An intimate account of Albert Einstein’s visit to Oxford in the 1930’s, casting new light on why he continues to be the world’s most famous scientist. In 1931, Albert Einstein visited Oxford to receive an honorary degree and lecture on relativity and the universe. While teaching, he naturally chalked equations and diagrams on several blackboards. Today, one of these boards is the most popular object in Oxford’s History of Science Museum. Yet Einstein tried to prevent its preservation because he ...
Mar 17, 2025•46 min•Season 2025Ep. 776
Are we alone in the universe? It’s a fundamental question for Earth-dwelling humankind. Are there other worlds like ours, out there somewhere? In Hidden in the Heavens, Jason Steffen, a former scientist on NASA’s Kepler mission, describes how that mission searched for planets orbiting Sun-like stars—especially Earth-like planets circulating in Earth-like orbits. What the Kepler space telescope found, Steffen reports, contradicted centuries of theoretical and observational work and transformed ou...
Mar 17, 2025•1 hr 2 min•Season 2025Ep. 775
We tend to think of our memories as impressions of the past that remain fully intact, preserved somewhere inside our brains. In fact, we construct and reconstruct our memories every time we attempt to recall them. Memory Lane introduces readers to the cutting-edge science of human memory, revealing how our recollections of the past are constantly adapting and changing, and why a faulty memory isn’t always a bad thing. Shedding light on what memory is and what it evolved to do, Ciara Greene and G...
Feb 18, 2025•1 hr•Season 2023Ep. 774
A new history of human intelligence that argues that humans know themselves by knowing their machines. We imagine that we are both in control of and controlled by our bodies—autonomous and yet automatic. This entanglement, according to David W. Bates, emerged in the seventeenth century when humans first built and compared themselves with machines. Reading varied thinkers from Descartes to Kant to Turing, Bates reveals how time and time again technological developments offered new ways to imagine...
Feb 18, 2025•1 hr•Season 2023Ep. 773
A thrilling exposé recounting how members of Opus Dei—a secretive, ultra-conservative Catholic sect—pushed its radical agenda within the Church and around the globe, using billions of dollars siphoned from one of the world’s largest banks. In an era of disinformation and deep fakes, here is a real-life conspiracy which hid in plain sight for more than sixty years. Gore tells a shocking story of money and power that spans decades and continents. Documenting Opus Dei’s secret history for the first...
Feb 18, 2025•54 min•Season 2023Ep. 772
For all the "selfishness" of genes, they team up to survive. Is the history of life in fact a story of cooperation? Amid the violence and brutality that dominates the news, it's hard to think of ourselves as team players. But cooperation, Jonathan Silvertown argues, is a fundamental part of our make-up, and deeply woven into the whole four-billion-year history of life. Starting with human society, Silvertown digs deeper, to show how cooperation is key to the cells forming our organs, to symbiosi...
Nov 26, 2024•55 min•Season 2023Ep. 771
Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling Stones Discover the true story of the four women who worked tirelessly behind the scenes to help shape and curate the image of The Rolling Stones—perfect for fans of Girls Like Us. The Rolling Stones have long been considered one of the greatest rock-and-roll bands of all time. At the forefront of the British Invasion and heading up the counterculture movement of the 1960s, the Sto...
Nov 25, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 2023Ep. 770
The definitive account of the great Bohr-Einstein debate and its continuing legacy In 1927, Niels Bohr and Albert Einstein began a debate about the interpretation and meaning of the new quantum theory. This would become one of the most famous debates in the history of science. At stake were an understanding of the purpose, and defense of the integrity, of science. What (if any) limits should we place on our expectations for what science can tell us about physical reality? Our protagonists slowly...
Nov 22, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 2023Ep. 769
Arguably among the worst of all medical afflictions, the dementias slowly destroy one's personality, take a tremendous emotional, physical, and financial toll on patients and families, and are irreversible and inexorably fatal. Winter's End: Dementia and Its Life-Shortening Options is constructed around a lengthy and detailed nonfiction account that is layered with the voices of approximately 100 palliative medicine practitioners, legal scholars, bioethicists, social workers, nurses, neurologist...
Nov 21, 2024•1 hr 4 min•Season 2023Ep. 768
When Rowan Jacobsen first heard of a chocolate bar made entirely from wild Bolivian cacao, he was skeptical. The waxy mass-market chocolate of his childhood had left him indifferent to it, and most experts believed wild cacao had disappeared from the rainforest centuries ago. But one dazzling bite of Cru Sauvage was all it took. Chasing chocolate down the supply chain and back through history, Jacobsen travels the rainforests of the Amazon and Central America to find the chocolate makers, activi...
