The 7th Avenue Project

By Robert Pollie

Society & Culture Arts Science & Medicine

What's The 7th Avenue Project about?

A podcast exploring questions in science, culture, music, philosophy and more. Life as we know it, or would like to. The content varies from episode to episode and includes interviews, music and the occasional sound-rich story in the tradition of This American Life or Radio Lab. Produced and hosted by Robert Pollie in California.

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The 7th Avenue Project episodes:

04.05.2016
Remembering Comedian Garry Shandling with Paul Provenza
There are a lot of comedians whose work I'm partial to, but I have a special place in my pantheon for Garry Shandling. He was funny, unsparing, compassionate, psychologically acute and epistemologically astute all at once, an uneasy combination of...
03.15.2016
Gravity Waves Explained by Physicist Anthony Aguirre
If the news coverage of recently discovered gravitational waves left you with lingering questions, you've come to the right place. Theoretical physicist Anthony Aguirre, our go-to guy on all things general relativistic, provides some great insight into the details and...
02.23.2016
Gwendolyn Mok: Pianist and Musical Medium
Gwendolyn Mok may have flunked her first Juilliard audition at the age of 5, but that was just a speed bump en route to a distinguished recording and concert career. Gwen sees herself as a kind of medium, doing her...
11.22.2015
George Yancy: Philosophizing While Black
“As a black male in the United States,” says George Yancy, “to do philosophy in the abstract would be to deny the reality of my own existence.” Yancy grew up in a tough North Philadelphia housing project, where young men...
11.15.2015
Molecular Biologist Kevin Esvelt: Gene Drives, CRISPR Critters and Evolutionary Sculpting
It's one thing to genetically modify an organism in the lab. It's another thing entirely to spread those modifications in the wild, altering whole populations or even species. A new technology, the “CRISPR gene drive,” promises to do just that,...
10.11.2015
Comic Book Artist Dean Haspiel: Superheroes, Antiheroes, Fantasy and Autobiography
If you're going to tell cool stories in comic books, it helps to have had a colorful life and interesting friends. Dean Haspiel has had both. His dad was a writer, occasional street vigilante and confidante of Marilyn Monroe. Mom's...
09.27.2015
Jonathan Gottschall: "The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch"
Jonathan Gottschall's career as a college English prof was on the rocks, and he was desperate to do something completely different. So in his late 30s he left the classroom for the cage, taking up mixed martial arts and training...
09.20.2015
Jonathan Ames: From Writer to Sitcom Showrunner
“I was an obscure novelist and then I was given the keys to this production, and I had to learn on the spot.” And learn he did, helming HBO's "Bored to Death" for three hilarious seasons and now "Blunt Talk"...
09.13.2015
Is Most Scientific Research Wrong? Psychologist Mike Frank on the "Reproducibility Crisis"
It's been called the "decline effect," "the proteus phenomenon," and "the reproducibility crisis": the startling realization that a lot of seemingly solid scientific research doesn't pan out under repeated testing. The latest blow to scientific confidence comes from the Reproducibility...
08.30.2015
Policing: Myths Vs. Realities with Seth Stoughton
Cop shows and tough-on-crime rhetoric often depict a world so brutish that police have no choice but to play rough and kick butt, but Seth Stoughton says we've been misled. The former cop turned law professor and policing expert contends...
08.23.2015
Huang Ruo: A Composer's Journey
Huang Ruo's career wasn't his to choose. His fortune-teller grandfather and composer father did that for him, and at the age of 12 he was bundled off to a distant music conservatory in Shanghai as his mother wept. Sad as...
08.16.2015
Anil Ananthaswamy on Neuroscience and Our Sense of Self
People suffering from Cotard's Syndrome think they're dead. Victims of body integrity identity disorder believe their own limbs don't belong to them, and schizophrenics feel their thoughts aren't their own. By chipping away at our sense of a unified, stable...
08.09.2015
Composers at Cabrillo: Hannah Lash, Missy Mazzoli and Nico Muhly
TThe Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music brings together some of the best and brightest composers working today. I spoke to three from this year's lineup as we listened to some of their pieces. Harpist/composer Hannah Lash confided her love of...
08.02.2015
Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on “The Look of Silence”
Viewers of Joshua Oppenheimer's jaw-dropping documentary "The Act of Killing," about the men who conducted Indonesia's genocidal anti-communist purges in 1965, might well have concluded that it was an impossible act to follow. Yet its sequel is, if anything, even...
07.12.2015
The Civil War Isn't Over: David Blight and Tony Horwitz
I used to think that the Civil War ended at Appomattox. But the next 150 years of conflict – including the events of recent months – make it clear how naive I was. Yale historian David Blight explains how the...
06.28.2015
Racial Passing in the USA: Historian Allyson Hobbs
