 2018 10:00 - 55 minutesTHIS IS CONGO, a new documentary film, attempts to wrap its mind around the incomprehensible realities of the Democratic Republic of Congo, almost 60 years after it was founded. At one point, commenting on one of the more incomprehensible recent events, a high-ranking military officer remarks: “They will say, “This is Congo” But when will they ask “Why? why is Congo like this?” Where do we begin? Where can we begin? For as long as I can remember, the news out of Congo has been bad. But my me...
160. Bassem Youssef (political satirist) – Now I Have to Answer for This?
August 11, 2018 10:00 - 46 minutesMy grandmother used to tell a story about coming to America from Poland. How she sang God Bless America to cheer up all the grownups on the ship. She was 5 or 6 years old, traveling alone with her mom. For her, it must have been a big adventure. I can hardly imagine what it was like for her mom— my great grandmother — how bad things must have been for Jews in their home town of Bialystok for her to pick up and leave like that, without her husband, heading toward some distant cousin in the und...
159. Change is Made by the Ones Who Stay – Paula Eiselt (documentary filmmaker)
August 04, 2018 10:00 - 54 minutesWhen I started college at New York University in 1990, nobody lived in Brooklyn. Brooklyn was the dark side of the moon. At least that’s how we NYU students thought about it. Lots of people lived in Brooklyn, of course. Just not us. It’s 2018, and Brooklyn has become an international brand, synonymous with artisanal pickles, gastropubs, and luxury condos. It’s the place even former NYU students can’t afford to live anymore. But in a couple of Brooklyn neighborhoods, people are still dressing...
158. Parker Posey (actor) – I See a Dachshund In You
July 28, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourThe impulse to make art is with us from childhood. It’s the desire to play. To say “hey! Look what I made!” It’s the wild fun of making a big mess that’s nobody else’s but your own—and not having to clean it up. Above all else, art is wild. It’s independent. It’s free. And that’s one reason why the art industry is a very weird thing. In order to make money “at scale” as the Silicon Valley kids like to say, movie studios, fancy galleries, and concert promoters have to quantify, systematize, a...
157. The Spiders From Mars – Jason Heller (Hugo Award-winning writer)
July 21, 2018 10:00 - 57 minutesThe other day I was at a kid’s birthday party and a fellow dad was joking that “When we were kids, it was all ‘bang-bang-bang!’ and now it’s all ‘pew-pew-pew!’”He was talking about video games and lasers as opposed to, I’m guessing, cowboys? Actually, as I remember childhood, it was all “wowm…wowm!” The sound of lightsabers. I was 5 years old when Star Wars: A New Hope came out, and like everyone who grew up back then, I had sci-fi seeping into my very pores. Alien civilizations. Cyborg kille...
156. While You Live, Shine – Christopher C. King (Grammy-winning music producer)
July 14, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourWhile you live, shine. Have no mourning at all. Life exists a short while And time demands its fee. – From a 2000 year old tombstone in (then) Greek-speaking Asia Minor I’d like to do a little free-association exercise with you. I’m going to say three words and I’d like you to speak or write down all the words that come to mind as a result. No filtering. No judgment. Ready? American Pop Culture. Go! . . . Ok. Here’s what I got: Kanye Trump Gun Meme YouTube That’s pretty sad, I suppose....
155. Lauren Groff (writer) – We Should Die of That Roar
July 07, 2018 10:00 - 43 minutesThe places we live in shape us. I don’t care who you are how indomitable your will…your spirit is in dialogue with the place you live. For example, I live in New York City, a place I wrapped around me like a second skin when I was 18 years old. Back then New York made me feel strong, cool, infinitely removed from the suburbs I grew up in. I’ve been here for 25 years and at this point what I mostly notice is the claustrophobic public spaces, the smallness of the sky. What do you feel when you...
154. Jonathan Safran Foer (writer) – One Thing We Can All Agree Upon
June 30, 2018 10:00 - 48 minutesWhat is food? It’s nourishment. It’s comfort. It’s culture. It’s art. For millions of people, it’s not something you waste much time thinking about. You eat what you’ve always eaten. What everyone around you eats. What you can afford. For others, every bite is a careful, conscious choice motivated by the drive to be thin, to impress your friends, or to do the right thing. In 2018, whatever our motivations, most of us live at a vast remove from the places and the ways our food is produced. We...
