Sauerkraut, kimchee, kefir, kombucha — Sandor Katz calls himself a "fermentation fetishist."More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Science and Technology
Take a big slab of shark meat, bury it in a pit and let it rot. Then dig it up and hang it in a windy shack for four months. No wonder the Vikings took to sea.More
To The Best Of Our Knowledge producer Doug Gordon explains what it’s like to live with obsessive compulsions.More
One person’s bubble can be another person’s safe space — a place where you don’t have to pretend and where you can feel supported and understood. For many black Americans, that place is Twitter. Media scholar Meredith Clark explains why.More
What's it like to host a talk show in virtual reality? We talk avatars with Will Smith, host of “The Foo Show.”More
The story of one famous mathematician’s obsession with the ancient and mystical and numerical world of the Kabbalah, from Shlomo Maital of the podcast "Israel Story."More
Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at MIT. He's kind of obsessed, in his own way, with understanding the universe. Specifically, he’s interested in what he calls “the beautiful question." Is the universe naturally, inherently beautiful?More
What if the geometric structure of the universe has been hidden, for centuries, in crochet? Margaret Wertheim can help you get there with a ball of wool, a crochet hook, and some non-Euclidean geometry.More
If you think you haven't seen any movies based on Philip K. Dick's work, you're probably wrong. David Gill talks about Hollywood's adaptations of Dick's work.More
The central question of Philip K. Dick's fiction is "What is reality?" Literary critic Umberto Rossi explains that Dick's work often contains many possible realities.More
Robots that clean the bathroom, cars that drive themselves, computers that diagnose disease. They may sound appealing, but technology writer Nicholas Carr warns that the new age of automation could mean we'll lose basic life skills.More
Androids may seem like a modern idea, but there were life-size androids in the 18th century — beautiful robot women who could look around and even play the harpsichord. Historian Heidi Voskuhl tells this remarkable story.More
Will a computer ever write a great novel? Absolutely, says the pioneering software developer Stephen Wolfram. He believes there's no limit to computer creativity.More
Filmmaker Astra Taylor wants to reclaim the democratic potential of personal technology.More
Doug Rushkoff believes personal technology is having an insidious effect on our relationship with time. He calls it “present shock.”More
Cathy O'Neil, data scientist and author of the blog mathbabe.org, warns that politicians are perilously close to being able to tell voters only what they want to hear.More
For more than 30 years, the scientists at the SETI Institute have been looking and listening for signs of extraterrestrial intelligence. And recently, some of them decided to get a bit more proactive. To find out how, Doug Gordon tracked down SETI’s senior astronomer, Seth Shostak. More
Neil deGrasse Tyson makes the case for why constantly searching for answers doesn't have to dispel our sense of awe and wonder faced with the seemingly unknowable universe.More