Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda

First impressions are supposed to tell us a lot, and they often do. Problem is, as Malcolm Gladwell explains in his latest book Talking to Strangers, sometimes what they tell us is wrong – dangerously wrong. Even deadly.

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A passionate astronomer and a vivid writer, Emily Levesque describes a life of watching what’s out there in the universe so vividly, you may want to run out and get a telescope. Her new book is The Last Stargazers.

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Recently nominated as the first presidential science advisor with a seat in the cabinet, Eric Lander talks with Alan about his leading role of the Human Genome Project and how the insights it’s revealed into diseases as different as Covid-19 and cancer are leading to treatments, and even cures, that he never imagined possible.

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When we see a magic trick, is the magician fooling us, or are we fooling ourselves? Penn Jillette, the talking half of the magic team Penn and Teller, tells Alan how tricks are a test of how we process reality.

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We not only need to sleep, we need to dream, too. Robert Stickgold explains why we must go to the movies every night when we sleep – it’s to make sense of our waking world. And it’s all in his book When Brains Dream.

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They did their military service, not in Vietnam, but in the world's largest research hospital – and over the years their work has saved millions of lives. You’ve probably never heard this story, even though someday yours may be a life that is saved by the Soldiers of Science.

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An in-depth preview of the upcoming eleventh season of Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda.

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Two old friends who have played together on stage and on camera have a chat. And not only discover new things about each other’s approach to acting, but also share their joy of connecting on stage – and the role the audience plays in those moments of spontaneity that make a live performance magical.

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A leading scientist who studies how genes make bodies, Cassandra Extavour almost became a musician and still sings professionally. She works with an extraordinary insect gene called oskar. Hundreds of millions of years ago oskar borrowed a fragment of a bacterial DNA that made sexual reproduction possible in the vast majority of animals– including you, me, and scientists who sing.

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The author of The Handmaid's Tale and its sequel, The Testaments, lets us in on her process of storytelling, involving both a “panoramic view ” and rolling revisions: “I’m more of a downhill skier – just get to the end and then you can go back and see where you screwed up along the way, count the trees you’ve hit.”

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