The recent case of Rachel Dolezal – the “black” activist outed as white – may have seemed novel, but she's actually part of an old tradition of racial passing in this country. How long has passing been going on and...
06.21.2015
Sara Solovitch: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright
Sara Solovitch grew up playing classical piano, a dedicated student and aspiring performer. But she quit at 19, undone by chronic jitters. Thirty years later, she decided to face her old fears, start over and brave the concert stage again....
05.17.2015
Astronomer Robert Kirshner: Supernovas, Dark Energy and The Fate of the Universe
Astronomer Robert Kirshner is an expert in supernovae – those spectacular exploding stars that can outshine a galaxy. It's a specialty he chanced on in grad school, and his timing was perfect. The field was really taking off, and it...
05.10.2015
Writer-Illustrator Sydney Padua: Babbage, Lovelace and the First Computer
A century before the first electronic computers, there was the Analytical Engine, a giant, coal-powered mechanical brain. Sounds like a steampunk fantasy, but it was the real deal: a general-purpose computer capable not only of number-crunching but also logical operations....
05.03.2015
Biophysicist Jeremy England: A New Theory of Evolution
We know life is made of molecules, but how did those molecules come together in the first place? Was it more than a series of rare and highly improbable coincidences--the parts just falling into place? MIT biophysicist Jeremy England thinks...
04.19.2015
Philosopher John Searle on Perception, Mind, Matter and Consciousness
One of America's most prominent philosophers says his field has been tilting at windmills for nearly 400 years. Representationalism – the idea that we don't directly perceive objects in the world, only our mental images of them – has bedeviled...
04.12.2015
Kazuo Ishiguro: “The Buried Giant,” Memory, Lies and Forgetting
IKazuo Ishiguro returns to the show to talk about his first novel in 10 years. The Buried Giant may sound like fantasy fiction, with its ogres, dragon and nod to Arthurian legend, but if so it's fantasy in the same...
03.29.2015
Black Hole Mischief: Is Relativity in Trouble?
It wasn't long after Einstein amazed the world with his theory of general relativity in 1915 that physicists were busily working out its more outlandish implications. And none freakier than the spacetime disruptions we now call black holes. Black holes...
03.22.2015
Eugene S. Robinson: Fighting, Writing, Rocking and Ass-Kicking
Eugene Robinson has been a body builder, disco dance instructor, streetfighter, bouncer, mixed-martial artist, rocker, author, journalist and actor. We talked about his early days fending off bullies in Brooklyn, training at martial arts, becoming a journalist, performing as frontman...
03.15.2015
Physicist Max Tegmark: Mathematics and the Ultimate Nature of Reality
Just as some of us are getting used to the idea of the multiverse, along comes Max Tegmark telling us that we're not thinking big enough. According to Max, there are actually multiple multiverses containing endless copies of and variations...
03.07.2015
The War on Body Hair: Historian Rebecca Herzig
Tweezing, shaving, waxing, corrosive chemicals, hormones, radiation, electrolysis, lasers and now the prospect of genetic engineering: human beings have gone to extreme — and sometimes suicidal — lengths to rid themselves of unwanted body hair. Whence the follicular fear and...
03.01.2015
Plato Lives! Rebecca Goldstein on Why Philosophy Still Matters (Re-run)
Rebecca Goldstein says some of her best friends are “philosophy jeerers,” convinced that anything philosophers can do, scientists can do better. She begs to differ, and offers the grandaddy of Western philosophy as exhibit A. 21st-century America has a surprising...
02.22.2015
Naturalist and snake expert Harry Greene (Re-run)
Harry Greene is a much-admired natural historian and herpetologist with a soft spot for black-tailed rattlesnakes. He's spent years in the field studying venomous serpents, when not in the classroom or lab (he's currently a prof at Cornell; before that...
02.15.2015
General Relativity for Beginners with Anthony Aguirre. Pt. 2 of 2 (Re-run)
Cosmologist Anthony Aguirre and I continue our jaunt through General Relativity. Last week we presented some of the basics. This week, we talk about the evidence, the impacts and implications, including the cosmological constant, the expanding universe, gravity waves, time...
02.08.2015
General Relativity for Beginners with Anthony Aguirre. Pt. 1 of 2 (Re-run)
It was Einstein's greatest idea, and one of the most audacious leaps of scientific imagination ever. Much of what physicists know or think they know about space, time and the cosmos depends on it. But General Relativity is usually brushed...
02.01.2015
Your Genes Are Listening: Social Genomicist Steve Cole (Re-run)
If you've bought into the simplified notion that genes are top-down bosses, issuing marching orders that your cells, body and brain merely obey, it's time to rethink. Biobehavioral scientist Steve Cole and colleagues are assembling a new picture of genes...
01.18.2015
Jonathan Katz on “Dr. Katz” and More
With apologies to Bob Newhart and others, my favorite TV shrink will always be Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist. A lot of the best comics of our era tried out their routines—and worked out their issues—on Dr. Katz's couch, and the...
