Insurance forms that make no sense. Subscriptions that can’t be cancelled. A never-ending blizzard of automated notifications. In this update of a 2025 ...

New York is the latest state to legalize medical aid in dying. Stephen Dubner speaks with the governor who signed the law, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a ...

It brings strangers together. It teaches probability, strategy, and emotional control. It has even helped N.F.L. teams win the Super Bowl. Stephen Dubner ...

As the Trump administration rolls back environmental regulations, we revisit a 2022 episode that explored the hidden cost of an invisible threat: air ...

Another war in the Middle East. A retreat from the international order. A presidency built on self-dealing and arbitrary power. It’s enough to make you think ...

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 ...