Maryanne Wolf is a cognitive neuroscientist who conducts research on “what the brain does when it reads and why some children and adults have greater difficulty learning how to read than others”. She has written some fascinating books including “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” and “Reader come home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World”. In this podcast Prof Wolf speaks passionately on reading and why, among other things, it needs to be introduced to kids early in their lives. And as adults, what can we do to rewire our brain circuits that may have been frayed with the advent of digital media.

India delivers a shock verdict to the Bharatiya Janata Party during the general elections. Narendra Modi’s BJP has done remarkably well and only lost out on the vote by 0.8 per cent as compared to the previous elections. It’s just that the votes were less effectively distributed. But by not winning the elections with a thumping majority means that the opposition will have a voice in the parliament, always a good sign for a healthy democracy. In sports Sunil Chhetri, the legendary Indian footballer retires. And in the animal kingdom, dice snakes pretend to play dead to detract predators.

Gregory Zukerman writes for the Wall Street Journal. Over the last few decades he has written several books. In 2019 he wrote "The Man Who solved the market: How Jim Simons Launched The Quant Revolution" which became a runaway hit. It tells the story of a genius mathematician who used modern quantitative techniques to make money for himself and his investors. Since 1988 one of the fund’s operated by Mr Simons generated average annual returns of 66%. Legendary investors like Warren Buffet, George Soros and Peter Lynch, too, cannot claim to have made these outsized profits with such consistency. How did Mr Simons go about his business? How did he manage a stellar team while keeping them movitated? How did he use machine learning, artificial intelligence, data and analytics in an era when these terms were unheard of in the industry? Gregory Zukerman explains it all in this podcast.

Alex Duff talks about how Brentford football club used data and analytics to improve and retain its spot in the English Premier League. His book, "Smart Money: The Fall and Rise of Brentford" is a fascinating account of how the club instilled new values and respected number crunching to make key decisions on deciding plays on the field and in the transfer market.

Ananyo Bhattacharya's "The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann" is a fascinating book about the Hungarian-American mathematician. It's a shame that most of us know little about the man. Dr Bhattacharya digs deep into the mathematician's early days and how he went on to have a lasting impact in different fields including nanotechnology, game theory, artificial intelligence and quantum physics.

How does it feel to witness a solar eclipse? Aditya tells us his experience in this podcast where we dig into trivia and history of this beautiful astronomical phenomenon. Bangalore faces a water crisis. How can a country as big as India deal with water shortages? Generative artificial intelligence is and will remain in the spotlight in a year when countries with a collective population of 4bn go to polls.

The Candidates Tournament is among the world’s most recognised Chess contests. This time round India has as many as five grandmasters competing for the top prize. That’s a big deal given that for around 30 years, it was Vishy Anand, the sole Indian grandmaster who represented India. In politics, “washing machine” trended for a while on Twitter in the context of corruption probes which, the opposition argued, could be washed away if one joined the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. And in business, Tesla scouts sites in India for a big plant. What does that mean for the giant and for the country?

Florida just passed a bill proposing to ban access to social media for kids under the age of 14. What does social media addiction do to our brains? We talk about the subject which is close to our hearts given that both of us have kids aged ten and five. The great Indian general elections are round the corner. What is the BJP up to? And in the world of cryptosphere, which we barely understand, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former boss of FTX, a defunct cryptocurrency exchange, gets 25 years in jail.

In this podcast Prof Dennis Yi Tenen, a software engineer turned literary scholar, leans on history of computer programming to tell modern tales of Artificial Intelligence. How did robots learn to write so quickly? Is it a good thing? Do technologies like ChatGPT make us lazy? Not quite, says Prof Tenen. He argues that such advances do not diminish our capacity to think. It may just make us better writers, on an average. Previously machines learned from human outputs but now they learn from machine outputs. What does this mean for us? He believes AI is neither Jesus nor a Terminator-like force as long as both the makers and users use it responsibly.

It’s the end of an era. Ameen Sayani recently passed away. His voice lives on. In this podcast we talk a bit about how he started in the radio industry and made a mark for himself across four decades. And he is as humble as they come. Fali Nariman, a doyen of law in India also died. And Open AI recently dropped its text to video model called SORA. What does it mean for all of us?