Zimmer talks about "Life's Edge," and Paulina Bren discusses "The Barbizon: The Hotel That Set Women Free."
Aug 21
Why We Can’t Resist a Great Bookstore
What is it about a bookstore? You walk in planning to browse for a few minutes, and somehow an hour later you’re still wandering the stacks with an armful of books you can’t seem to put down. For this week’s episode, our guest host, MJ Franklin, and the producer Sarah Diamond tak ... Show More
26m 3s
Aug 14
This Reporter Can Tell Us What Nuclear Apocalypse Looks Like (Encore)
Imagine, if you will, that for unknown reasons North Korea has just launched a nuclear bomb at the United States. What happens next? The journalist Annie Jacobsen has imagined exactly that, and spent more than a decade interviewing dozens of experts while mastering the voluminous ... Show More
45m 29s
Aug 5
Let’s Talk About the 50 Best Thrillers of the 21st Century
What are the best thrillers published since 2000? That was the question that the team at The New York Times’s Book Review posed to hundreds of writers of every kind of crime fiction, from legal thrillers to spy novels to cozy mysteries, as well as librarians, editors, critics and ... Show More
51m 26s
Mar 2025
Carl Zimmer on the Hidden Life in the Air We Breathe
<p>Carl Zimmer is one of the finest science communicators of our time, having spent decades writing about biology, evolution, and heredity. His latest (and 16<sup>th</sup>) book, <em><span style= "mso-fareast-font-family: 'Times New Roman'; mso-fareast-theme-font: major-fareast;" ... Show More
51m 43s
Aug 2025
Special Episode: Carl Zimmer & Airborne
In the first years of the COVID pandemic, a debate raged: was the virus transmitted via respiratory droplets, or was it airborne? For some, this distinction seemed overly technical, pedantic even. But for others, it represented decades of dismissal and missed opportunities - oppo ... Show More
49m 4s
Feb 2023
Seriously...what IS life?
In this Back To School episode we consider the "List of Life": the criteria that define what it is to be a living thing. Some are easy calls: A kitten is alive. A grain of salt is not. But what about the tricky cases, like a virus? Or, more importantly, what about futuristic andr ... Show More
10m 56s
Apr 2023
#315 — The Great Derangement
<p dir="ltr">Sam Harris speaks with Tim Urban about his new book, "<a href="https://waitbutwhy.com/whatsourproblem">What's Our Problem: A Self-Help Book for Societies</a>." They discuss Tim's unusual career, the finitude of life, existential risk, exponential technological change ... Show More
59m 57s