How Nintendo Leveled Up
Over the past 40 years, Shigeru Miyamoto has been inventing the modern video game one pixel at a time. From Donkey Kong to Super Mario Bros to The Legend of…
In the Clear
The Problem with Birds and Glass Three Ways to Make Your Home Safer for Birds: 1. Reduce lighting at night. Light pollution can disorient birds and draw them in to…
Spark Bird: John Kessler and the Music of Birds
BirdNote’s longtime senior producer on becoming more aware of bird sounds
African Sci-Fi Looks to a Future Climate
When the writer Nnedi Okorafor coined the term Africanfuturism, she wanted to distinguish sci-fi written about Africa from Afrofuturism, which is focuses on the experiences of Black people in the…
Towers of Silence
this story is about a specific thing but also about how a system collapses when the keystone is removed
Secrets of the Planet of the Apes, with Josh Friedman
The Planet of the Apes franchise spans decades and formats: it started as a French novel in 1963, and then jumped the Atlantic to become a long-running series of movies,…
Untold Killing
Over the course of a mid-Summer week in July 1995, more than 8,000 men and boys were systematically killed in a small Bosnian town called Srebrenica. 'Untold Killing' tells the…
An African perspective on the history of Africa
Africa's story has long been presented in western narratives as one that only 'began' with the arrival of non-Africans – yet modern science has revealed that the African continent was,…
The world’s humblest heroes, from plumbers to tardigrades
Inspired by The Super Mario Bros Movie, we're talking about a humble class of heroes whose lives are devoted to infrastructure maintenance and repair. There are heating engineer rogues and…