When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, s...
Apr 05, 2021•40 min•Ep. 612
Today music fills our lives. How we have created, performed and listened to this music throughout history has defined what our species is and how we understand who we are. Yet music is an overlooked part of our origin story. The Musical Human takes us on an exhilarating journey across the ages – from Bach to BTS and back – to explore the vibrant relationship between music and the human species. With insights from a wealth of disciplines, world-leading musicologist Michael Spitzer renders a globa...
Apr 01, 2021•54 min•Ep. 611
Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives, who prowl the woods around the family estate and read fortunes in the guts of birds. Eleanor finds herself desperately trying to hold the family together—in order to save them all, Eleanor must learn to embrace her family ...
Apr 01, 2021•36 min•Ep. 611
Sam asks Rose about when they first discovered T.S. Eliot in this episode of 1Q1A. If you enjoy this bit then be sure to listen to the full episode where Sam and Rose discuss their book "What Big Teeth".
Apr 01, 2021•2 min•Ep. 610
Today our guest is Steven Hall, author of The Raw Sharks Texts a seminal and amazing book that was released almost 14 years ago and published in pretty much every language in the world. It won the Somerset Maugham Award and should be a movie soon. Steven has written for Granta and Lonely Planet and build tons of video games. But today we will be talking about Maxwell’s Demon, Steven’s new book which is being released on April 6th in the US by Grove. Thomas Quinn is having a hard time. A failed n...
Mar 30, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 609
Sam asks Steven if he still reads the back of cereal boxes. Listen to what Steven has to say. Check out Sam's full interview with Steven on his latest novel, Maxwell's Demon.
Mar 30, 2021•24 sec•Ep. 608
He walks the stars embedded in the virtual dome of night and, when he tires of a world, throws a small black stone over his shoulder - and entire societies blink out of existence. The work is necessary, or so he insists. But the Planetbreaker's son has his own ideas. Meanwhile, in 'The Strange Case Of,' Mamatas gleefully blinks sentimental, shopworn ideas out of easy acceptance. 'The Twin Dragons of Sentimentality and Didacticism' explores the dangers and pleasures of Animal Rescue. But listen. ...
Mar 10, 2021•52 min•Ep. 607
He walks the stars embedded in the virtual dome of night and, when he tires of a world, throws a small black stone over his shoulder - and entire societies blink out of existence. The work is necessary, or so he insists. But the Planetbreaker's son has his own ideas. Meanwhile, in 'The Strange Case Of,' Mamatas gleefully blinks sentimental, shopworn ideas out of easy acceptance. 'The Twin Dragons of Sentimentality and Didacticism' explores the dangers and pleasures of Animal Rescue. But listen. ...
Mar 10, 2021•1 min•Ep. 606
Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional; the ghosts—literal and figurative—that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Page...
Mar 05, 2021•53 min•Ep. 605
Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional; the ghosts—literal and figurative—that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Page...
Mar 05, 2021•37 sec•Ep. 604
From the internationally bestselling author of Sarah's Key comes Tatiana de Rosnay's Flowers of Darkness, a riveting and emotionally intense novel, set in a near future Paris, where a woman confronts past betrayal and present mystery Author Clarissa Katsef is struggling to write her next book. She’s just snagged a brand new artist residency in an ultra-modern apartment, with a view of all of Paris, a dream for any novelist in search of tranquility. But since moving in, she has had the feeling of...
Feb 25, 2021•55 min•Ep. 601
Land of Big numbers is ten short stories and as you know I love short stories. The characters are from China and their stories may not be happy or necessarily fulfilling ones but they vibrate with a meaning that is uplifting in an unusual kind of way. People striving, people, hoping, people on their way to somewhere. They may not get there but they have journeys that are courageous, hopeful and sometimes even silly. It is always a surprise when you realize that tales of those from thousands of m...
Feb 24, 2021•41 min•Ep. 600
Land of Big numbers is ten short stories and as you know I love short stories. The characters are from China and their stories may not be happy or necessarily fulfilling ones but they vibrate with a meaning that is uplifting in an unusual kind of way. People striving, people, hoping, people on their way to somewhere. They may not get there but they have journeys that are courageous, hopeful and sometimes even silly. It is always a surprise when you realize that tales of those from thousands of m...
Feb 24, 2021•1 min•Ep. 599
Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world...
Feb 24, 2021•47 min•Ep. 598
Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world...
Feb 24, 2021•29 sec•Ep. 597
Luckenbooth, her third novel, about an Edinburgh tenement and the curse that haunts it, infecting the lives of all who live across the building's nine floors over nine decades of mystery and uproarious change ... Melding the poetic, the esoteric and the occult with the grit and grime of a real life lived on the edge, she writes unlike any other author of her generation, in no small part because she has lived a life unlike any other author.' Scotsman 'A whirlwind of a novel, and I am certain that...
Feb 24, 2021•25 min•Ep. 595
Luckenbooth, Jenni's third novel, about an Edinburgh tenement and the curse that haunts it, infects the lives of all who live across the building's nine floors over nine decades of mystery and uproarious change ... Melding the poetic, the esoteric and the occult with the grit and grime of a real life lived on the edge, she writes unlike any other author of her generation, in no small part because she has lived a life unlike any other author.'
