He’s fascinated by how culture has shaped our evolution – not only changing our bodies and expanding our brains but even expanding our ability to cooperate. And the more diverse a culture, the better its ability to innovate.

Joe Henrich: How Culture Has Shaped Our Bodies and Brains

That’s the title of a new book by New York Times technology reporter Kashmir Hill. Her book is both deeply researched and downright scary, as spelled out in the book’s subtitle: A Secretive Start-Up’s Quest to End Privacy As We Know it. A glimpse of your face in any photo you’ve ever uploaded can now lead to anyone discovering details of your life – both on-line and out there in the world.

Kashmir Hill: Your Face Belongs to Us

Author of a best-selling book called Why We Sleep, and host of the Matt Walker Podcast, he’s become the go-to expert on everything to do with sleep, from how it keeps both mind and body healthy to why we dream.

Matthew Walker: Sleep REALLY Matters

A brilliant violinist in her teens, her world came crashing down when an injury ended her career even as it was beginning. Remarkably, she turned that loss into a PhD in neuroscience, a stint in the White House and a popular podcast about others also navigating drastic changes in their lives.

Maya Shankar: Beginning from an Ending

Do you believe people are worse now than they use to be? That smarter people are happier people? That you know when to quit a conversation? Wrong on all counts, according to Adam Mastroianni, a social psychologist. He’s also a professional improv performer and uses those skills teaching business school students.

Adam Mastroianni: Why You So Often Get It Wrong

Nancy Kanwisher has discovered many areas of the brain that are specialized for one particular purpose— like recognizing faces – which is interesting to Alan because of his inability to remember the faces of people he meets. Other specialized areas include identifying food, which Alan so far has no trouble with.

Nancy Kanwisher: Your Brain is a Swiss Army Knife

She managed to write a lyrical, moving book about her journey to a massive glacier in Antarctica that, if it collapses into the ocean, would cause a catastrophic rise in sea level. Unexpectedly, it’s also a book about her difficulty in choosing motherhood in a time of radical climate change.

Elizabeth Rush: Journey to the Doomsday Glacier

The actor/writer/comedian has been an inspiration to comedians like Jay Leno and Jerry Seinfeld. And he’s been inspired himself by greats of the past in the exacting art of finding what’s funny in our daily lives – when observed from just the right angle.

Robert Klein: He Observes, We Laugh

Alan and Executive Producer Graham Chedd chat about and play excerpts from Alan's conversations with some of the guests in the new season, beginning next week. Guests include comedian Robert Klein; writer Elizabeth Rush; and neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher.

Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda - Season 22 trailer

Counterfeit people, the seductively appealing Deep Fakes made possible by AI, are just the beginning of what the distinguished philosopher Dan Dennett says is a threat to humanity. This spring, he joined hundreds of other thought leaders in signing a starkly scary statement: AI threatens to make us extinct.

Dan Dennett: Fake People Aren’t Funny

Most of us don’t know most things. Yet most of us also think we understand a lot (OK, not quantum mechanics or Federal Reserve policy). We are all living with what Sloman and Fernbach argue is an Illusionof how much we know: a knowledge illusion. And this is fueling the fracturing of society.

Steve Sloman and Phil Fernbach: How Do You Know That?

Torn between astronomy and acting, she has landed in the sweet spot: leader of a research team judging other planets for their hospitality for life, while using the skills she learned as an actor to connect with and encourage a new generation of girls to become – as she was – entranced by the stars.

Aomawa Shields: When an Actor is Starstruck

A physicist whose world has no room for spirits, but who has experienced many eerily transcendent moments – both in nature and in his work – sets out to understand the unexplainable.

Alan Lightman: Can Science Explain Spirituality?

A member of the US House of Representatives for 16 years before retiring – unindicted and undefeated as he likes to say – Steve Israel knows the value of good communication, and the cost to us all when it’s missing.

Steve Israel: Disagreeing Without the Hate

Every atom in your body – and there are more than all the grains of sand in the world­ – came from outer space, many of them created moments after the Big Bang that began it all. Dan Levitt tells the stories of the remarkable people who figured out how all those atoms got into you.

Dan Levitt: You Are Stardust. Really

The New Yorker essayist explores the mystery of mastery as he tackles skills he believed he could never learn. Including boxing, figure drawing and – in his 50s – driving.

Adam Gopnik: The Joy of Getting Good at Something Hard

Of all the attributes that make us humans unique – or in archeologist Brenna Hassett’s view, weird – the weirdest of all is our extraordinarily long childhood. In her delightful book, Growing Up Human, she explores the many tricks evolution has invented to lengthen our childhoods, including her favorite: Grandmas.

Brenna Hassett: Why We Are Weird

When funding for the James Webb Space Telescope was in doubt, cosmologist Michael Turner argued passionately that it would transform our understanding of the origin and fate of our universe. Today, with the spectacular images being taken by the Webb exceeding even its designers’ dreams, Turner is “awed and ecstatic.”

Michael Turner: The Dazzling Cosmos

The prizewinning architect has designed some of the world’s most dramatic, daring, and memorable buildings. Inspired by optimism, wonder, music, and light they challenge their visitors to experience them as a story.

Daniel Libeskind: His buildings speak for themselves

With the national state of emergency for Covid-19 now officially over, we invited physician and author Topol to reflect on his experience writing a regular online newsletter attempting to counter the misinformation flooding the internet. Called Ground Truths, it takes an unsparing dive into what went right and what went wrong over the last three years.

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