What is the most popular form of media today: Movies? Music? Books? Nope, it’s video games. With 2.5 billion gamers today, games are set to be the type of media that most defines our world. And two scholars at the University of Chicago are re-thinking how to leverage them in a way to address some of the world’s biggest issues. Prof. Patrick Jagoda and Assoc. Prof. Kristen Schilt are designing alternate reality games that allow players to become active participants not just as players, but as des...
Dec 10, 2020•32 min•Ep. 47
With so many contentious issues in our deeply polarized world, the real or virtual Thanksgiving dinner table may be a hard place to find a lot of empathy this year. As we take a week off to reconnect with our families, we wanted to re-share this enlightening episode with Professor of Neurobiology, Peggy Mason, all about how empathy works and how we can make our empathy stronger.
Nov 25, 2020•21 min•Ep. 46
This week, we’re featuring another University of Chicago Podcast Network show. It’s called Capitalisn’t. Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court has many focusing on question about how the new court will judge cases on social issues like abortion, but we rarely hear enough about the economic cases the court deals with. It turns out, the Supreme Court actually has a huge influence on our economy, not just social issues. On this episode of Capitalisn't, their team interrogates the rela...
Nov 20, 2020•47 min•Ep. 45
It’s hard to think of a presidential election that has raised as many questions as 2020. What do these results tell us about the views and desires of the American public, what the polls got right and wrong, and how all of this will affect our economy? To find some answers, we turned to two leading UChicago scholars—and fellow University of Chicago Podcast Network hosts to discuss what comes next, following the historic election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Big Brains host Paul M. Rand welcome...
Nov 11, 2020•34 min•Ep. 44
When should a government choose to reveal a secret—or conceal it? Your knee-jerk reaction may be to say they should never hide anything from the public. But political scientist Austin Carson of the University of Chicago says his research complicates that answer. Carson has spent his career reading massive amounts of declassified material. What he’s found shows how governments can use secrecy to deescalate conflicts and maintain peace. But he says balancing this utility of secrecy with democracy ...
Oct 29, 2020•29 min•Ep. 43
The Supreme Court today may be more politicized than any other time in U.S. history. With the expected confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump will have appointed three justices in less than four years, and the American public has come to see the bench as divided by “left” and “right.” But how can we bring the Court back in line with its Constitutional ideals? Prof. Geoffrey Stone , a distinguished scholar at the University of Chicago Law School , has spent his career studying t...
Oct 15, 2020•26 min•Ep. 42
Since their inception, natural history museums have struggled with how to represent Native Americans and their culture. People from these communities are often not included in the conversation, and their artifacts can be mishandled. But the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, in partnership with the Neubauer Collegium at the University of Chicago, is trying to change that. A historic exhibition, Apsáalooke Women and Warriors , is the first large-scale show to be curated by an Indigenous ...
Oct 01, 2020•37 min•Ep. 41
The 2020 presidential election this November is happening amid an unprecedented pandemic. As states scramble to scale up mail-in voting, President Trump claims it will lead to widespread fraud. But what does a leading expert on voting think? Assoc. Prof. Anthony Fowler is a leading University of Chicago scholar on voting and voter behavior. On this episode, we discuss mail-in and mobile voting, why he thinks it should be illegal not to vote, and how the voting map may look deceiving on Election ...
Sep 17, 2020•25 min•Ep. 40
Imagine a new technology that could create unbreakable encryption, supercharge the development of AI, and radically expedite the development of drug treatments for everything from cancer to COVID-19. That technology could be quantum computing and the quantum internet. David Awschalom is a professor in quantum science and engineering at the University of Chicago, and he’s one of the leading experts in the field. With new massive investments in quantum from the Department of Energy, he’s hoping to...
Sep 03, 2020•25 min•Ep. 39
The quarantine to stem the tide of the coronavirus pandemic has left many people trapped inside, alone. Loneliness and isolation were already a major health crisis in our country before COVID-19, and things have only gotten worse. During this time, we want to revisit a conversation we had with University of Chicago professor Linda Waite. Her first of its kind research into social well-being has provided key insights into how our social lives affect our physical health.
