In 2006, Barack Obama was the new darling of the Democratic Party and was considering a Presidential run in 2008.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Danielle Ofri is a practicing physician today. It’s a life she owes in part to mentors like "Joseph Sitkin", who taught her as a resident.. In her essay “Intensive Care” from the book “Writer, MD” – she describes her time as a young doctor and the emotional price that can come with a license to practice medicine.
Angie da Silva is a historian of black cultural life in the United States, going back to the Civil War. She collects stories, both through oral history and archival research. But she's not merely a writer. She brings these stories to life through historical reenactment, often as a slave character she's created named Lila. She says that the stories she hears and tells are too often left out of our history books.
In this interview, she talks about her work and tells the story of Mary Meachum, a free black abolitionist who worked on the Mississippi in St. Louis.
Psychologists John and Julie Gottman are famous for being able to predict with 94% accuracy whether a couple will break up, stay together unhappily, or stay together happily. In their Love Lab, they've identified hidden patterns of behavior that can strengthen or weaken relationships. If we'd known the secret to a good marriage was non-linear differential equations, we might have paid more attention in math class.
So your future self’s woken up at home on this weekday in 2055. Time for work, right?
But what kind of work? With America’s old industries sagging, what kind of jobs will we do?
To tackle that question, Steve Paulson sat down with MIT management professor, Erik Brynjolfsson.
Erik Larson talks about the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and what it meant for Chicago at the turn of the century, and talks about America’s first serial killer who was operating in Chicago at the same time.
Astronomers have detected strange light patterrns around a star 1500 light years away. The usual explanations fall short, so Jason Wright says one possibility is a massive structure created by an advanced alien civilization.
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