Freakonomics Radio

675. Has the New York Times Become a Games Company?

But their runaway success with games like Wordle says something bigger about the way we live now.

Radiolab

The Bad Show

91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone...what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors.

EconTalk

Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

boundaries, and not unlimited freedom, often make us more creative, productive, and fulfilled

TED

The Art and Science of Wine Tasting | Qian Janice Wang | TED

There are actually two ways of thinking about complexity when it comes to wine or food. There's, first, chemical complexity, right? That's the stuff that's in the glass. What are the chemical molecules in the wine? And then there's a concept called psychological complexity, where complexity is not really in the wine, but it's in the mind of the drinker.

Radiolab

The Bad Show

91% of men, and 84% of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors.

Radiolab

The Bad Show

With all of the black-and-white moralizing in our world today, we decided to bring back an old show from 2011 about the little bit of bad that's in all of us...and the little bit of really, really bad that's in some of us.

Pivot

The Bezos Met Ball Takeover: All the Money, None of the Rizz | Pivot

The day of the IPO, they went into a conference room, this, you know, nice, fairly unattractive guy who had no sexual currency their whole life, and they come out and they're the sexiest man alive.

Pivot

Is Trump Using the WHCD Shooting as an “Opportunity” to Push His Agenda? | Pivot

The biggest psychological tax cut in history would be if we elected a technocrat who maybe checked in once a month but wasn't in your face every day and dominating the table conversation at dinner.

It's Been a Minute

The guys behind the men’s purity movement

I think what is so different about the way specifically men of their generation, which is Gen Z, they're in their very early 20s, and my generation, which is about 10 years older than that, is that they have so much more shame around the amount of pornography they watch.

EconTalk

Adam Smith's Warning About Wealth, Fame, and Status (with Ross Levine)

Smith emerges as a penetrating psychologist who understood that our deepest hunger isn't for wealth but for respect--and that this hunger, left unexamined, leads individuals and societies alike into serious trouble.

Fresh Air

Actor Oscar Isaac is ‘a vulture’ of his own life

With Victor Frankenstein, he had no doubts. The whole movie, he has very little doubt, which was a very freeing thing to play up until the moment of creation. And then after that, it's kind of all doubt. And that's when he kind of goes in within himself and ossifies. But Josh is very different. Josh is mostly doubt and mostly reactionary.

Fresh Air

Have we been reading Toni Morrison all wrong?

Morrison is one of the incredible thinkers and theorists of racism as a pathology. And when she describes what it is to be racist, she's very insistent that this is a problem of the racist. This isn't actually a problem of the black person.

Fresh Air

Have we been reading Toni Morrison all wrong?

You can spend all your time trying to prove that we are humans, that we had a civilization, that we have art, that we have culture. But it's a distraction because there's always going to be one more thing. And actually, the problem is not us. The problem is the racist who has no other way of feeling full, no other way of having integrity other than putting someone else down.

Code Switch

How your vote became your identity

There was a time when our party was a thing that we voted for, and, you know, we felt psychologically connected to the party. The party wins, we feel good. If the party loses, we feel bad. But there's still all these other parts of our identity that we have that are linked to our, you know, sense of self-esteem and our place in the world.

It's Been a Minute

The world is awful. Is it healthier to stop caring? | It's Been A Minute

This pose of acting like you don't care and maybe the pose becomes so real that you actually don't really care.

Hidden Brain

The Debt Trap

We like to think that good financial decisions come down to discipline and basic math. But the psychology of money turns out to be deeply complicated.

Semafor

The State of Happiness in 2026 | Semafor Events

Well, I'd have to say happiness. So that's why we do this. And at that time he was doing surveys where he would ask people just tell me how your life is going.

Book of the Day

'One of Us' is a British political drama based on the Boris Johnson era

The idea of revenge, of nurturing it like a pet, it's the closest he can get to having that love reciprocated.

Hidden Brain

Rethinking Depression

We tend to see depression as an illness to eliminate, evidence that something has gone wrong in the brain. But what if low mood serves a purpose?

TED

1 Thing You Can Do Today to Be Happier | Sonja Lyubomirsky | TED

It dawned on me that almost all of the interventions that work to make us happier, they work precisely because they help us feel more connected to and loved by others.

TED

"FEEL LOVE" / "POSER" | PARTYOF2 | TED

We made to combat imposter syndrome, which is something I think we all kind of deal with