Aug 27, 2020•24 min•Ep. 38
The way we talk is probably not something most of us spend a lot of time thinking about, but when it comes to communicating, what we’re saying may only be as important as how we say it. That’s what Prof. Katherine Kinzler of the University of Chicago argues in her new book, How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do—And What It Says About You —an innovative exploration of how speech creates and deepens our social biases, starting from the point of view of children. With our national discourse f...
Aug 13, 2020•30 min•Ep. 37
People have been taking psychoactive drugs since the beginning of human history, but there hasn’t been a lot of good scientific study of these substances. One person who has been trying to turn a scientific lens toward them is University of Chicago Professor Harriett de Wit, and what she’s discovered is surprising. The latest research shows that there may be more uses for drugs like MDMA and LSD than sending people on mind-altering trips. In fact, they could radically change how some people enga...
Jul 30, 2020•19 min•Ep. 36
What are we going to do about police misconduct? Many are calling for a total defunding of the police, while others are looking for systems to enhance accountability through reform. Many have pointed to civilian oversight agencies, but University of Chicago legal scholar Sharon Fairley says that these agencies can often become corrupt. Last year, Fairley completed the most comprehensive study of civilian oversight agencies ever conducted. Its insights are exhaustive for how to make these agencie...
Jul 16, 2020•30 min•Ep. 35
There have always been, and probably always will be, conspiracy theories, but we’ve certainty seen a dramatic increase this year. Misinformation around the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic have created page after internet page of conspiracy theories. And the protests following the murder of George Floyd at the hands of police have also generated a whole host of conspiracies. On this episode, we’re going to take a data driven look at conspiracies theories, who believes them and why. We’ll get...
Jul 02, 2020•27 min•Ep. 34
In the last few weeks, our country has been rocked by nationwide protests following the killing of George Floyd, and many other black people, at the hands of police. To be true to the mission of our show, we’re using our platform to address the underlying and historical racial injustices that have driven the protests in the only way we know how: by talking to UChicago scholars. On this episode, we brought together a panel of experts— Prof. Cathy Cohen, Asst. Prof. Reuben Jonathan Miller and Asst...
Jun 18, 2020•41 min•Ep. 33
What happens to the world after a pandemic? Lots of experts have been talking about what we may be able to expect after COVID-19 from the 1918 Spanish flu and The Black Death. But, as any historian will tell, history is often more complicated than people think. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Chicago and an expert on the Renaissance that followed the Black Death. But she says the “Golden Age” may not have been as golden as we think. On t...
Jun 08, 2020•29 min•Ep. 32
Our society has always relied on leaders to effectively manage crises. But with the COVID-19 pandemic ravaging society, it’s more important than ever to understand what effective leadership should look like right now. Daniel Diermeier is the former provost of the University of Chicago and the recently appointed chancellor of Vanderbilt University. But he’s also a world-renowned crisis management scholar. On this episode, he shares his expertise on how business and political leadership should be ...
May 21, 2020•27 min•Ep. 31
The coronavirus pandemic has taken a toll on our students. As we move into the summer, schools will need to understand the best way to address these issues.To understand what students have lost and how schools can help them recover, there’s no better person to talk to than Elaine Allensworth, the director of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research. On this episode, she explains what the best research tells us about education during this crisis.
May 12, 2020•20 min•Ep. 30
The coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the most profound challenges in our world. One of the most prominent has been governmental dysfunction. As director for the Center For Effective Government at the , this is an issue close to Prof. William Howell’s work. So far, experts have largely wanted to focus on the actions of President Trump during this pandemic, but Howell says governmental ineffectiveness goes beyond just the president. It’s rooted deep in our political incentives and institutions....
Apr 30, 2020•27 min•Ep. 29
One of the most tragic aspects of the coronavirus outbreak has been the disproportionate effect COVID-19 has had on communities of color in cities around the country. Assoc. Prof. Monica Peek of the University of Chicago Medicine has dedicated her practice and career to studying racial health disparities. Her research, and the work of many others, has shown that many diseases and chronic conditions disproportionately affect communities of color. Coronavirus is no exception....