01.11.2015
Comedian Nore Davis
Growing up, Nore Davis used laughter to ease family friction and foster mutual understanding. As a professional comedian, that's still his M.O., applying some healing humor to divisive subjects like race, homophobia, and police-civilian tensions. We talked about his youth...
01.04.2015
Singer-Songwriter Meklit: All in Good Time (Re-run)
It took Meklit Hadero a while to realize she could be a singer, and a while longer to start recording, but man, has she made up the distance. Over the last few years she's released a series of impeccably produced...
12.28.2014
Davis Perkins: Stories from an Ebola Treatment Unit
Ever wondered what life is like for medical workers treating Ebola patients? Or what sort of people volunteer for such hazardous duty? Davis Perkins is a paramedic, a former paratrooper and retired firefighter with a passion for landscape painting and...
12.21.2014
Eula Biss: On Immunity, Vaccines and Fear
Before reading Eula Biss's new book "On Immunity," I thought the anti-vaccination movement was a recent phenomenon. But as she makes clear, the roots go much deeper: not only historically, but psychologically, sociologically, maybe even theologically. We talked about vaccines...
12.14.2014
Rick Doblin: Psychedelics and Psychotherapy
The criminalization of psychedelic drugs did little to stop casual use, but did make it nearly impossible to do legitimate research on their effects and medicinal potential. Rick Doblin has spent most of his life trying to change that. Now,...
12.07.2014
Laura Kipnis and the Modern Man
Cultural commentator Laura Kipnis is one of our sharpest surveyors of sexual politics and gender relations. She's written bracingly about porn, femininity and feminism, self-deception and scandal, love and marriage… So why'd it take her so long to get around...
11.30.2014
Poet And Warlock of Words Michael Robbins
Michael Robbins says he wanted to be a rock star even more than a poet. His devotion to music, from rap to rock to pop and country, is plain in almost every line of his verse — not just in...
11.27.2014
Richard Ford on Frank Bascombe And Himself
Richard Ford and I don't always see eye to eye on his long-running protagonist Frank Bascombe, and he thinks that's OK, even a good thing. Amidst differing readings and some good-natured contrariety, I learned a lot about Richard the writer,...
11.09.2014
Molecular Biologist Sofie Salama: The Story of Jumping Genes
It's not just organisms that compete in nature—molecules do, too. Sofie Salama and colleagues have been exploring an age-old tug-of-war inside our genome, between genes that spread like kudzu and others that perform a kind of weed control. The conflict...
11.02.2014
Writing for Keeps: The Life and Legacy of Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen didn't publish much, but her work has had an outsize impact. Her stories were instant classics and part of the great democratization of 20th-century American lit. The fact that they were painstakingly written while working menial jobs, raising...
10.26.2014
Comedian Maria Bamford: Not Afraid of the Dark
When we last spoke to Maria Bamford in 2008, she was still flying a little under the mainstream radar. In recent years she's broken through, and success couldn't happen to a nicer, funnier person. Maria's especially well-known and lauded for...
10.19.2014
Experimental Philosopher Jonathon Keats
Jonathon Keats is still searching for the perfect job title. In the meantime he's making do with “experimental philosopher,” though he's also been called a conceptual artist and a poet of ideas. His chosen form is the Gedankenexperiment, brought to...
10.12.2014
Singer, Songwriter, Banjo Player Abigail Washburn
Abigail Washburn always considered singing and songwriting a sideline and never thought she could make a career of it. But a sharp-eared music exec knew better. After overhearing her play at a bluegrass convention, he signed her on the spot...
09.21.2014
Physicist Brian Greene: Time, Gravity, Teaching
I included parts of this interview on the radio show, but this online version is the first time it's been available uncut. Brian was coming to Philip Glass's Days and Nights Festival to present and narrate the film adaptation of...
09.21.2014
Ira Glass on “Ira Glass”
As Ira Glass was getting ready to perform Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host in our area as part of his cousin Philip Glass's Days and Nights Festival, I grabbed the opportunity to chat with him. We talked about...
09.14.2014
Julia Reynolds: Gang Life and Gang Death In California
Julia Reynolds never planned on becoming an expert on gang violence. But as a reporter covering towns like Salinas, CA, she found the carnage hard to ignore, and she wondered why so many young men were keen for a career...
08.31.2014
Jim Dwyer: False Convictions, Forensic Failures
You wouldn't know it from watching CSI, but forensic science may not be so scientific after all. In recent years the use of DNA evidence has exposed just how badly traditional crime lab techniques can fail, helping to convict the...
08.24.2014
Max Brooks on WWI, The Harlem Hellfighters, Zombies and Him
Writer Max Brooks discusses his graphic novel “The Harlem Hellfighters,” about a historic African-American regiment in WWI, as well as his best-selling zombie fiction, his life and career.

