Members of The Sweet Adelines and the Lustre Quartet join us for this week's Please Explain, which is all about barbershop quartets! Peggy Gram joined The Sweet Adelines, the women’s barbershop organization, in her teens, and is a 50-year member of the group. Jennifer Harris, Kathryn Morrical, Lori Crouter, and Lori Dreyer formed the Lustre Quartet in 2005, and have been a top-10 international quartet since 2012. They will be joined by Gage Averill, an ethnomusicologist and Dean of Arts at the University of British Columbia. He’s also the author of Four Parts, No Waiting: A Social History of American Barbershop Quartet. 

//

Soundchecking the Lustre Quartet for today's Please Explain on barbershop music!

In 2009, a frog was discovered in a rain forest in Ecuador that changed its skin texture from smooth to spiky, and in 2014, a new species of frog was found in Staten Island. These amphibians continue to surprise scientists, yet many species have also been going extinct for decades. For today's Please Explain, we learn about the world of frogs, with Robin Moore, an award-winning photographer, a Senior Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers, and an advocate with the Amphibian Survival Alliance. 

Urvashi Rangan, Director, Consumer Safety for Sustainability at Consumer Reports, discusses the pesticides used on produce and how they affect our health. She offers advice on how to choose produce, if buying organic is better, and looks at the effects of pesticides on the environment and on pollinators. Consumer Reports has compiled a report on pesticides in produce. 

Today, seed plants make up about 90 percent of the world's flora. But that wasn't always the case. Today on Please Explain, Thor Hanson, author of The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses, & Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History, describes the path that seeds have paved through evolution, natural history, and human culture, and examines the traits and habits that have allowed seeds – and the plants that bear them – to be successful, and to transform the planet. Plus, Gerard Lordahl, Greening Director of GrowNYC returns to the show to offer advice on planting seeds at home!

A century ago, daily life ground to a halt when the circus rolled into town. Across America, banks closed, schools canceled classes, farmers left their fields, and factories shut down so that everyone could go to the show. But when Ringling Brothers recently announced that they would retire their elephants in 2018, it underscored the dramatic change taking place in the American circus today. Janet Davis is a professor of American studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top. Today, she joins us for Please Explain: The Circus! 

Around 60,000 years ago, humans migrated out of Africa, but we were not alone. Humans encountered Neanderthals and inbred, which is why Neanderthals play an important role in the story of human evolution. On today's Please Explain, we learn why, with Shara Bailey Associate Professor, Center for the Study of Human Origins at NYU, and Jamie Shreeve, Executive Editor for Science at National Geographic Magazine.

The story of cotton is inexorably tied to the story of modern capitalism, a constant global struggle between slaves and planters, merchants and statesmen, workers and factory owners. On this week's Please Explain, we dive into how cotton changed history, and how the industry, and the product, reaches our homes today. Sven Beckert is the author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History, and Mike Watson is the Vice President of Fiber Competition for Cotton Incorporated.

As Valentine's Day is right around the corner, this week's Please Explain segment is all about a common, but perhaps unfortunate feeling that can creep in around this time: shame. Jennifer Jacquet discusses her new book Is Shame Necessary?: New Uses for an Old Tool, which flips the stigma of shame on its head. Jacquet argues that shame can be used as a social good. It can challenge corporations and even governments to change policies and behaviors that are detrimental to the environment. Is Shame Necessary? will be released on Feb 17.

This past Sunday, Mayor Bill De Blasio warned that the impending snowstorm could be "one of the largest snowstorms in the history of this city." While New York was spared the worst effects of the storm, blizzards can be incredibly destructive forces, and accurately predicting these snowstorms is crucial, but often far more complicated than people realize. For today's Please Explain, we are talking all about blizzards with Andrew Freedman, Science Editor for Mashable and former Senior Science writer for Climate Central. His writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, online at The Weather Channel, and washingtonpost.com, where he wrote a weekly climate science column for the "Capital Weather Gang" blog. 

For this week's Please Explain, we're unraveling the mysteries of the human brain and heading to the absolute frontiers of neuroscience. We will discuss the spectacular technological advances that will enable us to map the more than eighty-five billion neurons in the brain, as well as the challenges that lie ahead in understanding the anticipated deluge of data and the prospects for building working simulations of the human brain.

Gary Marcus is Director of the NYU Center for Language and Music, and Professor of Psychology at New York University. Ned Block is the Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. Dr. Marcus's new book, The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists, features an essay by Dr. Block arguing that high resolution images of the brain are not sufficient for a true understanding of the mind.