Apr 21, 2020•17 min•Ep. 28
The coronavirus outbreak has devastated many sectors of our society, and brought many of the issues we were facing before the pandemic to the forefront. This is especially true of health care. Prof. Katherine Baicker is a leading scholar in the economic analysis of health policy and dean of the Harris School of Public Policy. On this episode, she explains how the coronavirus is revealing how our public and private health systems need to change today and in the future to address this pandemic and...
Apr 03, 2020•15 min•Ep. 27
Why do we feel empathy for some people, but not others? Where does this feeling of empathy come from? These questions have been the focus of one University of Chicago neurobiologist’s career. And to find answers, Prof. Peggy Mason started studying an unlikely creature: rats. It turns out that rodents have a lot to teach us about empathy. And the implications of Mason’s work give us important insights into how to tackle some of society’s most difficult problems.
Mar 10, 2020•20 min•Ep. 26
The outbreak of the coronavirus in China is a global tragedy. While much of the attention has been on the disease itself, many global experts have been focusing on the economic side-effects. Some economists are even hinting that the effects on China’s economy could be just as disastrous in the long-term as the disease itself. You’ve probably seen plenty of stories about how this outbreak could derail China’s economy, but why exactly is that the case and what would that look like on the ground? T...
Feb 25, 2020•18 min•Ep. 25
Since its inception following World War II, the Doomsday Clock has measured our time until apocalypse in minutes. This year, for the first time, the clock set our time to midnight in just seconds. Rachel Bronson is the CEO and president of the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists, the organization that sets the clock. Even though the Clock is a metaphor, she says understanding the meaning behind it is a matter of life and death. This year, the Bulletin cited two major factors in their decision: the...
Feb 12, 2020•25 min•Ep. 24
University of Chicago alumnus Bill Browder’s story sounds like the plot of a Hollywood thriller—except it’s all true. He just wanted to be a businessman, but his experience as a foreign investor in Russia would push him to become an international activist. Today, Browder, AB’85, travels the globe trying to convince countries to adopt a law called the Magnitsky Act, which he says is the future of how we fight human rights abuse. The law is revolutionary in the way it targets these individuals whe...
Jan 27, 2020•26 min•Ep. 23
University of Chicago economist Luigi Zingales often says that only an immigrant like himself can really appreciate American capitalism. In his native Italy, Zingales says what you know and what you do are far less important that who you know and what you do for them. But in the last decade, Zingales says the United States has started to look more and more like the country he left. Now, he’s trying to save American capitalism from itself—and big businesses including Amazon, Facebook and Google. ...
Jan 13, 2020•26 min•Ep. 22
In October of 2019, Google announced their supercomputer had reached quantum supremacy. With that announcement, and as we take a short break for the holidays, we thought we should replay a prior Big Brains episode for you with David Awschalom, one of the world's leading quantum scientists. Awschalom is turning what was once in the realm of science fiction into reality—which could offer revolutionary breakthroughs in communications, digital encryption, sensor technology and even medicine. Subscri...
Dec 30, 2019•20 min•Ep. 21
Every election year, poll after poll tries to predict where millennials stand politically. As we head into 2020, we'd like to replay this episode with Prof. Cathy Cohen who says some of our assumptions about what issues matter to young people are all wrong. Cohen’s innovative survey of millennials, GenForward, is a first of its kind. By oversampling young people of color, they investigate differences in responses by race and ethnicity. The data she’s collected gives us a unique window into what ...
Dec 16, 2019•21 min•Ep. 20
It’s a simple question to ask, but seems impossible to answer: What causes one nation to succeed and another to fail? What exactly are the origins of global inequality? There are few people who have spent more time trying to answer this question than Prof. James Robinson. Robinson’ first book, Why Nations Fail, was an international best-seller. It laid out in clear and stark terms what the origins of prosperity and poverty really are. Now, he’s written a sequel, The Narrow Corridor , which furth...
Dec 02, 2019•28 min•Ep. 20
Since the beginning of human history, we’ve looked up at the stars and wondered: Are we alone? No other generation has been able to find an answer, but David Charbonneau thinks we may be the first. He’s an astronomer at Harvard University and a recipient of an honorary degree from the University of Chicago this year. Charbonneau has made it his life’s goal to search the stars for habitable planets and alien life. On this episode, he tells his fascinating story about the history of exoplanetary r...
Nov 18, 2019•21 min•Ep. 19
