7th Avenue Project

Episodes

1. 20

   Gravity Waves Explained by Physicist Anthony Aguirre

   If news coverage of recently discovered gravitational waves left you with lingering questions, you've come to the right place. Theoretical physicist Anthony Aguirre, our go-to guy on all things general relativistic, provides some great insight into the details and subtleties that popular accounts...

   Apr 8, 2016

   53m
2. 19

   Remembering Comedian Garry Shandling with Paul Provenza

   I'm fond of a lot of comedians, but I have a special place in my pantheon for Garry Shandling. His work managed to be funny, unsparing and compassionate, psychologically acute and epistemologically astute all at once. When I learned of his untimely death on March 24 I was, like many fans, deeply...

   Apr 8, 2016

   1h 01m
3. 18

   Gwendolyn Mok: Pianist and Musical Medium

   If her parents hadn't named her "Mok plays the piano" when still in the womb, Gwendolyn Mok might have been a patent lawyer, or race car driver, or surgeon. Luckily for us music lovers, she heeded the parental directive. Gwen sees herself as a kind of musical medium, dedicated to discovering and...

   Feb 26, 2016

   1h 18m
4. 17

   George Yancy: Philosophizing While Black

   “As a black male in the United States,” says George Yancy, “to do philosophy in the abstract would be to deny the reality of my own existence.” Yancy grew up in a tough North Philadelphia housing project, where young men were far more likely to end up in early graves or jail than in academia. He...

   Dec 14, 2015

   1h 16m
5. 16

   Kevin Esvelt: Gene Drives, CRISPR Critters & Evolutionary Sculpting

   It's one thing to genetically modify an organism in the lab. It's another thing to spread those modifications in the wild, altering whole populations or even species. A new technology, the "CRISPR gene drive," promises to do just that, giving human beings unprecedented power to fine-tune the...

   Nov 24, 2015

   1h 25m
6. 15

   Dean Haspiel: Comic Book Hero & Sensitive F***

   If you're going to tell cool stories in comic books, it helps to have had a colorful life and interesting friends. Dean Haspiel has had both. His dad was a writer, occasional street vigilante and confidante of Marilyn Monroe. Mom's pals included Shelly Winters and the young Bobby De Niro, who was...

   Oct 14, 2015

   1h 00m
7. 14

   Why Men Fight: Jonathan Gottschall on "The Professor in the Cage"

   Jonathan Gottschall's career as a college English prof was on the rocks, and he was desperate to do something completely different. So in his late 30s he left the classroom for the cage, taking up mixed martial arts and training for an amateur bout. It was more than a mid-life escapade. Jonathan...

   Oct 5, 2015

   1h 21m
8. 13

   Jonathan Ames: Adventures of a Sitcom Showrunner

   "I was an obscure novelist and then I was given the keys to this production, and I had to learn on the spot." And learn he did, helming HBO's "Bored to Death" for three hilarious seasons and now "Blunt Talk" on Starz. Jonathan Ames describes the terrors and delights of television auteur-dom, the...

   Sep 27, 2015

   59m
9. 12

   Is Most Scientific Research Wrong? Psychologist Mike Frank on the Reproducibility Crisis

   It’s been called the “decline effect,” “the proteus phenomenon,” and “the reproducibility crisis”: the startling realization that a lot of scientific research doesn’t seem to hold up under repeated testing. The latest blow to scientific confidence comes from the Reproducibility Project, which...

   Sep 20, 2015

   1h 20m
10. 11

    Police Myths vs Realities: Seth Stoughton Interview

    Cop shows and crime fiction give us a world so nasty and brutish that police have to play it tough if they want to keep the peace and survive, but Seth Stoughton says we've been misled. The former cop and now law professor/policing expert says that while police have to be prepared for anything,...

    Sep 9, 2015

    1h 18m
11. 10

    Huang Ruo: A Composer's Journey

    You might say Huang Ruo's career as a composer was foreordained – with help from his fortune-teller grandfather – and that fate was kind in this case. Today he's a portrait in joyful expression and unbridled invention. He draws on all the sounds he heard growing up in China in the 80s – from...

    Aug 25, 2015

    1h 11m
12. 9

    Anil Ananthaswamy Interview: Science and the Self

    People suffering from Cotard’s Syndrome think they’re dead. Victims of body integrity identity disorder believe their own limbs don't belong to them, and schizophrenics feel their thoughts aren’t their own. By chipping away at our sense of a unified, stable self, these and other mental conditions...

    Aug 23, 2015

    1h 21m
13. 8

    Composers at Cabrillo: Hannah Lash, Missy Mazzoli, Nico Muhly

    The Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music brings together some of the best and brightest composers working today. I spoke to three from this year's festival as we listened to some of their pieces being performed at Cabrillo (and other work). Harpist/composer Hannah Lash confided her love of…

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    Aug 11, 2015

    1h 00m
14. 7

    Joshua Oppenheimer Interview: Breaking the Silence on Genocide

    Joshua Oppenheimer blew a lot of minds with his 2013 documentary "The Act of Killing," about some of the men who committed genocide in Indonesia in 1965. Werner Herzog called it "unprecedented in the history of cinema." Now Joshua has delivered a companion piece that's every bit as powerful, if…

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    Aug 10, 2015

    1h 15m
15. 6

    Why the Civil War Isn't Over: David Blight & Tony Horwitz

    I used to think that the Civil War ended at Appomattox. But the next 150 years of conflict – including the events of recent months – make it clear how naive I was. Yale historian David Blight explains how the nation dropped the ball when it abandoned Reconstruction and set about reconstructing...

    Jul 19, 2015

    1h 07m
16. 5

    Racial Passing in the USA: Historian Allyson Hobbs

    The recent case of Rachel Dolezal – the "black" activist outed as white – may have seemed novel, but she's part of a long tradition of "passing" in this country. How long has passing been going on? What's it tell us about racial categories and color lines? Why are we so fascinated with passing...

    Jul 10, 2015

    1h 11m
17. 4

    Sara Solovitch: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright

    Sara Solovitch grew up playing classical piano, a dedicated student and aspiring performer. But she quit at 19, undone by chronic jitters. Thirty years later, she decided to face her old fears, start over and brave the concert stage again. She tells the story in her new book, "Playing Scared: A...

    Jun 21, 2015

    59m
18. 3

    Supernovas, Dark Energy, the Fate of the Universe: Robert Kirshner Radio Interview

    Astronomer Robert Kirshner is an expert in supernovae – those spectacular exploding stars that can outshine a galaxy. It's a specialty he chanced on in grad school, and his timing was perfect. The field was really taking off, and it was supernovae that would lead to the biggest cosmological...

    May 18, 2015

    1h 07m
19. 2

    Sydney Padua Interview: Babbage, Lovelace & the First Computer

    A century before electronic computers, there was the Analytical Engine, a giant, coal-powered mechanical brain. Sounds like a steampunk fantasy, but it was the real deal: the first general-purpose computing device. Not even its inventor, the eccentric Victorian-era mathematician Charles Babbage,...

    May 17, 2015

    57m
20. 1

    Jeremy England Interview: A New Theory of Life

    We know life is made of molecules, but how did those molecules come together in the first place? Was it more than a series of rare and highly improbable coincidences--the parts just falling into place? MIT biophysicist Jeremy England thinks so. He says that under the right circumstances, which...

    May 3, 2015

    1h 00m