The 7th Avenue Project

Anthropologist Hugh Raffles ruminates on human-insect relationships around the world in his new book Insectopedia. Japanese insect boys, Chinese fighting crickets, insect minds, insect music...

We consider the music and dance that captured the hearts of millions. Guests include tango historians Donald Cohen and Christine Denniston, and members of the Santa Cruz tango community. Show originally broadcast April, 2009.

Writer Gabriel Thompson went undercover to learn first-hand about the tough low-wage jobs done mostly by immigrants in America. He harvested lettuce in Arizona, toiled in a slaughterhouse in Alabama and did low-end restaurant jobs in Manhattan. He describes his year of working strenuously, and what he learned about immigrant labor.

In recent years, physics theory has gotten way ahead of the evidence. Now, researchers are going to extremes to figure out what's true and what isn't. They've launched a set of hugely ambitious experiments in some of the most forbidding places on Earth, from the South Pole to Himalayan mountaintops. Physics writer Anil Ananthaswamy travelled to these remote laboratories, and he tells us what he saw.

A tune-filled celebration and cerebration with neuroscientist, musician and record producer Daniel Levitin, author of "This is Your Brain on Music." Originally broadcast in 2007.

What Jane Goodall was to chimps, biologist Barry Sinervo is to lizards. He's spent the last 20 years studying lizards in the wild, gaining remarkable insights into the workings of evolution, social behavior and cooperation. He shares his discoveries, along with some very funny lizard stories.

Noted landscape painter Richard Mayhew discusses his life and work, including his childhood in a mixed African American and Native American community, joining the New York art scene at the height of the abstract expressionist movement, his second career as a jazz singer and helping to organize African-American artists in the 1960s.

Terry Castle takes on her own and others' self-deceptions in her latest collection of hilarious, brutally honest essays, "The Professor and Other Writings." Targets include sex, romance and youthful infatuations. She and Robert do their best to burst as many bubbles as possible.

Fifty years ago, a group of Harvard faculty began experimenting with psychoactive drugs and helped turn on a generation. Robert looks back on a defining cultural moment with Don Lattin, author of "The Harvard Psychedelic Club," and with Harvard alumnus Paul Lee, who took part in the experiments.

Philosopher/Novelist Rebecca Goldstein discusses her latest book, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction." She and Robert consider the case for and against religion.