153. Guns: The Genie and the Bottle – Priya Satia (Historian)
June 23, 2018 10:00 - 49 minutesWhen you think of the industrial revolution what comes to mind? Steam engines probably. Lone genius inventors. Factories and coal mines, perhaps. And depending on your professional interests and political leanings, either suffering laborers in sweat shops or the Great Onward March of Civilization. Did anybody think of guns? According to my guest today Stanford historian Priya Satia, guns are inextricably bound up with industrialization and it is our long and ever-changing relationship with t...
152. Where You Gonna Run To? Lorena Luciano and Filippo Piscopo (documentary filmmakers)
June 16, 2018 10:00 - 55 minutesImagine you’re a father or a mother of three kids. Your city is in the middle of a civil war. At any time a rocket might burst through your wall. Soldiers might round your family up, or kill them in crossfire. What do you do? You leave, of course. You do whatever you have to do to get your kids to safety. There will be many deadly risks along the way. But you know what’s the worst? The not knowing. The constant thoughts inside your head of everything that might go wrong, everything you hope w...
151. Jessica Abel (cartoonist, creative coach) – Practical Magic
June 09, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourOn an earlier episode of this show the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk said something that I’ve never forgotten. He said that writing programs shouldn’t teach about plots or characters or how to structure a story. Instead, they should teach writers to manage their own psyches. To be the captains of their own creative ships across the rough daily waters of fluctuating emotions and energies. This kind of self-management, he suggested, is what makes the difference between people who keep producin...
150. David Sedaris (humorist) – Sir David of the Spotless Roadways
June 02, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourLife is full of horrible things. I dare you to deny it. Things like death, sickness, and alcoholism. And did I mention death, which lies in wait for us all? But if you talk about these things at dinner parties, or at work, or to someone you have just met in line at the grocery store, you risk being branded a negative person. In some circles, such as the state of California, negativity is like leprosy. It can really mess up your social life. This does not seem to trouble my guest today, who ...
149. Yanis Varoufakis (former finance minister of Greece) – Happiness, Inc.
May 26, 2018 10:00 - 56 minutesAs the Wu-Tang Clan once put it: “Cash moves everything around me... Get the money. Dollar dollar bill, y’all.” I grew up not wanting to believe this. All the stuff that seemed worth having was hard to put a price tag on. but in a global capitalist world, there’s a lot of hard, sad truth to it. As an American child of the 1980s, I absorbed the message “find yourself!” “Follow your passions!” But there are powerful economic forces at work, shaping our lives and opportunities. My guest today e...
148. Jonathan Lethem (writer) – Batman's Greatest Enemy
May 19, 2018 10:00 - 57 minutesThere’s a famous line from a Bob Dylan song that goes “she’s got everything she needs...she’s an artist...she don’t look back.” As a person who loves art—music and literature especially—I’ve always been haunted by that line. Does an artist really not look back? Is looking back somehow a threat to creativity? What about Proust? Did he ever look anywhere but back? My guest today is Jonathan Lethem, one of my very favorite writers since I read his early novel Fortress of Solitude. He’s also th...
147. Ronan Farrow (investigative journalist) — A Failure to Communicate
May 12, 2018 10:00 - 41 minutesIn Hollywood movies diplomats always get a bad rap. I’m picturing Claude Rains as “Mr. Dryden” in Lawrence of Arabia looking, as Clyde Rains always does, somewhat reptilian as he hunches over a map of the Middle East with General Allenby, smirking secretively. Hollywood diplomats are slippery. Untrustworthy. More often than not, they turn out to be double agents. On screen, definitive action plays better than careful talk or compromise. This is true of America in general and of our politics i...
146. Think Again LIVE with Kristen Radtke (graphic novelist) – The Fascination of What's Difficult
May 05, 2018 10:00 - 57 minutesThis episode is really something different. It’s a live show we did on April 21st in Green Bay Wisconsin, as part of Untitled Town Book and Author Festival, now in its second year. I’d never been to Green Bay before. Nice town! You may know about the cheese and the football, but did you know that the Red Hot Chili Peppers once fled from the police due to an unfortunate wardrobe malfunction at a concert and spent the night hanging out at a local fan’s house? I learned this and much, much more ...
