According to our unscientific office poll, the annual changing of the clocks has all the popularity of a root canal. With few exceptions, people described the shift to and from Daylight Saving Time as disorienting, arbitrary, and unwelcome.
On a more existential level, winding the clocks back and forth reminds us that no matter how concrete minutes and hours ... Show More
Aug 19
City Summer, Country Summer
Growing up, Kiese Laymon thought of himself as a city kid. But he spent his childhood with a foot in two worlds: his mom’s house in the capital city of Jackson, Mississippi and his grandma’s house in a rural country town. It wasn’t until Kiese left Mississippi that he came to und ... Show More
31m 55s
Aug 12
If climate change were a choose-your-own-adventure story
Dean Russell had just wrapped several reporting projects on climate change, mental health, and COVID. “My world was just so serious,” he said. That’s when his boss approached Dean with an idea. What if they made a fiction podcast about climate change? At first Dean wasn’t sold, b ... Show More
32m 44s
Aug 5
The Willy Wonka factory of product testing
Producer Felix Poon goes on a field trip to the headquarters of Consumer Reports, where they test snow blowers on wet sawdust, drop bicycle helmets on anvils, and cover space heaters in towels to see how long it takes them to catch fire. How do they come up with this stuff? And, ... Show More
32m 18s
Sep 2021
About time, part 1: Newton's exploding clock
Most of us think of time as something that divides neatly into seconds, minutes and hours, in a way that’s as regular and predictable at the farthest reaches of the cosmos as it is in our kitchens. But scientists and philosophers have discovered that time has some weird tricks up ... Show More
28m 27s
May 2025
Time going too fast? How to slow it down, with Ruth Ogden, PhD
Why does time fly when you’re having fun – and slow to a crawl when you’re not? Ruth Ogden, PhD, talks about how our experiences and emotions influence our sense of time, why time seems to go by faster as we get older, why changing to daylight saving time feels so disruptive and ... Show More
36m 9s