Episode Archives

CM 174: Michael McCullough on the Kindness of Strangers

How did humans, a species of self-centered apes, come to care deeply about complete strangers? From an evolutionary standpoint, we shouldn’t be kind to strangers. Yet, history shows, time and again, we are. Scientists see it as a puzzle to solve. Michael McCullough, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, believes it’s…

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CM 173: Katherine Kinzler on How Language Shapes Us

We recognize the biases we hold around race, class, and gender, but what about language? Katherine Kinzler, author of the book, How You Say It: Why You Talk the Way You Do – and What It Says about You, explains, “The language you speak, and the accent or dialect you use to speak it, is…

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CM 172: Ashley Whillans On How to Reclaim Your Time

How can we escape the time traps that keep us from living our best lives? These are the traps that make us feel like there are never enough hours in the day. They leave us time poor, a term Ashley Whillans talks about in her book, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live…

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CM 171: Anne Helen Petersen on Workplace Burnout

How did we get to a place where life’s become an endless treadmill of work? In her latest book, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, Anne Helen Petersen tackles this question. Her book is for anyone who feels their life has become an endless to-do list. In particular, Petersen describes the plight of…

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CM 170: Nicholas Carr on What the Internet Does to Our Brains

Is the onslaught of online information eroding our brain’s ability to think deeply and creatively? In 2008, Nicholas Carr, asked the provocative question, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Two years later, he delved more deeply into this topic in his Pulitzer Prize-nominated book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.  Writing at…

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