01
September 28, 2026
Colors
Radiolab · Jad Abumrad & Robert Krulwich · 1 hr 6 min
A playful, gorgeous episode about how different creatures and cultures see colour. It changes how the sky looks.
All topics
Episodes about making things.
Handpicked podcast conversations with writers, designers and builders about craft, taste and the long work of making something good.
02
September 27, 2026
#168: The Value of Deep Work in the Age of Distraction
The Art of Manliness · Cal Newport · 57 min
A clear, practical case for long, undistracted focus from the person who named it. Still true, maybe more so.
03
September 25, 2026
David Reich – Why the Bronze Age was an inflection point in human evolution
Dwarkesh Podcast · David Reich · 2 hr 13 min
A geneticist reads ancient DNA like a history book and finds a far stranger, more mixed human story than we were taught.
04
September 24, 2026
Montaigne
In Our Time · Melvyn Bragg and guests · 42 min
A calm, clear introduction to the man who invented the essay by writing honestly about himself.
05
September 17, 2026
Mary Oliver — “I got saved by the beauty of the world.”
On Being · Mary Oliver · 50 min
A rare, unhurried conversation with the poet who spent a lifetime paying attention. Quiet, funny, and completely without pretence.
06
September 15, 2026
Andrew Graham-Dixon on Vermeer, a Forgotten Sect, and Underrated Artists
Conversations with Tyler · Andrew Graham-Dixon · 57 min
Someone who has looked at paintings professionally for decades explains what he actually sees. It will change how long you stand in front of things.
07
September 14, 2026
The Gondolier
Radiolab · Latif Nasser · 1 hr 13 min
A story that starts somewhere very specific and ends up somewhere much larger. The kind of episode you describe badly and remember for years.
08
September 9, 2026
The Borrowed Nature of Biomimicry
99% Invisible · Roman Mars · 32 min
Designers love the phrase learn from nature. This looks at what that borrowing actually costs and who gets credit.
09
September 7, 2026
How Feelings Make Us Smarter
Hidden Brain · Peter Salovey · 48 min
The case that emotion is not the opposite of reason but part of the machinery. Careful, unhurried, and quietly useful.
10
September 5, 2026
385. Saint Patrick: Slave, Rebel, & Ireland’s Patron Saint (Ep 3)
Empire · William Dalrymple & Anita Anand · 55 min
A kidnapped teenager becomes a national symbol, and almost none of it happened the way the parade suggests. History as an argument about who owns a story.
11
September 4, 2026
Valeria Luiselli : Beginning Middle End
Between the Covers · Valeria Luiselli · 2 hr 45 min
David Naimon gives a serious writer the time serious writers rarely get. Slow, generous, and about form as a moral choice.
12
August 29, 2026
Elizabeth I vs The Catholics: The Queen’s Spymaster (Part 1)
The Rest Is History · Tom Holland & Dominic Sandbrook · 1 hr 12 min
Espionage before there was a word for it: plots, ciphers and a state learning to watch its own people. Told at eye level, with the details that make it stick.
13
August 28, 2026
Joel Mokyr on Clans, Corporations, and a Culture of Growth
Conversations with Tyler · Joel Mokyr · 46 min
Mokyr has spent a career on why sustained growth started where it did, and Cowen pushes him past the textbook story into culture, clans and institutions.
14
August 27, 2026
364 | Stuart Firestein on How Science Relies on Ignorance and Failure
Sean Carroll's Mindscape · Stuart Firestein · 1 hr 16 min
Firestein argues that science runs on ignorance rather than facts, and Carroll lets the idea breathe. A rare hour that makes not knowing feel like a skill.
15
August 25, 2026
What Art Does For Your Brain
Hidden Brain · Daisy Fancourt · 49 min
A careful look at why standing in front of a painting changes something measurable in us. The episode resists the wellness pitch and stays with the evidence.
