Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us know that we're similar to others in many ways, and different from others in many ways. What psychologist Brian Little has found is that there is something that makes each of us truly unique — not just different from others in degree, but different from everyone else who has ever lived. That something is the particular combination of all our traits.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us can point to experiences that made us who we are — a teacher who believed in us, a parent who didn't, a move to a new city that forced us to reinvent ourselves. But psychologists have found that we dramatically underestimate how much we will change in the future, even as we readily acknowledge how much we've changed in the past.

Code Switch

Work does not deserve your full self | Code Switch

To be your authentic self at work is um a level of like vulnerability and putting yourself forward when like you're sacrificing time with your family, with your community, mentally with yourself. And these jobs expect so much from you, but you are ultimately disposable.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us feel we have an ordinary life. We are not famous, we have not discovered a cure for cancer or written a great novel. But the psychologist Brian Little argues this view is mistaken. Our lives are filled with what he calls 'personal projects' — the goals and pursuits that animate us and give meaning to our existence.

Hidden Brain

You Are Not Ordinary

Most of us are somewhere in the middle of the bell curve on most traits — but the more traits you consider, the more each of us diverges into a unique combination that has never existed before and will never exist again. When you consider the totality of who you are, you are not ordinary.

The New York Times

How the War in Iran Is Impacting Street Vendors

For Saeed, selling books isn't only about making money. It's an act of quiet resistance.

Fresh Air

Best Of: Broadway legend André De Shields / Apache Chef Nephi Craig

I believed from my very first conscious thought that my destiny would rise up and meet me

Fresh Air

A former nun on why she ran away from her 'Cloistered' life

I think I'd had a sense of transcendence very strongly when my father died. And that led me on to want to get closer to the source of transcendence. And I thought, you know, religion maybe had the key.

Fresh Air

Broadway legend André De Shields doesn't walk, he floats

I don't rush anywhere. I walk slowly. My reputation is that Andre DeShields doesn't walk, he floats.

Fresh Air

Jia Tolentino on ‘Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare’

The face is traditionally how we come to know each other, how we the first glimpse we have of a person's temperament and soul and life history and disposition. It tells us it answers so many questions. Also, you can tell if a person is tired. You can tell if they're sick. You can tell their emotions. Do they laugh a lot by their laugh lines?

Fresh Air

Broadway legend André De Shields doesn't walk, he floats

I believed from my very first conscious thought that my destiny would rise up and meet me.

Fresh Air

Harriet Clark spent 37 years visiting her mom in prison

I think fundamentally the prison looked to me like a hill. It's hard for me to remember what the prison looked like to me as a child because I went there for almost 40 years and it changed a lot in that 40 years. It became much more prison-like.

Code Switch

Why the World Cup is race and class all the way down

Race and class and identity like always seem to be right there on the surface at the World Cup every 4 years. Like, maybe more so than any other sporting event.

Book of the Day

'The Shampoo Effect,' 'The Revelation of Dionne Daphne' are marked by big surprises

I think that we all have really strong senses about the life that we want to live and the kind of person that we want to become, but once you have children and you're no longer living for yourself, you no longer have the time you want to do everything the right way. You can be this ardent environmentalist who's all of a sudden using disposable diapers.

It's Been a Minute

Homelessness is more common than you think.

I think about it as it's become like the scarlet H. They've taken those conditions and treated them as if it's a moral failure. They've then pinned that on anyone with a label homeless.

It's Been a Minute

The naked truth of beauty

The internet democratized beauty, but now we all are kind of treating ourselves as these project managers of our faces and our bodies.

It's Been a Minute

The naked truth of beauty | It's Been a Minute

When I first started in 2016, I really think beauty was about expression and now increasingly it's about optimization. So people have kind of moved from like how do I want to be? How do I want to express myself to how do I fix myself? How do I optimize?

