Only Human

What happens when you’re becoming a psychologist but you’ve never come clean to your own family about your struggles with mental health? This is the dilemma Rose confronts, and she lets us eavesdrop when she finally confesses to her mother that she’s been depressed most of her life.

In the early 1900s, an eccentric fitness guru named Bernarr Macfadden discovered what he believed was a treatment for everything: fasting. In this episode, how Macfadden’s miracle cure got big, was forgotten and came back nearly a century later.

Robert Hoge doesn’t look like most people. He was born with severe defects; growing up, he had to get used to people calling him “ugly.” This week, Robert reflects on the lie we all tell ourselves: that it’s what on the inside that counts, and looks don’t matter. And he tells us what happens when the way you look forces you to confront that, every day.

Memory and listening go hand-in-hand. But you know the feeling: You’re at an event where you don’t know anyone. And then you get introduced to lots of folks — only to forget their names ten minutes later. The good news? We can work on our memory. Memory champion and science journalist Joshua Foer guides us through creative ways that will help make any name stick — and reminds us effort is always key.

An outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease had New Yorkers panicking last summer. We go behind the scenes to find out how the city stopped a deadly bacteria that claimed 16 lives, and left more than a hundred people sick.