pplpod

We treat the boundary between living things and machines as obvious. On one side, flesh, blood, and erratic emotion. On the other, gears, circuits, and predictable math. Toasters do not have anxiety a...

6 Maj 24min

In 1976, the Mexican government finally buried one of its most polarizing national heroes with full military honors at the Monument to the Revolution in Mexico City. There were just two strange detail...

6 Maj 23min

Imagine being a quiet, nature-loving marine biologist who writes lyrical books about the ocean, then suddenly becoming public enemy number one for the entire global chemical industry. That was Rachel ...

6 Maj 13min

According to a landmark 2002 study by habit researcher Wendy Wood, roughly 43 percent of your daily behavior happens entirely on autopilot. You are not really choosing to brush your teeth or pour the ...

6 Maj 31min

He liberated six modern nations, had a country and a currency named after him, and died impoverished in a borrowed shirt, convinced his life's work was a complete failure. In his own bitter words, he ...

6 Maj 23min

The smartphone in your pocket is, in Richard Stallman's words, a "portable surveillance and tracking device." That's the paradox at the heart of this episode: the entire digital world runs on foundati...

6 Maj 25min

Imagine an 11-year-old's bedroom papered wall-to-wall with calculus lecture notes, not posters or paintings but pages of integrals and dense mathematical symbols. That was Sofya Kovalevskaya's actual ...

6 Maj 21min

Stephen Hawking's name is everywhere, but the man behind the synthesized voice and the TV cameos was more rebellious, stubborn, and human than the legend suggests. In this episode we go beyond the pop...

6 Maj 22min