196. Susan Hockfield (MIT president emerita, neuroscientist) – Extraordinary machines
“Are we in the best of times? Or the end of times? One of the oddities of the current era is that extreme pessimism about the world coexists with extreme optimism — and both have a plausible case to m...
25 Mai 201959min
195. Adam Gopnik (essayist) – the rhinoceros of liberalism vs. the unicorns of everything else
If I had to choose one word to capture this moment in American (and maybe world) history, “patience” wouldn’t be it. From every direction, everything demands our urgent attention. Everything is a tic...
18 Mai 20191h
194. Jared Diamond (Historian) – Look inward, Nation
Imagine yourself a German citizen the day after the end of World War II. Much of your city is bombed to ruins. A good part of the population is dead. The Nazi ideology that has dominated your nation f...
11 Mai 201947min
193. Anaïs Mitchell (HADESTOWN creator, songwriter/singer) – sometimes the god speaks through you
Among other things, music can be medicine. Like a vaccine, it sometimes works by giving your body a little taste of the disease. Other times, of course, you just wanna dance, and James Brown might be ...
4 Mai 201956min
192. Delphine Minoui (journalist) – Land of paradoxes: the inner and outer Iran
I remember visiting New York when I was 18 and thinking about coming here for college. How badly I wanted to be “from” New York. How cool, how real, how substantial that would be. What does it mean t...
27 Apr 201954min
191. Simon Critchley (philosopher) – the philosophy of tragedy & the tragedy of philosophy
Well into her 90’s, my grandma Selma and I had this running conversation about the state of the world. She’d escaped Polish pogroms as a 5 year old, lived through the loss of half her relatives in Wor...
20 Apr 20191h
190. Terry Gilliam (filmmaker) - The impossible dream
Faith in anything is its own special form of madness. It’s a challenge to entropy, and entropy takes no challenge lightly. If there’s any better metaphor for this struggle than trying to make a big b...
13 Apr 201951min
189. Ross Kauffman (Oscar-winning filmmaker) – Tigers and the humans who love them
I was thinking this morning that It’s funny how “humane” is the only word we have for that idea, since so much that’s inhumane has been created by us humans. When we talk about the humane treatment of...
6 Apr 201939min