Fresh Air

'The Invite' screenwriters Rashida Jones & Will McCormack

I think that being an adult is sort of like reconciling who you are with who you want to be. And it's great to have dreams, and sometimes dreams don't come true, but that doesn't mean you can't have another. That doesn't mean—life goes on, right?

Book of the Day

'Kin' and 'When Two Feathers Fell from the Sky' fictionalize the Jim Crow South

Black women are either stereotyped as terrible mothers or just bottomlessly maternal. And so I was really interrogating what does it mean to mother by choice? And what does it mean to mother not by choice?

Fresh Air

Guitarist Lenny Kaye on Patti Smith, Nuggets, and his solo debut

I call my accumulation the museum of me, because I look at all the books, some of which I'll never read, but I like seeing their spines on the shelf.

TED Radio Hour

The state of fashion

Queer space is about sharing. Yes, we're making space for ourselves, but we're also sharing ourselves and we're inviting people into our circle. We're being generous. Maximalism is generous. It's everything. It's the cake. It's the flour, the eggs, the sugar. It's the oven. It's the heat. It's the love that was put into all of it.

Code Switch

How anti-DEI hit the military | Code Switch

Crossing the ocean to fight for freedom abroad that he wasn't even fully granted at home.

TED Radio Hour

The state of fashion

Queer space is about sharing. Yes, we're making space for ourself, but we're also sharing ourselves and we're inviting people into our circle. We're being generous. Maximalism is generous.

Book of the Day

Norah O'Donnell’s 'We the Women' pays tribute to U.S. history's female heroes

On the Declaration of Independence, she puts her name as Mary Katherine Goddard. She wanted to be remembered. She wanted to be part of this founding document and as you point out, it was dangerous and treasonous to put your name on that document.

Fresh Air

Writer Rachel Aviv explores the complexity of the mother-daughter bond

I wrote some of these stories feeling existentially like a daughter, and now I have returned to them with a different identification. It was as if I had failed to see the drama on the mother's side, too, her particular longings and humiliations and needs.

Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Celebrating the 4th with nothing but bangers!

A guy came up to the mic right over there and he said, 'My wife left me because she said I wasn't you.' ... But the gentleman stopped and then he said, 'And I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart.' And he literally dropped the mic and I thought that kind of covers the whole gamut.

Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

Celebrating the 4th with nothing but bangers!

A guy came up to the mic right over there and he said, 'My wife left me because she said I wasn't you.' And he literally dropped the mic and I thought that kind of covers the whole gamut.

TED Radio Hour

The state of fashion

Queer space is about sharing. Yes, we're making space for ourselves, but we're also sharing ourselves and we're inviting people into our circle. We're being generous. Maximalism is generous.

Book of the Day

In 'Names Have Been Changed,' a criminal on the run confesses her story on a podcast

The more time passes, the more she really just wants someone to kind of acknowledge her real name. I think in one of the first few things she tells us in the book is, "I just wish someone would call me by my real name." It's been about 10 years that she's been on the run. And so, it's almost like she's lost sight of herself in that process of hurtling forward, you know, around the globe.

Book of the Day

In 'Names Have Been Changed,' a criminal on the run confesses her story on a podcast

I think the way we speak, like you know, the body, the way we actually make the sounds and especially when we're talking to ourselves in, you know, what we would call our natural voices, like that is in some way maybe the most honest part of ourselves coming out.

Book of the Day

Tom Perrotta’s novel 'Ghost Town' revisits a New Jersey childhood from a bygone era

My mother was like, no, my kids are going to college. And and you know, uh my brother went to Williams College, my sister went to Villanova, I went to Yale. So, you know, her vision of the family was the vision that determined our lives.

Book of the Day

Laverne Cox on her childhood, 'Walden' and her new memoir 'Transcendent'

When I um read Walden when I was a freshman in high school, I was just sort of like transcendentalism. This is like this is what I want wanted to do my whole life. I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word um for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.

