In his final years, Richard Feynman’s curiosity took him to some surprising places. We hear from his companions on the trips he took — and one he wasn’t ...

What happens when an existentially depressed and recently widowed young physicist from Queens gets a fresh start in California? We follow Richard Feynman out ...

From the Manhattan Project to the Challenger investigation, the physicist Richard Feynman loved to shoot down what he called “lousy ideas.” Today, the world is ...

Not exactly. But their runaway success with games like Wordle says something bigger about the way we live now. (Part one of a series, “We Are All Gamers Now.”) ...

Great. Then depressed. Then great again. Stephen Dubner gets the full story from David Lang; we also hear from some fans, and the New York Philharmonic’s ...

Economists and politicians have turned him into a mascot for free-market ideology. Some on the left say the right has badly misread him. In this updated replay ...

That’s what the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang wanted to learn. So he turned Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations into an oratorio. We tag along as ...

Epic Systems manages the electronic health records for hundreds of millions of people. This makes Faulkner a healthcare heavyweight and one of the most ...

New York City’s mayor called them “public enemy number one.” History books say they caused the Black Death — although recent scientific evidence disputes that ...

One possibility: a leading hypothesis pursued by researchers (and funders) was built on science that now appears to be fraudulent. Stephen Dubner speaks with ...

How do beekeepers make a living? Why is there so much honey fraud? And why did billions of bees suddenly disappear? To find out, guest host Steve Levitt ...

Nearly everything that politicians say about taxes is at least half a lie. They are also dishonest when it comes to the national debt. In this update of an ...

Is it tradition … or protectionism? And what happens when the bourbon boom turns into a glut? SOURCES: Andrew Muhammad, agricultural economist at the ...

As one researcher told us: “We’ve engineered a world where the most distracting device ever made is also the one we use to listen to music in the car.” A ...

In blue cities across the country, unions and politicians want to ban self-driving cars. In this episode from the Search Engine podcast, PJ Vogt visits Boston ...

How a secret project at Google led to driverless cars on American roads. Freakonomics Radio shares a story from our friends at Search Engine. (Part one of a ...

A ruthless (and ruthlessly efficient) industry is using digital tools to supercharge one of the world’s oldest behaviors. We look at how the industry works, ...

Economists don’t usually talk about “culture.” But Joel Mokyr argues that it’s the engine of innovation — and the Nobel Prize committee agreed. Stephen Dubner ...

Just beneath the surface of the global economy, there is a hidden layer of dealmakers for whom war, chaos, and sanctions can be a great business opportunity. ...

… of bad reviews, meager financing, or artificial intelligence. But he is worried that the world is full of sloppy thinkers who mistake facts for the ...