Matthew Laplante

Again and again, similar patterns show up in nature in different creatures at different times in their evolutionary histories—even when those life forms have evolved on much different paths for hundreds of millions of years. And when they show up, as it turns out, we often perceive them as beautiful. So, the question is: Why?

For most of the history of the Disney brand of amusement parks, an “Everyone is a V.I.P.” philosophy made good business sense. With limited exceptions, Walt Disney and his successors resisted tiered services that gave extra privileges to those who could afford them. But if you’ve been to a Disney park lately, you know that’s no longer the case. In his recent op-ed for The News York Times, Daniel Currell examines why that is, and what’s to come.

A few years back, we had David Sinclair on the program. David is one of the world’s top researchers working on the question of whether we can extend human lifespans.A couple years after that, Nate Price was with us. Nate is also looking at this question, though from a different angle: he wants to know how we can pack more healthy years into the lifespans we already have.But here on the program, we find ourselves returning to another version of that same question: what does it actually mean to lengthen a life?Brett Popplewell has been thinking about that too — about whether a life can feel longer not only through years added, but through attention, novelty, memory, movement, and the refusal to let the days become interchangeable.

For years, comedy thrived on cynicism. The world was a mess, people were selfish, and anyone who believed otherwise was the punchline.But from Ted Lasso, to Paddington, to Come From Away, some of our most beloved stories are finding humor, heart, and even heroism in empathy, earnestness, and human decency.This summer, Lyric Repertory Company is producing Gutenberg! The Musical! It’s a delightfully ridiculous show about two aspiring theater makers who are convinced they have created a masterpiece. They haven't, but their unwavering enthusiasm is part of what makes the show so charming.And it's not the only production in Lyric's season that seems interested in the power of human decency.

It’s a question psychologists have been wrestling with for decades: What exactly is time?Not the time kept by clocks or calendars, but the time we actually experience. Why do some moments stretch and others collapse?Martin Wiener has spent much of his career trying to understand those questions. His work suggests that our experience of time is not fixed at all. Instead, it may be something the brain continuously constructs and reshapes according to the information it decides is worth remembering.

When we think about cancer, we tend to think about what doctors can do. But what about what patients can do? How much of that is hope? How much of it is science?

When wildfire threatens a community, what determines who makes it out safely? Emergency managers, firefighters, and weather all play critical roles, but so do the choices we make before and during an evacuation. After three decades of studying fast-moving fires, University of Utah researcher Tom Cova explains what he has learned about preparation, quick decisions, and why neighbors helping neighbors can save lives.

We all know politicians, advertisers and social media algorithms are trying to influence what we believe. But what about our own brains? How do we know when our beliefs are helping us, and when we’re instead engaged in a form of inner propaganda? And how can we use this knowledge to our advantage?

There are a lot of rich and powerful people in Silicon Valley who have said some strange things about democracy.It would be easy to dismiss some of this as tech entrepreneurs doing what tech entrepreneurs have always done: dreaming about moving fast and breaking stuff, and making enormous claims about the future.But the journalist Gil Durán thinks that dismissing all of this as blather would be a mistake.In his new book, The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy, Durán argues that these ideas actually belong to an emerging political ideology — one that has moved from obscure books and blogs into some of the most powerful institutions in the United States.