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Evel Knievel, the world-famous daredevil, is planning his greatest ever stunt. In 1974, he wants to leap over Snake River Canyon in Idaho. The chasm is almost a third of a mile wide, much bigger than any jump he's done before. To make it work, he'll need a custom-made rocket-powered "Skycycle," TV camera crews and - most importantly - a very positive attitude. 

For a list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com.

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Two extraordinary trends are happening in the United States simultaneously. One is that alcohol consumption is declining precipitously. The share of Americans who drink has hit a record low since Gallup started tracking it in the 1930s. In 2004, fewer than 30 percent of Americans under 35 said moderate drinking was bad for your health; now it’s 66 percent.

The second trend is that marijuana usage has skyrocketed. Per researchers, cannabis has overtaken alcohol and cigarettes as the nation’s most popular daily drug. And the impact of that shift has been profound.

Today, Derek is joined by Jonathan Caulkins, a drug policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and Beau Kilmer, the codirector of the RAND Drug Policy Research Center. They discuss what is gained and lost in the switch from booze to weed, the ripple effects of marijuana’s surge in popularity, and what the legalization of cannabis is doing to America.

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Host: Derek Thompson

Guests: Jonathan Caulkins and Beau Kilmer

Producer: Victoria Valencia

Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman

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Los Angeles has a new museum: Dataland –- the world’s first museum completely devoted to AI-generated art. In a time of high anxiety around the impact of AI on jobs, the environment and human creativity, can Dataland change the conversation around human-AI collaboration? LAist All Things Considered Host Julia Paskin takes us inside Dataland.  

Read Julia’s essay on Dataland at LAist.com.

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Support for this podcast is made possible by Gordon and Dona Crawford, who believe that quality journalism makes Los Angeles a better place to live.

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Late night scrolling. Couchlock. Habitual insomnia. You want to sleep —  so why won’t you turn off the light, dumplin’? We’ve got someone for that: sleep scientist, globally known PBS correspondent, host of the series Braincraft, and Noctohabitologist, Dr. Vanessa “Nessy” Hill. So let’s chat about what amount of sleep is “normal,” if farmers had two sleeps, electricity, blue blockers, “me time,” proof that Dolly Parton is an alien from an angel planet, the populations most prone to sleep procrastination, which of 93 scientifically-proven habit-changers are the easiest to implement, and how this expert and I have both personally battled the agony between wanting to rest but avoiding it.  Come. Gather. Get mad. Be healed.

Visit Dr. Hill’s website and follow her on Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Substack

A donation went to Project Sleep

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Other episodes you may enjoy: Somnology (SLEEP), Chronobiology (CIRCADIAN RHYTHMS), Oneirology (DREAMS), Attention-Deficit Neuropsychology (ADHD), Obsessive-Compulsive Neurobiology (OCD), Mnemonology (MEMORY), Ergopathology (BURNOUT), Personality Psychology (PERSONALITIES), Misophonology (DISTRACTING SOUND & NOISE RAGE), Dolorology (PAIN)

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Books are dying. Across the world the number of people reading is in free fall. Literacy is declining or stagnating in most developed countries. At universities, students are unable to read the books assigned to them by their teachers. Addictive digital entertainment technologies have colonised our free time with infantilising ‘slop’. The golden chain of knowledge linking reader to reader through the centuries is breaking for the first time since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire ushered in the Dark Ages.

The New Dark Ages is an impassioned attack on the trivial and meaningless culture of the screen and a defence of the written word. Drawing on history and classic works of literature and theory, The New Dark Ages argues that reading and writing are essential for innovation, creativity and critical thinking.

Above all, the culture of print is essential to the functioning of modern democracies which require their citizens to grapple with ideas at length and in depth. And as print dies, we risk returning to the chaos, tribalism, and rage of a pre-literate society. (Penguin)

James met Jack at Larry's beneath London's National Portrait Gallery.

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Talented and beautiful, Molly O'Day is a rising star in 1920s Hollywood. But when Molly's teenage body starts to change and she can no longer fit into the dress she wore when she was 16, the studio wants nothing to do with her. As the scripts dry up and the money runs out, Molly faces a difficult but painfully familiar choice. 

For a list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com

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David and Tamler do another tier ranking--this time on philosophical thought experiments, so as not to further alienate our chemistry-adjacent listeners. We hit most of the big ones: Pascal's wager, Pascal's mugging, Mary the color scientist, the Ring of Gyges, Jarvis Thomson's violinist, the experience machine, the utility monster, and a lot more. Can you guess our grade for the trolley dilemma?

• The Chinese Room (Searle) [wikipedia.org]
• Descartes' Evil Demon (Descartes) [wikipedia.org]
• The Experience Machine (Nozick) [wikipedia.org]
• Mary the Color Scientist (F. Jackson) [wikipedia.org]
• Pascal's Mugging (Yudkowsky/Bostrom) [wikipedia.org]
• Pascal's Wager (Pascal) [wikipedia.org]
• The Ring of Gyges (Plato) [wikipedia.org]
• The Shallow Pond (Singer) [wikipedia.org]
• The Ship of Theseus (Hobbes) [wikipedia.org]
• The Trolley Problem (Philippa Foot/J.J. Thomson) [wikipedia.org]
• The Utility Monster (Nozick) [wikipedia.org]
• The Veil of Ignorance (Rawls) [wikipedia.org]
• The Violinist (J.J. Thomson) [wikipedia.org]

Perhaps you're familiar with the phrase "Buckley's chance!". Well, it's thought that it originates from William Buckley, a man who defied all odds to escape his fate as a convict. 

Buckley was a brickie from Northern England who ends up being adopted by the Wathaurong people in 1800s Victoria.  

Leigh investigates the legend of Buckley’s survival, what the Wathaurong had to gain from him, and how things finally came to a head.  

Psst - he also debunks a few famous convict myths we love to tell. 

SOURCES 

Reminiscences of James Buckley who lived for thirty years among the Wallawarro or Watourong tribes at Geelong Port Phillip, communicated by him to George Langhorne, 1837 (State Library of Victoria, Manuscripts Collection) 

Bonwick, James (1856). William Buckley: the wild white man, and his Port Phillip black friends, (Melbourne) 

Morgan, John (1856). The life and adventures of William Buckley: thirty-two years a wanderer amongst the Aborigines (Melbourne) 

Flannery, Tim (ed) (2017). The Life and Adventures of William Buckley (Melbourne: Text Publishing) 

Tipping, Marjorie (1988). Convicts Unbound (Melbourne: Viking O’Neill) 

McKinnon, Crystal and McLisky, Clare (2022). “Settler Colonial Emotions... in the William Buckley Story” in The Routledge History of Emotions  

Tudehope, CM (1962). “William Buckley” in Victorian Historical Magazine,1962 Tipping, Marjorie (2006). William Buckley (1780–1856), Australian Dictionary of Biography 

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The dream of podcasting is alive in 2026. It's been 15 years since the cult classic comedy series Portlandia introduced the world to the 90's time capsule filled with wacky characters that outlined the unique neighborhoods that make up the city. Now Carrie and Fred are back, reliving all the weirdness.

To begin, they're starting with all the events that led up to the launch of Portlandia, including Carrie's toast at Fred's wedding, which was secretly an audition for Lorne Michaels; Fred's days as a Sleater-Kinney fan boy; and the wildly inappropriate campaign video they made for John Kerry.

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