Richard Holmes went to Cambridge University intending to study the lives of poets. Until a dueling mathematician, and a dinner conversation composed entirely of gestures, changed his mind.
What do you do when your own worst enemy is...you?
In today's short, we get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts...until he meets a bird who can keep him in check.
This week on the podcast, football! No, it's not a Super Bowl recap. Jad and Robert present a piece from across the pond--a piece about soccer they fell in love with when they heard it at the Third Coast festival in Chicago.
Stories about getting lost, and how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home.
In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.
In this new short, a tree full of blood-sucking bats lends a startling twist to our understanding of altruism and natural selection.
If natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?
A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.
Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?
One tidy mathematical formula may hold the key to how cities work. We take to the streets to test the numbers, & ask what really makes cities tick.
In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie.
In this podcast, Jad and Robert throw some physics at a bible story. We find out just how many trumpeters you'd actually need to blow down the walls of Jericho.
We plunge into a black hole, take a trip over Niagara Falls, and upend some myths about falling cats.
In this podcast, Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought and the voice in your head. How did it get there? And what's happening when people hear someone else's voice in their head?
The strange, subjective nature of time -- from a sped-up spin through childhood, to a really, really slowed-down Beethoven symphony.
Words have the power to shape the way we think and feel. In this stunning video (made to accompany our Words episode), filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante bandy visual wordplay into a moving exploration of the power of language.
It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour, we try to do just that.
Robert and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion, and success.
An unlikely escape story begins in a supermarket, and ends in a boat off the coast of Maine.