What's The 7th Avenue Project about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The 7th Avenue Project episodes:

Remembering Comedian Garry Shandling with Paul Provenza

Gravity Waves Explained by Physicist Anthony Aguirre

Gwendolyn Mok: Pianist and Musical Medium

George Yancy: Philosophizing While Black

Molecular Biologist Kevin Esvelt: Gene Drives, CRISPR Critters and Evolutionary Sculpting

Comic Book Artist Dean Haspiel: Superheroes, Antiheroes, Fantasy and Autobiography

Jonathan Gottschall: "The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch"

Jonathan Ames: From Writer to Sitcom Showrunner

Is Most Scientific Research Wrong? Psychologist Mike Frank on the "Reproducibility Crisis"

Policing: Myths Vs. Realities with Seth Stoughton

Huang Ruo: A Composer's Journey

Anil Ananthaswamy on Neuroscience and Our Sense of Self

Composers at Cabrillo: Hannah Lash, Missy Mazzoli and Nico Muhly

Filmmaker Joshua Oppenheimer on “The Look of Silence”

The Civil War Isn't Over: David Blight and Tony Horwitz

Racial Passing in the USA: Historian Allyson Hobbs

Sara Solovitch: A History and Memoir of Stage Fright

Astronomer Robert Kirshner: Supernovas, Dark Energy and The Fate of the Universe

Writer-Illustrator Sydney Padua: Babbage, Lovelace and the First Computer

Biophysicist Jeremy England: A New Theory of Evolution

Philosopher John Searle on Perception, Mind, Matter and Consciousness

Kazuo Ishiguro: “The Buried Giant,” Memory, Lies and Forgetting

Black Hole Mischief: Is Relativity in Trouble?

Eugene S. Robinson: Fighting, Writing, Rocking and Ass-Kicking

Physicist Max Tegmark: Mathematics and the Ultimate Nature of Reality

The War on Body Hair: Historian Rebecca Herzig

Plato Lives! Rebecca Goldstein on Why Philosophy Still Matters (Re-run)

Naturalist and snake expert Harry Greene (Re-run)

General Relativity for Beginners with Anthony Aguirre. Pt. 2 of 2 (Re-run)

General Relativity for Beginners with Anthony Aguirre. Pt. 1 of 2 (Re-run)

Your Genes Are Listening: Social Genomicist Steve Cole (Re-run)

Jonathan Katz on “Dr. Katz” and More

Comedian Nore Davis

Singer-Songwriter Meklit: All in Good Time (Re-run)

Davis Perkins: Stories from an Ebola Treatment Unit

Eula Biss: On Immunity, Vaccines and Fear

Rick Doblin: Psychedelics and Psychotherapy

Laura Kipnis and the Modern Man

Poet And Warlock of Words Michael Robbins

Richard Ford on Frank Bascombe And Himself

Molecular Biologist Sofie Salama: The Story of Jumping Genes

Writing for Keeps: The Life and Legacy of Tillie Olsen

Comedian Maria Bamford: Not Afraid of the Dark

Experimental Philosopher Jonathon Keats

Singer, Songwriter, Banjo Player Abigail Washburn

Physicist Brian Greene: Time, Gravity, Teaching

Ira Glass on “Ira Glass”

Julia Reynolds: Gang Life and Gang Death In California

Jim Dwyer: False Convictions, Forensic Failures

Max Brooks on WWI, The Harlem Hellfighters, Zombies and Him