Book of the Day

Laverne Cox on her childhood, 'Walden' and her new memoir 'Transcendent'

I wanted to transcend how people see me because I was assigned male at birth and because I'm black and poor in the South. I want to transcend this body. I want to transcend like time and space. And I finally had a word for what I longed to do and what I felt like I was here to do.

Fresh Air

Wendell Pierce is a proud journeyman actor

I'm a journeyman actor. And some people say I shouldn't say that, but I actually embrace that. That's something that I wear with pride.

Fresh Air

Wendell Pierce is a proud journeyman actor

There's the joke that we have as actors of the five stages of your career. There's who is Wendell Pierce? Get me Wendell Pierce. Get me someone like Wendell Pierce. Get me a younger Wendell Pierce. And then the last and final and fifth stages, who is Wendell Pierce?

Fresh Air

Laverne Cox

I want to protect that little child. I'm just so, I'm so angry. And I think like, yeah, I don't know if I can be able to read excerpts from this book again. We'll see. I'm just I'm so pissed. I'm so angry. And I'm so hurt.

Fresh Air

Laverne Cox

I saw the switch flip in their eyes. I saw that flicker of threat. The way their stances shifted into those of aggression that made the hairs on my arms stand on end. They were disgusted by me. I was no longer a friend, a peer, someone to play with. I was an easy target. I was prey.

Fresh Air

Best Of: A family split by race / Eddie Glaude Jr. on America at 250

My grandfather kept Edward's secret right from the very beginning out of a sense of protectiveness for him. He knew that this was a very dangerous and risky thing that Edward was doing. Black men who were found to be posing as white could face all sorts of violence, even death in the Jim Crow era.

Code Switch

Obama's new Presidential Center and his tricky relationship with the South Side | Code Switch

I mean, it probably looks different if you're a tourist walking the grounds than it would if you're one of the kids of that high school across the street.

Fresh Air

Comic Ali Siddiq on fatherhood, prison, and his biggest regret

I didn't want my kids to think that anything else was more important than them, not being in the streets, not women, not gambling, not hustling, not anything. I didn't want them to ever think that anything that I was doing was more important than them. And my father made me at times feel unimportant to him.

Throughline

Captain America and the nation's conscience | Throughline

You are never going to be Superman unless you suddenly find a lot of money from somewhere. You are never going to be Batman. But, there's always that chance, isn't there, that you could one day be Captain America.

Hidden Brain

A Secret Source of Connection

Most of us think of the things we have in common with other people as a source of connection. But Inbar and his colleagues have found something surprising: the things that make us different can be just as powerful — and sometimes more powerful — at bringing people together.

It's Been a Minute

Generative AI's race problem

I don't think that we have a lot of opportunities or enough opportunities to feel meaningfully seen. I can't really blame anybody for saying, 'Oh, this song moves me. This song makes me feel seen.' when we're in a media climate where we don't really have as many opportunities as I would like for us to feel meaningfully seen.

The New York Times

How the World Cup’s Most Famous Voice Gets Ready for “GOOOAL!”

It was a very emotional and very authentic broadcast because it was just myself on air, and very happy for my home country. It was something that I had been waiting for as much as all the Argentinian soccer fans for 36 years.

Hidden Brain

Who Are You, Really?

You're not the same person with your friends as you are with your co-workers or your kids. So who are you, really?

Book of the Day

In 'Keeper of My Kin,' Ada Ferrer struggles with being her mother's "chosen one"

I felt like that moment represented like a kind of original sin, that my success, my flourishing, my everything came from my mother's decision to take me, which was a decision that also involved leaving him behind. So, I felt guilty for being the chosen one.

It's Been A Minute

You're not broken. You're experiencing 'Church Hurt.' | It's Been A Minute

The most damaging thing about conversion therapy was it said everything that is natural that felt natural to me... was sinful and that my desire to express myself as a person who wants to be in relationship with another human being — that because it was directed to someone of the same sex that I had to completely reorient and change everything about me to be acceptable to God.