301 - Cognitive Dissonance - Part Two

Tim Harford of the podcast Cautionary Tales sits down with David McRaney to hear a story from David's book, How Minds Change, about how (and why) a prominent conspiracy theorist realized he was wrong. Charlie Veitch was certain that 9/11 was an inside job. The attack on the World ...  Show more

Communications professor Heather Barnes teaches us how to use what she learned teaching at Second City, managing the Museum of Science and Industry, and taking classes at the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science to truly engage with difficult people through the power of pos ...  Show more

This week, Scott is joined by Dr. Richard Wiseman, a psychologist renowned for his work on magic, illusion, deception, luck, and self-development. As the UK's only Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire, Dr. Wiseman has published ov ...  Show more

A paper published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention argues that Chagas disease is now endemic in the U.S. Koalas may finally be spared from a deadly epidemic. Meanwhile NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has uncovered tantalizing clues about potential ancient microbia ...  Show more

Scientists now agree that COVID spreads via airborne transmission. But during the early days of the disease, public health officials suggested that it mainly did so via close contact. The subsequent back-and-forth over how COVID spread brought science journalist Carl Zimmer into ...  Show more

Chief multimedia editor Jeffery DelViscio ventured to Greenland for a month to learn from the scientists studying the country’s ice sheet. He speaks with host Rachel Feltman about his time in the field and his takeaways from conversations with climate scientists. This story was s ...  Show more