Shell Game

We’re coming up on the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and it had us thinking about an episode we produced in 2014. It’s the story of one sentence, written in the hours after September 11th, 2001, that has led to the longest war in U.S. history. We examine how just 60 words ...  Afficher plus

The world lost a legend recently, and we wanted in some small way to pay tribute to the great Dolly Parton. So we’re playing you an episode from a series we had a small part in back in 2017, Dolly Parton’s America. The series kicked off with a simple question: How did the queen o ...  Afficher plus

What would happen if you created a digital copy of yourself, powered by AI, and set it loose in the world? Evan Ratliff, longtime tech journalist, decided to find out. He combined a clone of his voice, an AI chatbot, and a phone line—many phone lines, actually—into what are calle ...  Afficher plus

Evan pushes the experiment one step further, sending his AI voice agent to talk to his closest friends and family — his buddies, his daughters, his dad. With their alternately joyful, skeptical, and painful reactions to meeting an AI version of him, he tries to come to terms with ...  Afficher plus

Robert, Joe and Christian call in the mailbot for yet another dose of listener feedback. Join them as they read your thoughts on everything from the uncanny valley and the Black Stone of Mecca to hook suspension and the science of guessing.

On his private space station high above Earth, Professor Burkhead has begun conducting a ground-breaking social experiment. Each week, his “Unifier” pairs together two unlikely creatures and puts them in a room together where the two subjects (an accountant and a giant squid, one ...  Afficher plus