Short Run

The news of Nixon’s trip to China is public, and he’s getting credit for pulling off such a historic event. Now, he and his advisers have to work with the Chinese to forge a relationship between two very different countries.

In the third part of Here & Now's "The Great Wager," host Jane Perlez revisits when Nixon met Mao.

Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger make contact with China. But in the midst of the Cold War, they don’t want anyone to know. How will Kissinger get to Beijing without alerting anyone — and what’s Frank Sinatra got to do with it?

In the second part of Here & Now's "The Great Wager," host Jane Perlez digs into how Kissinger pulled off a secret trip to China. 

President Richard Nixon has a plan: He wants to go to China. The only problem? The U.S. and China have had zero contact since the Communist Party took over China two decades before.

In the first part of Here & Now's "The Great Wager," host Jane Perlez digs into the beginning of Nixon’s improbable diplomatic mission.

In the final episode of Endless Thread's series "Good Bot, Bad Bot," co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell visit Google, the frontier of AI, to see just how close the field is to creating bots with minds of their own.

In the fifth episode of Endless Thread's series "Good Bot, Bad Bot," co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Nora Saks dive into the ways artificial intelligence is changing modern love and online dating. Trying to find love (or even lock in one date) on dating apps is no easy task, especially with the onslaught of fake accounts and catfishing scams.

But what if you had a digital dating coach installed right in your phone's keyboard — an AI Cyrano de Bergerac or Alex "Hitch" Hitchens — to automatically generate a perfectly crafted, personalized message for every conversation? Not just openers to get the conversation started, but witty, flirty banter to keep it going?

As Endless Thread producer Nora Saks reports, lots of companies are developing apps that use AI-generated communication to optimize users' love lives and connections  — online and off. Nora and co-host Ben Brock Johnson talk to the founder of one such start-up, as well as a dating app researcher, and single friends to probe the pros and cons of having an AI wingman in your pocket.

In the fourth episode of Endless Thread's series "Good Bot, Bad Bot," co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Quincy Walters share a cautionary tale about Tay, a Microsoft AI chatbot that has lived on in infamy. Tay was originally modeled to be the bot-girl-next-door. But after only 16 hours on Twitter, Tay was shut down for regurgitating white supremacist, racist and sexist talking points online.

Tay's short-lived run on the internet illuminated ethical issues in tech culture. This episode uncovers who gets a say in what we build, how developers build it, and who is to blame when things take a dark turn.

In the third episode of Endless Thread's series "Good Bot, Bad Bot," co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson explore a growing field of artificial intelligence: immortalizing the dead through predictive AI text.

They talk with two individuals who used this tech in different ways, and discuss how these bots can help us improve our understanding of grief.

In the second episode of Endless Thread's series "Good Bot, Bad Bot," co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson consider the possibilities of bots being used in governments around the world.

How can bots increase transparency and shine a light on corruption, such as insider trading, among our elected officials? Will bots be put on the ballot in the near future?

In the first episode of Endless Thread's series "Good Bot, Bad Bot," co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson delve into the history of ELIZA, the world's first chatbot therapist.

Why did this computer's creator have a lot of complicated feelings about the development of AI? Can AI help us cope with mental health issues?

Trust — in our institutions, our leaders, in each other — can erode away. But trust can also be rebuilt, even after devastating events. How can humans rebuild trust?