16
August 24, 2026
Ursula K. Le Guin interview
Between the Covers · Ursula K. Le Guin · 1 hr 30 min
A slow, generous conversation with a writer who spent her life insisting that imagination is a moral faculty. David Naimon asks real questions and then, rarely for an interviewer, gets out of the way.
17
August 21, 2026
Bad Medicine, Part 1: The Story of 98.6
Freakonomics Radio · Stephen Dubner · 48 min
A quietly unsettling look at how much of medicine rests on numbers nobody re-checked. Not a conspiracy story — a story about how evidence actually accumulates, and how slowly it gets corrected.
18
August 20, 2026
TSMC
Acquired · Ben Gilbert & David Rosenthal · 3 hr 12 min
The story of the single most important company most people cannot name, told with the patience of a long book and the clarity of a great lecture. By the end you understand not just a business but the physical substrate of modern life.
19
August 17, 2026
What the internet is doing to our attention (with Nilay Patel)
The Ezra Klein Show · Nilay Patel · 1 hr 12 min
Two people who have spent their careers inside the attention economy talk honestly about what it has cost. It is not a lecture about screen time; it is a conversation about what happens to a culture when everything is optimised for a click.
20
August 15, 2026
Are Bunions Born or Made?
Move Your DNA with Katy Bowman · Katy Bowman · 44 min
A biomechanist takes the most unglamorous subject imaginable and uses it to explain something larger: how the shape of a body records decades of small habits. No supplements, no protocols, no hype. Just careful thinking about how we live in our own feet.
21
August 12, 2026
Plate Tectonics
In Our Time · Sanjeev Gupta, Rebecca Bell, Saskia Goes · 52 min
A calm academic conversation about how an idea considered ridiculous became the foundation of modern earth science. No music, no drama, just three scholars taking their time. It is a small lesson in how consensus actually changes.
22
August 10, 2026
Pockets
Articles of Interest · Avery Trufelman · 23 min
A short episode about a detail so ordinary you have never once questioned it, and by the end it has become a story about who is trusted to carry things. The best kind of small idea: it stays with you longer than most long ones.
23
August 9, 2026
Matthew Walker on sleep, Part I: the dangers of poor sleep
The Peter Attia Drive · Matthew Walker · 1 hr 58 min
Two careful scientists taking their time with a subject most of us treat casually. There is no hype here and no product at the end, which is exactly why it changes behaviour more reliably than a book summary would.
24
August 5, 2026
Children of the Magenta (Automation Paradox, pt. 1)
99% Invisible · Roman Mars and Katie Mingle · 34 min
Long before anyone argued about AI, aviation had already learned what happens to human skill when the machine does most of the work. This episode turns one flight into a quiet, unforgettable argument about the cost of handing over control.
25
August 1, 2026
Eyes Wide Open: Part 2
Hidden Brain · Matthew Walker · 36 min
Sleep scientist Matthew Walker explains why the average adult's habit of trading sleep for productivity is a quiet act of self-sabotage. The conversation moves past generic advice into what actually happens in a dreaming brain and why it matters for memory, mood and health. It's the rare health segment that changes behavior without moralizing.
26
July 30, 2026
Nvidia Part I: The GPU Company (1993-2006)
Acquired · Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal · 119 min
Long before Nvidia became a trillion-dollar AI bellwether, it was a scrappy graphics chip company that nearly died more than once. Ben and David trace those near-collapses and the stubborn technical bets that eventually paid off, which makes today's AI boom look far less inevitable and far more earned. It's a masterclass in how founders survive years of being almost wrong.
27
July 27, 2026
The Choices Before Us
Hidden Brain · Sheena Iyengar · 49 min
Sheena Iyengar spent her career studying why more options don't necessarily make us happier, and this conversation distills that research into something usable. It reframes daily decision fatigue as a design problem rather than a personal failing. Recorded during early pandemic uncertainty, its insights about control and choice have only grown more relevant.
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