Nov 21, 2024•50 min•Season 2023Ep. 767
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth. Faced with uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem. Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begin...
Aug 28, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Season 2023Ep. 766
Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful is a spellbinding dystopian novel about the lengths one will go to for their children in a world teetering on the edge of apocalypse. In a land destabilized by unsafe air, wildfires, floods, viruses, supply shortages, and homegrown terror, Cass is raising three small children by herself in the city. Her husband, Nathaniel, has gone all too willingly to serve as a medic in an overseas war. His absence, and Cass’s isolation, has brought her into an exhausted but...
Aug 28, 2024•46 min•Season 2023Ep. 765
An accessible and gratifying introduction to the world of paranormal beliefs and bizarre experiences. Ghostly encounters, alien abduction, reincarnation, talking to the dead, UFO sightings, inexplicable coincidences, out-of-body and near-death experiences. Are these legitimate phenomena? If not, then how should we go about understanding them? In this fascinating book, Chris French investigates paranormal claims to discover what lurks behind this “weird shit.” French provides authoritative eviden...
Aug 28, 2024•58 min•Season 2023Ep. 764
The received wisdom in quantum physics is that, at the deepest levels of reality, there are no actual causes for atomic events. This idea led to the outlandish belief that quantum objects—indeed, reality itself—aren’t real unless shaped by human measurement. Einstein mocked this idea, asking whether his bed spread out across his room unless he looked at it. And yet it remains one of the most influential ideas in science and our culture. In Escape from Shadow Physics, Adam Forrest Kay takes up Ei...
Aug 22, 2024•50 min•Season 2023Ep. 763
Have you ever wondered why your tap water tastes the way it does? The Taste of Water explores the increasing erasure of tastes from drinking water over the twentieth century. It asks how dramatic changes in municipal water treatment have altered consumers’ awareness of the environment their water comes from. Through examining the development of sensory expertise in the United States and France, this unique history uncovers the foundational role of palatability in shaping Western water treatment ...
Aug 22, 2024•43 min•Season 2023Ep. 762
It's 1973 and The Rocky Horror Show is about to be launched onto an unsuspecting world for the first time. Martin Fitzgibbon was the young drummer recruited specifically to play an integral part in the show's success. Here, for the first time, Martin gives his unique insight into how the show and its participants became an overnight success and created a cultural phenomenon which fifty years on still reverberates around the world. But there was a life before and after "Rocky" too, which although...
Aug 09, 2024•54 min•Season 2023Ep. 761
A kinder, funner usage guide to the ever-changing English language and a useful tool for both the grammar stickler and the more colloquial user of English, from linguist and veteran professor Anne Curzan Our use of language naturally evolves and is a living, breathing thing that reflects who we are. Says Who? offers clear, nuanced guidance that goes beyond “right” and “wrong” to empower us to make informed language choices. Never snooty or scoldy (yes, that’s a “real” word!), this book explains ...
Jul 12, 2024•44 min•Season 2023Ep. 760
An award-winning science writer discovers she’s faceblind and investigates the neuroscience of sight, memory, and imagination—while solving some long-running mysteries about her own life. Science writer Sadie Dingfelder has always known that she’s a little quirky. But while she’s made some strange mistakes over the years, it’s not until she accosts a stranger in a grocery store (whom she thinks is her husband) that she realizes something is amiss. With a mixture of curiosity and dread, Dingfelde...
Jul 12, 2024•56 min•Season 2023Ep. 759
Imagine you've made it. You and your friends have hit the big time in music and you're going to be a star. But then, quite suddenly, it's over. Your best friends don't want you anymore, and you're on the outside. Perhaps they're tired of your bad habits, they think you're not good enough, or they sense you just don't want it as much as they do. Whatever the cause, you're a reject. So, what do you do next? Featuring a player rejected by both Nirvana and Soundgarden who became a decorated special ...
Jul 12, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 2023Ep. 758
A cosmic perspective on carbon--its importance in the universe and our lives When we think of carbon, we might first think of a simple element near the top of the periodic table: symbol C, atomic number 6. Alternatively, we might think of something more tangible--a sooty piece of coal or a sparkling diamond, both made of carbon. Or, as Earth's temperature continues to rise alarmingly, we might think of the role carbon plays in climate change. Yet carbon's story begins long ago, far from earthly ...
