Richard Holmes went to Cambridge University intending to study the lives of poets. Until a dueling mathematician, and a dinner conversation composed entirely of gestures, changed his mind.

In today's short, we get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts...until he meets a bird who can keep him in check.

This week on the podcast, football! No, it's not a Super Bowl recap. Jad and Robert present a piece from across the pond--a piece about soccer they fell in love with when they heard it at the Third Coast festival in Chicago.

In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.

In this new short, a tree full of blood-sucking bats lends a startling twist to our understanding of altruism and natural selection.

A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.

Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?

In today's podcast, we get a tantalizing taste of words in the wild, from the jungles to the prairie.

In this podcast, Jad and Robert throw some physics at a bible story. We find out just how many trumpeters you'd actually need to blow down the walls of Jericho.

In this podcast, Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought and the voice in your head. How did it get there? And what's happening when people hear someone else's voice in their head?

Words have the power to shape the way we think and feel. In this stunning video (made to accompany our Words episode), filmmakers Will Hoffman and Daniel Mercadante bandy visual wordplay into a moving exploration of the power of language.

Robert and Malcolm Gladwell duke it out over questions of luck, talent, passion, and success.

An unlikely escape story begins in a supermarket, and ends in a boat off the coast of Maine.

Oliver Sacks, the famous neuroscientist and author, can't recognize faces. Neither can Chuck Close--the great artist known for his enormous paintings of ... that's right, faces.

When scientists treat words like data, clues to the real-life mysteries of human aging are found in the writings of Agatha Christie and 678 nuns.

Music duo Buke and Gass talk to Jad about coaxing delightfully twangy sounds from their homemade instruments.

Lulu Miller talks to a nursing home in Düsseldorf, Germany that came up with a novel approach to caring for Alzheimer's and Dementia patients.

A rare and haunting disorder called Capgras turns loved ones into imposters--and reveals that recognizing people, even the people we know the best, is more about how they make us feel than what we see in front of our eyes.

Biopsychologist Barbara Smuts takes us to a remote area of Kenya, where she tried to gain the trust of a troop of baboons in the 1970s.