Feb 24, 2021•41 sec•Ep. 594
It is the year of our Lord 1349 and it is the season of the Plague. Novice friar Brother Diggory, now sixteen, has lived in the Monastery of the Order of St Odo at Whye since his eighth birthday. But his life is about to change. The sickness is creeping ever closer and the monks must attend to the victims. When Brother Diggory is nominated to tend to those afflicted, he realises he is about to meet the Plague, and that it is more powerful than him. What he doesn't realise is that encountering an...
Feb 24, 2021•50 min•Ep. 593
It is the year of our Lord 1349 and it is the season of the Plague. Novice friar Brother Diggory, now sixteen, has lived in the Monastery of the Order of St Odo at Whye since his eighth birthday. But his life is about to change. The sickness is creeping ever closer and the monks must attend to the victims. When Brother Diggory is nominated to tend to those afflicted, he realises he is about to meet the Plague, and that it is more powerful than him. What he doesn't realise is that encountering an...
Feb 24, 2021•29 sec•Ep. 592
Sophie Jones is a physics prodigy on track to unlock the secrets of the universe. But when she meets Jake Kristopher during their first week at Yale they instantly feel a deep connection, as if they’ve known each other before. Quickly, they become a couple. Slowly, their love lures Sophie away from school. When a shocking development forces Sophie into a new reality, she returns to physics to make sense of her world. She grapples with life’s big questions, including how to cope with unexpected c...
Feb 05, 2021•41 min•Ep. 591
Sophie Jones is a physics prodigy on track to unlock the secrets of the universe. But when she meets Jake Kristopher during their first week at Yale they instantly feel a deep connection, as if they’ve known each other before. Quickly, they become a couple. Slowly, their love lures Sophie away from school. When a shocking development forces Sophie into a new reality, she returns to physics to make sense of her world. She grapples with life’s big questions, including how to cope with unexpected c...
Feb 05, 2021•14 sec•Ep. 590
The only numbers in this book are the page numbers. Math Without Numbers is a vivid, conversational, and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math—topology, analysis, and algebra—which turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. This book upends the conventional approach to math, inviting you to think creatively about shape and dimension, the infinite and infinitesimal, symmetries, proofs, and how these concepts all fit together. What awaits readers is a freewheeling tour ...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr•Ep. 589
The only numbers in this book are the page numbers. Math Without Numbers is a vivid, conversational, and wholly original guide to the three main branches of abstract math—topology, analysis, and algebra—which turn out to be surprisingly easy to grasp. This book upends the conventional approach to math, inviting you to think creatively about shape and dimension, the infinite and infinitesimal, symmetries, proofs, and how these concepts all fit together. What awaits readers is a freewheeling tour ...
Jan 27, 2021•49 sec•Ep. 588
Harmony, North Carolina is a typical town—full of saints and sinners you can’t tell apart... Its history echoes with lynchings and shootings; mob violence and vigilante justice. But those are just whispers of a past lost to time. The summer of 2000 was different. Iggy in the Baptist church. Gasoline and a match. Twenty-five people dead. This, Harmony couldn’t forget. Told in a kaleidoscope of timelines and voices, Michael Bible examines every dimension of a tragic but all-too-American story in T...
Jan 26, 2021•59 min•Ep. 587
Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom―the Metazoa―they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also...
Jan 12, 2021•48 min•Ep. 586
In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. In these wide-ranging pieces, Knausgaard reflects openly on Ingmar Bergman's notebooks, Anselm Kiefer, the Northern Lights, Madame Bovary, Rembrandt, and the role of an editor with penetrating intelligence. Accompanied by color reproductions throughout, these essays illuminate Cindy Sherman's shadowlands, the sublime mystery of Sally Mann's vision, and the serious play of Francesca Woodman....
Jan 04, 2021•53 min•Ep. 585
In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to be published in English. In these wide-ranging pieces, Knausgaard reflects openly on Ingmar Bergman's notebooks, Anselm Kiefer, the Northern Lights, Madame Bovary, Rembrandt, and the role of an editor with penetrating intelligence. Accompanied by color reproductions throughout, these essays illuminate Cindy Sherman's shadowlands, the sublime mystery of Sally Mann's vision, and the serious play of Francesca Woodman....
Jan 04, 2021•1 min•Ep. 584
Humankind has always had the urge to memorialise, to make physical testaments to the past. There’s just one problem: when we carve a statue or put up a monument, it can wind up holding us hostage to bad history. In this extraordinary history book, Keith Lowe uses monuments from around the world to show how different countries have attempted to sculpt their history in the wake of the Second World War, and what these memorials reveal about their politics and national identity today. Amongst many q...
Dec 31, 2020•1 hr 9 min•Ep. 583
Humankind has always had the urge to memorialise, to make physical testaments to the past. There’s just one problem: when we carve a statue or put up a monument, it can wind up holding us hostage to bad history. In this extraordinary history book, Keith Lowe uses monuments from around the world to show how different countries have attempted to sculpt their history in the wake of the Second World War, and what these memorials reveal about their politics and national identity today. Amongst many q...
Dec 31, 2020•52 sec•Ep. 582
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and best-selling author: a captivating, brilliantly imaginative story of three extraordinary animals--and a young boy--whose lives intersect in Paris. Paras, short for "Perestroika," is a spirited racehorse at a racetrack west of Paris. One afternoon at dusk, she finds the door of her stall open and--she's a curious filly--wanders all the way to the City of Light. She's dazzled and often mystified by the sights, sounds, and smells around her, but she isn't afraid....
Dec 31, 2020•34 min•Ep. 581
