Amanda Mull joins us to talk about how we’ve traditionally undervalued these acquaintances and how the loss of these occasional interactions has caused our lives to shrink.
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A Post-Mortem On Texas’s Colossal Energy Failure
University of Houston energy fellow Ed Hirs and Texas Water Resources Institute associate director Wendy Jepson join us to explain why one of the toughest weeks in Texas history was likely preventable – and what the state needs to do to make sure an energy disaster doesn’t strike again.
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Egg Freezing: Empowerment Or Impediment
Lucy van de Wiel, research associate at the Reproductive Sociology Research Group, University of Cambridge, joins us to discuss how this reproductive technology offers a chance at parenting but also can lead to a heartbreaking journey into a largely unregulated industry.
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What Is Appalachia Without Coal Mining?
Jeff Young is managing editor of Ohio Valley ReSource, a regional journalism collaborative reporting on economic and social change in Kentucky, Ohio and West Virginia. He joins us to discuss his investigations into the struggles of the people and businesses there, and why they don’t bode well for the future of the nation.
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Life As A Black Vegan
Amirah Mercer is the founder of Other Suns, a wellness guide for Black women, and she joins us to talk about her switch to a vegan lifestyle, the isolation from community she initially felt, and her subsequent deep dive into the long history of plant-based diets in the Black diaspora.
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It’s OK to Press Pause
Journalist and author Katherine May joins us to talk about finding meaning in moments when life isn’t joyful — and why tribulations ultimately build our strength.
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Do Women Really Need All Those C-Sections?
Jacqueline H. Wolf, professor of the history of medicine at Ohio University, joins us to talk about the history of cesarean birth and the impacts it has on women’s lives and the public health system as a whole.
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Why The Thing We Want Most Is Nothingness
Kyle Chayka joins us to discuss the barriers we put up to isolate ourselves from the world, why that’s caught on as a health craze, and how that disconnect might link to a more pessimistic outlook on life than we’d like to acknowledge.
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What The World Demands Of Deaf People
Jaipreet Virdi, assistant history professor at the University of Delaware, joins us to talk about her research into medicine’s long legacy of promised hearing cures and why science has yet to achieve a universal solution.
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Why Guys Need More Friends
Boston Globe staff writer Billy Baker joins us to talk about his realization that, at 40, his full life was missing a cadre of close buddies and how that lead to his quest to rebuild those intimate connections outside work and family.
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What Does It Mean To Be Asian-American?
Cathy Park Hong, poetry editor of the New Republic and a professor at Rutgers-Newark University, joins us to talk about the stereotypes, suspicions, successes and fears wrapped up in her identity.
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When Scientists Dabbled In Clairvoyance
Alicia Puglionesi holds a Ph.D. in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology from Johns Hopkins University, and she joins host Krys Boyd to discuss a field of study that tried to make a science of the unexplained.
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