Jun 11, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 2023Ep. 757
From award-winning journalist Kenneth Miller comes the definitive story of the scientists who set out to answer two questions: “Why do we sleep?” and "How can we sleep better?” A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness. In the 1920s, Nath...
Jun 07, 2024•57 min•Season 2023Ep. 756
Some ideas seem to possess a disproportionate ability to lead to new insights, new discoveries, new ideas, and even entirely new ways of thinking. Such ideas are said to be fruitful. Looking across the history of science and mathematics, we see creative minds preoccupied with the search for ideas of this kind. More precious than truth, but far less plentiful, fruitful ideas provide those in pursuit of knowledge with a seemingly bottomless well of innovation from which to draw as they attempt to ...
Jun 07, 2024•56 min•Season 2023Ep. 755
A vivid, captivating account of the Beatles’s musical transformation throughout the pivotal year of 1963, as the world became caught up in the maelstrom of Beatlemania and its far-reaching cultural impact. The Beatles broke up more than half a century ago, yet millions around the globe are still drawn to the legacy of four lads from Liverpool. From the carefree innocence of "A Hard Day's Night" to the experimental psychedelia of "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds,” their message of love, peace, and ...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Season 2023Ep. 754
Analyzing Prayer draws together a range of theologians and philosophers to deal with different approaches to prayer as a Christian practice. The essays included deal with issues pertaining to petitionary prayer, prayer as reorientation of oneself in the presence of God, prayer by those who do not believe, liturgical prayer, mystical prayer, whether God prays, the interrelation between prayer and various forms of knowledge, theologizing as a form of prayer, lament and prayer, prayer and God's pre...
Jun 07, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 2023Ep. 753
From prizewinning writer Joe Fassler comes a brilliant modern reimagining of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus as a story of obsession, longing, and the radical pursuit of utopia It’s 2005, and 24-year-old Jane is miserable. Overworked, buried in debt, she senses the life she wanted slipping away—while the world around her veers badly off course, hurtling toward economic and ecological collapse. She wants to find something better. But she has no idea where to start. In a sudden and unprecedented b...
May 23, 2024•54 min•Season 2023Ep. 752
The internationally bestselling author of Griffin & Sabine returns with his newest literary mystery--a charming assemblage of his own illustrated stories. Each of the invitingly strange tales is paired with its own glyphic creature (perhaps created by Sabine herself). Little is known of the fascinating manuscript that Nick Bantock has come to possess. It was discovered in an attic in North London, stuffed into a battered cardboard box, and unceremoniously delivered directly to Nick's doorste...
Apr 28, 2024•1 hr 9 min•Season 2023Ep. 751
Experimental physicist at CERN and acclaimed science presenter Harry Cliff offers an eye-opening account of the inexplicable phenomena that science has only recently glimpsed, and that could transform our understanding of the fundamental nature of reality. Something strange is going on in the cosmos. Scientists are uncovering a catalogue of weird phenomena that simply can’t be explained by our long-established theories of the universe. Particles with unbelievable energies are bursting from benea...
Apr 25, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Season 2023Ep. 750
A holistic reading of Nietzsche’s distinctive thought beyond the “death of God.” In Nietzsche’s Kind of Philosophy, Richard Schacht provides a holistic interpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche’s distinctive thinking, developed over decades of engagement with the philosopher’s work. For Schacht, Nietzsche’s overarching project is to envision a “philosophy of the future” attuned to new challenges facing Western humanity after the “death of God,” when monotheism no longer anchors our understanding of ...
Apr 04, 2024•1 hr 8 min•Season 2023Ep. 749
Remarkable new discoveries affirm the octopus as one of nature’s most intelligent and complex animals. This new book—written by the beloved author of the international bestseller The Soul of an Octopus, along with Warren Carlyle, founder of Octonation, and enhanced with vivid National Geographic photography—brings us closer than ever to these elusive creatures. The companion to the highly-anticipated National Geographic television special—narrated by Paul Rudd and airing for Earth Day—this beaut...
Apr 04, 2024•51 min•Season 2023Ep. 748
Sam and Dr. Marshall Poe, the creator and chief editor of The New Books Network, explore the topic of plagiarism within the academic world amid the current climate of political division. They discuss the actions of political factions aimed at either identifying and removing academics who deliberately steal the work and words of others, or attacking those academics whose political beliefs do not align with their own. Poe argues that perfection is sometimes unattainable and emphasizes the signific...
Apr 04, 2024•56 min•Season 2023Ep. 747
