237 - Reactance - Michele Belot

In this episode we welcome back author Will Storr whose new book, The Status Game, feels like required reading for anyone confused, curious, or worried about how politics, cults, conspiracy theories c...

3 Sep 20231h 16min

Sedona Chinn, who studies how people make sense of competing scientific, environmental, and health-related claims, joins us to discuss her latest research into doing your own research. In her latest p...

19 Aug 202341min

We sit down with Brian Brushwood to discuss how he put together this most recent season of The World's Greatest Con, his podcast about incredible scams. This season is all about how two teenagers pull...

6 Aug 20231h 6min

In this episode we sit down with Jennifer Shahade, a two-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion, author, speaker, and professional poker player whose new book, Chess Queens, is the true story of the greates...

23 Jul 202358min

In an era in which we have more information available to us than ever before, when claims of “fake news” might themselves be, in fact, fake news, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, authors of The ...

11 Jul 202348min

Deliberation. Debate. Conversation. Though it can feel like that’s what we are doing online as we trade arguments back and forth, most of the places where we currently gather make it much easier to pr...

9 Jul 202345min

At the peak of COVID-19, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling set out to write a book about the widespread pushback against masks and vaccines as away to discuss the rise of the medical freedom movement in Americ...

25 Jun 202349min

Marina Nitze is a professional fixer of broken systems – a hacker, not of computers and technology, but of the social phenomena that tend to emerge when people get together and form organizations, ins...

11 Jun 202342min