Robert Sapolsky

01/14/24 • 60 min

Our guest is renowned neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky. He’s spent his career investigating behavior across the animal kingdom, including humans. In books like The Trouble With Testosterone and Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, Sapolsky translates decades of research into fascinating stories and lessons accessible to non-scientific audiences. His latest book, Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will, offers a marvelous synthesis of what we know about how consciousness works—the tight weave between reason and emotion and between stimulus and response in the moment and over a life. On January 3, 2024, Sapolsky joined Caterina Fake for a conversation recorded at the studios of KQED in San Francisco.

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Tracy K. Smith

Tracy K. Smith is the author of five acclaimed poetry collections, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, she served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States. In 2020, heartsick from constant assaults on Black life, Smith found herself soul-searching, and digging into the historical archive for help navigating the “din of human division and strife.” In her new book, To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul, Smith draws on several avenues of thinking – personal, documentary, and spiritual– to understand who we are as a nation and what we might hope to mean to one another. On November 10, 2023, Tracy K. Smith came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with john a. powell, Director of the Othering & Belonging Institute and a Professor of Law and Professor of African American Studies and Ethnic Studies at the University of California.

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Dr. Jen Gunter

Our guest is Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB-GYN and pain medicine physician. Gunter’s work both as a clinician and a writer, is aimed at helping women understand and care for their bodies. That includes countering a large amount of misinformation about women’s health - which she does with great wit on social media. Her books include “The Vagina Bible”, “The Menopause Manifesto” and her newest, “Blood: The Science, Medicine, and Mythology of Menstruation”. On January 9, 2024, Jen Gunter came to the studios of KQED in San Francisco to talk with Indre Viskontas.