7th Avenue Project

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 ignored or glossed over.

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 saddened, and I sought out someone who appreciated his work as much as I do. Paul Provenza is both a comedian and a sort of comedy curator, chronicler and catalyst, and he was responsible for one of Garry's more revealing public appearances, which I was fortunate enough to attend.

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 channeling the intentions of composers such as Ravel, Brahms and Beethoven. That includes playing some of the vintage pianos the composers themselves wrote for, and Gwen demonstrated with some exquisite renditions as we talked about her concert and recording career. Also discussed: school days at Juilliard with Yo Yo Ma, driving the silk road, making mistakes in concert, and the best way to listen to a piano.

“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 beat the odds and now enjoys the status of a tenured professor at a major university, but he hasn't forgotten where he came from, or the racial realities that made his story so unlikely. George and I talked about his beginnings, becoming a philosopher and using his brand of "down to earth" philosophizing to explore the structure of blackness, whiteness and lived experience in a racialized society.

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 natural world and change the course of evolution. Malaria-resistant mosquitoes? Lyme-free ticks? The possibilities are endless. I talked to molecular biologist and "evolutionary sculptor" Kevin Esvelt, who first proposed the CRISPR gene drive, about its potential and its perils.

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 one of Dean's babysitters. Dean worked with Harvey Pekar and Jonathan Ames on their respective graphic novels, and won an Emmy for his title work on Jonathan's HBO sitcom "Bored to Death." He was also the inspiration for Ray the cartoonist, played on BTD by Zack Galifianakis. We talked about all of the above, plus Dean's beginnings as a comic artist, his love of superheroes, his own hero complex, his residencies at the Yaddo artist colony, and much else.

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 had some unresolved issues around bullying in his youth, and wanted to better understand the relationship between violence and masculinity, including his own. We talked about MMA, male aggression and Jonathan's book "The Professor in the Cage," as well as his ill-fated run as a literary scholar with an evolutionary bent.

"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 dubious distinction of being TV's first showrunner to go Full Monty, being manhandled by Zack Galifianakis, his friendship with Jason Schwartzman, the comedic excellence of Patrick Stewart and more.

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 attempted to replicate 100 published psychology studies and found that half or more of the follow-ups failed to support the original findings. So is it time to start doubting the credibility of research in general? Stanford University psychologist and Reproducibility Project participant Mike Frank joined us to explain what the results really mean, misconceptions about statistical significance, the various ways experimenters can go wrong, and how they can do better.

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, civility, a cool head and patience are usually the best ways to fight crime while minimizing dangers to officers and the public. We talked about the psychology of police-civilian confrontations, alternatives to deadly force, and some recent cases where things went seriously wrong, including the Walter Scott shooting, the Sandra Bland arrest and the McKinney pool party.

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 ancient ritual chants and folk songs to classical, rock and pop (both Chinese and Western) – to create something that feels seamless, heartfelt and original. He's also a wonderful singer, as you'll hear in this very tuneful interview.

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 hint at how selfhood might be assembled in the first place. What exactly is a self, anyway? Is it the product of specific neural mechanisms, or perhaps a psych-social construct? Does it ever go entirely away? Science writer Anil Ananthaswamy examines the evidence from neuroscience along with theories of the self from psychology, philosophy and spiritual traditions such as Buddhism, in his new book "The Man Who Wasn't There: Investigations into the Strange New Science of the Self."

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 tuned percussion and hidden structure. Missy Mazzoli discussed her "River Rouge Transfiguration" (inspired by the iconic Ford auto plant) and "Vespers for a New Dark Age": secular music with religious roots. Nico Muhly described the Disneyfied gamelan of his piece "Wish You Were Here" and his "technical exercise with a heart of gold" "Étude #3."

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 not more so. While "The Act of Killing" explored the killers' own fevered imaginations, "The Look of Silence" offers a survivor's perspective as he confronts the perpetrators. Joshua is not only a brilliant filmmaker but also a deeply insightful and eloquent commentator, and this interview is a must-listen.

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 history itself, embracing some convenient myths and turning its back on civil rights and African Americans. In the second part of the show, Pulitzer prizewinner Tony Horwitz reflects on confederate nostalgia, the Lost Cause tradition and "How the South Lost the War but Won the Narrative."

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 stories? I spoke with historian Allyson Hobbs about her book "A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life."

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 History and Memoir of Stage Fright." Sara and I discussed the psychology of stage fright, its sufferers and treatments, how perfectionism and pressure set us up for failure, and the culture of classical performance.

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 surprise of the last 20 years: the revelation that mysterious "dark energy" os pushing the universe apart at faster and faster rates. Bob and I talked about his career, the discovery of dark energy and what it might mean for the future of the cosmos.

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, grasped its full potential. It was his friend and fellow visionary Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron, who had that critical insight. Sydney’s new book, "The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer" is part graphic novel, part historical investigation, part technical primer, part pictorial tribute to a truly wondrous machine.

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 aren't rare at all, matter tends naturally toward greater organization, complex structures and adaptive behavior, making life a likely, even inevitable result of physics. His theory of pre-biological evolution provides a much-needed complement to Darwinian biological evolution.