RATIONALITY: Steven Pinker’s Love Song to Cri...

What do your five senses — sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch — have to do with happiness? According to Gretchen Rubin, a great deal. The world around us, she says, has the potential to dazzle, to entertain, to trigger a state of rapture. If only we pay attention. Today on the ...  Show more

America's a funny place. It's not a country with a fixed geographic or religious identity. We don't have a common story of divine creation. "What we have," writes Ben Rhodes in his new book, ⁠All We Say⁠, "are words." The words of the founding documents, yes — but also "the words ...  Show more

Steven Pinker (@sapinker) is a psychology professor at Harvard, one of the world's leading authorities on language and the mind, and an author of several bestsellers. His latest is <a href="https://www ...

Everyone makes mistakes. How do you learn from them? Lessons from the classroom, the Air Force, and the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

RESOURCES:

Why do some countries produce far more science Nobel laureates than others? Why did Silicon Valley happen in California rather than Japan or Boston? Why did the Industrial Revolution happen when it did and where it did?

These are just some of the questions that have insp ...

Today it’s great to have Steven Pinker on the podcast. Dr. Pinker is the Johnstone professor of psychology at Harvard University. A two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist and the winner of many awards for his research, teaching, and books. He’s been elected to the National Academy of S ...  Show more