More than two decades ago, Adam Riess’s Nobel Prize-winning work fundamentally changed our understanding of the universe. His new work is reshaping cosmology for a second time.
Uri Simonsohn is a behavioral science professor who wants to improve standards in his field — so he’s made a sideline of investigating fraudulent academic research. He tells Steve Levitt, who’s spent plenty of time rooting out cheaters in other fields, how he does it.
Former U.S. Secretary of Education, 3×3 basketball champion, and leader of an anti-gun violence organization are all on Arne’s resume. He’s also Steve’s neighbor. The two talk about teachers caught cheating in Chicago public schools and Steve shares a story he’s never told Arne, about a defining moment in the educator’s life.
Kate Marvel spends her days playing with climate models, which she says are “like a very expensive version of The Sims.” As a physicist she gets tired of being asked to weigh in on economics, geopolitics, and despair — but she still defends the right of scientists to have strong feelings about the planet.
Twenty years ago, before the Freakonomics book tour, Bill McGowan taught Steve Levitt to speak in public. In his new book he tries to teach everyone else.
Former professional poker player Annie Duke wrote a book about Steve’s favorite subject: quitting. They talk about why quitting is so hard, how to do it sooner, and why we feel shame when we do something that’s good for us.
Psychologist David Yeager thinks the conventional wisdom for how to motivate young people is all wrong. His model for helping kids cope with stress is required reading at Steve’s new high school.
She’s a botanist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the author of the bestselling Braiding Sweetgrass. In her new book she criticizes the market economy — but she and Steve find a surprising amount of common ground.
Palliative physician B.J. Miller asks: Is there a better way to think about dying? And can death be beautiful?
Historian Tom Holland narrowly escaped a career writing vampire novels to become the co-host of the wildly popular podcast The Rest Is History. At Steve’s request, he compares President Trump and Julius Caesar and explains why the culture wars are arguments about Christian theology.
John Green returns to the show to talk about tuberculosis — a disease that kills more than a million people a year. Steve has an idea for a new way to get treatment to those in need.
Abraham Verghese is a physician and a best-selling author — in that order, he says. He explains the difference between curing and healing, and tells Steve why doctors should spend more time with patients and less with electronic health records.
Jens Ludwig has an idea for how to fix America’s gun violence problem — and it starts by rejecting conventional wisdom from both sides of the political aisle.
Ellen Wiebe is a physician who helps seriously ill patients end their lives in Canada, where assisted suicide is legal. Is death a human right?
He has been a lawyer, an instructor at the F.B.I. Academy, the owner of a frozen-yogurt chain, and a winner of the TV show Survivor. Today, Kwon works at Google, but things haven’t always come easily for him. Steve Levitt talks to Kwon about his debilitating childhood anxieties, his compulsion to choose the hardest path in life, and how Kwon used game theory to stage a victory on Survivor.
Ken Goldberg is at the forefront of robotics — which means he tries to teach machines to do things humans find trivial.
Suzanne O’Sullivan is a neurologist who sees many patients with psychosomatic disorders. Their symptoms may be psychological in origin, but their pain is real and physical — and the way we practice medicine, she argues, is making those and other health problems worse.
Reginald Dwayne Betts spent more than eight years in prison. Today he’s a Yale Law graduate, a MacArthur Fellow, and a poet. His nonprofit works to build libraries in prisons so that more incarcerated people can find hope.
Chemist Jack Szostak wants to understand how the first life forms came into being on Earth. He and Steve discuss the danger of “mirror bacteria,” the origin of biology in poisonous chemicals, and the possibility that life might exist on other planets too.
Owen Flanagan’s newest book details his 20-year dependence on alcohol and pills — and outlines his research on what addiction can tell us about the nature of consciousness.
The primatologist discusses the thrill of observing chimpanzees in the wild, the value of challenging orthodoxy, and why dying is her next great adventure.
Hank Green is an internet phenomenon and a master communicator, with a plan to reform higher education. He and Steve talk about the video blog that launched Hank’s career, the economics of the internet, and how a cancer diagnosis prompted him to become a stand-up comedian.
Jonathan Levin is an academic economist who now runs one of the most influential universities in the world. He tells Steve how he saved Comcast a billion dollars, why he turned down Steve’s unusual pitch to come to the University of Chicago, and why being a nice guy makes him a better college president.
Sarah Hart investigates the mathematical structures underlying musical compositions and literature. Using examples from Monteverdi to Lewis Carroll, Sarah explains to Steve how math affects how we hear music and understand stories.
Sarah Stein Greenberg runs Stanford’s d.school, which teaches design as a mode of problem solving. She and Steve talk about what makes her field different from other academic disciplines, how to approach hard problems, and why brainstorms are so annoying.
David Eagleman upends myths and describes the vast possibilities of a brainscape that even neuroscientists are only beginning to understand. Steve Levitt interviews him in this special episode of People I (Mostly) Admire.
In her book, Rumbles, medical historian Elsa Richardson explores the history of the human gut. She talks with Steve about dubious medical practices, gruesome tales of survival, and the things that medieval doctors may have gotten right.
How psychologist Dan Gilbert went from high school dropout to Harvard professor, found the secret of joy, and inspired Steve Levitt’s divorce.
Moon Duchin is a math professor at Cornell University whose theoretical work has practical applications for voting and democracy. Why is striving for fair elections so difficult?
The director of the Hayden Planetarium is one of the best science communicators of our time. He and Steve talk about his role in reclassifying Pluto, bad teachers, and why economics isn’t a science.
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