Best of: We don’t just feel emotions. We make...

Back in 2015, before President Donald Trump, before January 6, before all the craziness of the last decade, Matt Yglesias made a blunt prediction: American democracy is doomed. Guest host Zack Beauchamp talks with Matt about what that argument got right, what it missed, and why t ...  Show more

What does it mean to be “woke”? It's become a catch-all term to smear or dismiss anything that has any vague association with progressive politics. So anytime you venture into an argument about “wokeness,” it becomes hopelessly entangled in a broader cultural battle. Today’s gues ...  Show more

We all strive to think rationally. But it doesn’t always do us much good. Cutting-edge science has revealed that if we want to sharpen our thinking, we need to feel our feelings. That science is the subject of “Emotional,” a new book by theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow. In ...  Show more

A common idea in the west is that our feelings or emotions should be viewed with suspicion, superseded or overridden by rational thought, and that your mind is a battleground between emotions and rationality. But on the show today, guests Lisa Feldman Barrett and John Dunne ar ...

Healthy//Toxic Healthy versus Toxic is a podcast where licensed mental health professionals explore what makes a relationship healthy or unhealthy. Our hosts aim to provide a scientifically informed perspective on what factors go into making healthy relationships, how to build se ...  Show more

“We don’t actually detect things in the world,” says neuroscientist and psychologist Lisa Barrett. “We infer what we expect to see.” Barrett is the author of How Emotions are Made, a book that overturns a lot of what we thought we knew about the mind and brain. For one, we aren’t ...  Show more