Episódios

  • Ann Patchett: Bel Canto Revisited
    Feb 25 2025

    In a remarkable and illuminating tour de force, the novelist recently took a fresh look at her best-known book, going through it line by line and annotating it with handwritten notes in the margins – notes on things she both loved and hated. “It shows,” she says, “a lot about how to write a novel.”

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    42 minutos
  • Matt Strassler: What Are You Made Of?
    Feb 18 2025

    The answer, regrettably, is unbelievable. That is, unbelievable to most of us, because we cannot imagine a universe – including ourselves – made of waves. Quantum physicist Matt Strassler braves the task of convincing Alan he is a collection of waves, and in doing so helps Alan answer a question that’s haunted him for more than a decade.

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    36 minutos
  • Julie Sedivy: How Language Shapes Us
    Feb 11 2025

    Her new book, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love is an ode to the power of language to both shape us and be shaped by us. It’s informed by her own experience with languages: she spoke five before learning English as an immigrant to Canada as a child.

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    41 minutos
  • Mala Murthy: From a Fly’s Brain to Yours
    Feb 4 2025

    The 500 feet of wiring packed into fruit fly’s brain has been fully mapped – giving insights into how the more that 300,000 miles of wiring packed into your brain generates your thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions. These insights could also lead to novel treatments for the diseases caused when the wiring goes wrong.

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    37 minutos
  • Brenda Wineapple: When Evolution Was on Trial
    Jan 28 2025

    In 1925, a trial in a small town in Tennessee riveted the nation. In the dock was a young man named John Scopes, charged with violating a state law outlawing the teaching of evolution. The trial exposed fault lines in society that are opening again today, a century later.

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    38 minutos
  • Daniel Levitin: Music as Medicine
    Jan 21 2025

    Music can lift our spirits, bring us to tears, spark our creativity, pace our workouts. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin explores all these benefits of music – and adds the recent scientific evidence that in some chronic medical conditions, music is medicinal.

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    41 minutos
  • Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda - Season 28 trailer
    Jan 14 2025

    Alan and Clear and Vivid’s executive producer Graham Chedd chat about and play clips from some of the shows coming up in season 28. A major theme of the season is language –from babies picking up clues about their mother’s language while still in the womb, to male fruit flies singing courtship songs to female fruit flies, to a best-selling novelist second guessing some of the language she used in her best known novel.

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    37 minutos
  • Marcia Bjornerud: The Wisdom of Rocks
    Jan 7 2025

    Offsprings of the Earth – Earthlings – we are most of us ignorant of the 3.5 billion years of experiments our planet has been through to produce us. Yet the story is there in the rocks all around us – if only we can decipher what they have to say.

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    33 minutos