145. Michael Gazzaniga (neuroscientist) – The Impossible Problem
April 28, 2018 10:00 - 46 minutesJe pense donc je suis. (I think, therefore I am.) Huh? Who is this I? How do I know that it is thinking? What does it even mean to say that I am—that I exist, if it's this mysterious, untrustworthy Ithat says so? To be fair, René Descartes didn't invent these problems. but In the centuries after his death, his thought experiments sent philosophers, psychologists and later on, neuroscientists reeling and spiraling down a seemingly bottomless chasm In search of Consciousness. What is it? Wh...
144. Antonio Damasio (neuroscientist & philosopher) – Where is My Mind?
April 21, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourWhy can’t we all just get along? And conversely, why do we sometimes get along so well, building cathedrals, inventing Democracy, symphonies, and stuff that that? According to my guest today, the answer is as old as life itself. In the behaviors of the most ancient forms of bacteria, single-celled organisms without a nucleus, we can see the seeds of civilization as we know it, for better and for worse. They form collectives. They go to war. The key is homeostasis—the imperative of all life ...
143. The Way Brothers (documentary filmmakers) – City On a Hill
April 14, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourIn New York City, where we all live in little boxes on top of one another, “Ignore thy neighbor” is a reasonable coping strategy. Live and let live, right? To each her own. But what’s the tipping point at which thy neighbor becomes simply too numerous, too loud, too different to ignore? I’d submit that whoever you are. Wherever you locate yourself on that spectrum of tolerance. You too, have your limits. In the mid 1980s, a group of people in Oregon discovered their tipping point when a mas...
142. Meg Wolitzer (writer) – Messages From Another Planet
April 07, 2018 10:00 - 59 minutesAmbition and loyalty. What we want versus what we already have and should be grateful for. When there’s conflict here, in some ways it's a tension between loyalty to others and loyalty to ourselves…or maybe loyalty to who we are now versus another possible future self. Have I overcomplicated my life out of impatience and ingratitude? Have I broken something precious beyond repair? Or on the other hand, am I missing out on the life I’m supposed to have? Sometimes I think a lot of the trouble c...
141. Tara Westover (writer, historian) – Nothing Final Can Be Known
March 31, 2018 10:00 - 1 hourWhat does your education mean to you? What would you be willing to sacrifice for it? For me and my sister, growing up, it was a given that you’d get “well-educated.” You’d get good grades, go to a good college, and most likely graduate, medical, law, or business school. School was just what you did…ritualized and rote the way religion is in other families. For my guest today, Tara Westover, the framework was completely different. In her mountain home in Idaho, school was seen as a threat. ...
140. Martin Amis (writer) – The Spooky Art
March 24, 2018 10:00 - 49 minutesLearn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
139. Neil Gaiman (writer) – And Then it Gets Darker
March 17, 2018 10:00 - 58 minutesAdult life, with all its schedules and responsibilities, can turn into a kind of library of locked boxes. The ones we open every day sit on a shelf at eye level, their keys clipped to a carabiner at our waist: Set the alarm. Pack a gym bag. Pick up milk for the kids. But on the lower shelves and in the dusty back rooms there’s an ominous jumble of odd-shaped containers. They hold the stories that don’t fit so neatly into the skin we’ve decided to live in. Maybe we’ve misplaced the keys, or m...
138. Steven Pinker (Cognitive Scientist) – The Defeat of Defeatism
March 10, 2018 11:00 - 37 minutesI admit it. I confess. I’ve got a touch of what my guest today calls “progressophobia”. Ever since Charles Dickens got hold of me back in middle school, and William Blake after that, I’ve been a little suspicious of the Great Onward March of science and technology. Gene therapy, healthier crops, safer, more efficient forms of nuclear energy? Very nice, very nice. But what about eugenics, climate change, and Fukushima? For every problem human ingenuity solves, doesn’t human nature create a ne...
137. Amy Chua (author, attorney) – U.S. & Them
March 03, 2018 11:00 - 47 minutesI don’t know about you, but for me, middle school was horrible. I arrived at an all-male school in a still very homophobic era as a small, nervous, Michael Jackson fanatic. Don’t worry - I’m going somewhere with this. For three years, life was hell. Then I found my tribe—the drama nerds. Maybe we couldn’t beat you up, but you had to respect the artistry. In high school, Tribalism was power. My guest today is Yale Law professor Amy Chua, who shook the Internet up a few years back with her boo...