Elizabeth Rosner, novelist, poet, and essayist, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how listening is the skill of interpretation, how she learned to hear the important things left unsaid in her own upbringing, and what science can teach us about the sounds that envelop us.
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Arik Kershenbaum is a zoologist, college lecturer and fellow at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He joins host Krys Boyd to discuss what we’re learning about how animals talk to one another, how that understanding also sheds light on human language, and how we might come to better understand animal identities and emotions.
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Author Michael Castleman joins host Krys Boyd to discuss three distinct eras of book publishing, from the first printing press to Amazon, and why today it’s fairly easy to find yourself in print — but much harder to find an audience to read it.
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Matteo Wong is a staff writer for The Atlantic, and he joins host Krys Boyd to discuss the looming extinction of some 7,000 languages since A.I. is only using about 10 to learn from.
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Jenni Nuttall teaches medieval literature at the University of Oxford, and she joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how words have influenced how we view female roles in society.
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Professor and bioacoustics expert Nicholas Mathevon discusses how animals use sound to intimidate, mate, emote and more.
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Viorica Marian is a professor of psychology at Northwestern University. She explains why she believes we all have the capacity to be multilingual and how that affects the ways we perceive the world.
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Immigrant justice advocate Alejandra Oliva discusses her work as a translator on the border, how it relates to her life as a Mexican-American woman, and what it takes to actually become a U.S. citizen.
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Steven Johnson from New York Times Magazine talks about how computers are learning languages so accurately that it’s hard to know you aren’t talking to a human.
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Amanda Montell is a language scholar and host/creator of the “Sounds Like a Cult” podcast, and she joins us to talk about how language is used to develop the us vs. them mentality that solidifies people’s membership in cults – and cultish organizations.
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We’ll be joined by a journalist who writes about the changing media landscape, a linguist who explains how cults use very specific language to recruit new members, and a researcher who says bad ideas are parasites that infect our brains.
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This hour we’ll talk with linguist John McWhorter about how we use profanity, Anna Sale of the “Death, Sex and Money” podcast about strategies for having difficult conversations and psychologist Katherine Kinzler about how the actual sound of our voices affects how people hear what we’ve got to say.
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