Steven Pinker tells Steve Paulson that parents don’t really have much to do with shaping their children’s personalities.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Persi Diaconis was a stage magician before he discovered probability theory and became one of the world's leading mathematicians. He tells us about some very powerful formulas derived from card shuffles and magic tricks.
There's a short story about a guy who's so afraid of other people reading his mind that he wears a tin foil hat to protect his thoughts. The tin foil part is crazy, but protecting your mind is maybe not such a bad idea. Academic psychologist Rob Brotherton says there are certain psychological traits that predispose people to believe in conspiracy theories. For example, there's an experiment done by a group of psychologists in Amsterdam. It involves a group of subjects and a messy desk.
FIND OUT HOW LIKELY YOU ARE TO BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES BY TAKING ROB'S QUIZ.
Novelist Tom Perrotta talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.
Did you know national parks intended for the masses are a 19th century invention and a distinctly American one?
Democracy, politics and Pakistani rock and roll.
Sherry Turkle discusses the ways in which we are already developing relationships with personal robotic devices from cellphones and iPods to toys like the Furby and My Real Baby.
Tariq Ali about Al-Andalus, the largely forgotten Muslim society on the peninsula that's now Spain and Portugal where Christians, Jews and Muslims once lived together in relative harmony.
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