The nocturnal songs of nightingales have captivated artists, poets and musicians for generations. Folk singer Sam Lee celebrates their annual return through intimate nighttime duets—performed in total darkness—that blend human voice and nightingale song.More
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Interviews By Topic
Witnessing the beauty of synchronous fireflies in the Great Smoky Mountains inspired author Leigh Ann Henion to turn off her porch light and discover the vast natural world that thrives in the darkness.More
Turns out there is an emerging science of uncertainty — a new frontier in psychology, artificial intelligence, and surgery — where things can go very wrong when people are missing a crucial skill set: being unsure. Maggie Jackson explains.More
There are two sides to giving up. The virtue of sacrifice – and the sin of despair. So how do we decide which is which? That’s the question psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asks in his newest book “On Giving Up.”More
Fasting is an ancient practice that’s experiencing something of a revival right now in health and fitness circles. But when John Oakes set out to explore the concept, he took it a lot deeper.More
Suzanne Simard transformed our understanding of forest ecology by uncovering the fungal networks that trees use to communicate with each other. Anne Strainchamps went walking with Simard to see firsthand how a forest is like a kinship network.More
Journalist Zoë Schlanger has been tracking the new science of plant intelligence. Plants can exhibit some of the same behaviors as animals with nervous systems, including decision-making and elaborate defenses against predators.More
Are the really big psychedelic experiences just hallucinations, or do they crack open some transpersonal dimension of consciousness? Philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes believes we need a metaphysics of psychedelics to explain these experiences.More
When painter Sougwen Chung paints something in collaboration with an AI she trained — say, a black oil-paint brush stroke — a robot mimics Chung. But at some point, the robot continues without Chung and paints something new. So how creative is AI?More
The internet is indeed overflowing with fake content, says computer scientist Walter Scheirer. But the vast majority of it seems aimed at the creation of connection—rather than destruction.More
Does AI have a fundamentally different kind of intelligence than the human mind? Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn is fascinated by this question. Her investigation into machine intelligence became a very personal journey, which led her down the rabbit hole into questions about creativity and the nature of transcendence.More
Before the era of data mining, scientists in the 1960s began a first-of-its kind study of personality—by secretly studying a group of preschoolers. Former test subject Susannah Breslin uncovers the buried secrets of that study.More
Writer Lowry Pressly argues that privacy is more than just about protecting the personal information you generate; it’s also choosing what to generate at all. It’s a fundamental tool for living our best possible lives.More
There are approximately 1.4 billion iPhone users worldwide and more than 3 billion Facebook users. In the next few decades, many of those users will die, leaving behind vast amounts of precious data. What happens to all of it?More
Hip-hop artist Dxtr Spits realized that his mental health issues were rooted in the toxicity of masculinity, which limited how he could express his feelings. So he started the "How Men Cry" movement, which teaches men how to cry.More
Behavioral neurologist Michael Trimble takes us on an evolutionary journey to unpack one of the few things that make Homo sapiens unique — we cry emotional tears. More
When an actor cries on stage during a theater production or in a film, what are they really doing? Jen Plants says when an actor cries on stage, it’s a lot more complicated, and important, than you think.More
A.J. Jacobs' latest research project turned obsession is puzzles. He goes deep into puzzle history and lore in a new book “The Puzzler: One Man’s Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life.”More