Ben Blatt is a former staff writer for Slate and the Harvard Lampoon. Ben is a numbers guy who has taken his fun approach to data journalism to topics such as Seinfeld, map-making, the Beatles, and Jeopardy.

This conversation centers around Ben's book "Nabokov's Favorite Word is Mauve" (2017). It's a book about what we can learn about writing and authors based not on what they say, or what impressions we get from reading their books, but on something that results from applying rigorous data analysis to their actual texts. Specifically, KMO and Ben discuss:

George Zarkadakis is the author of both fiction and non-fiction books, who describes himself as a science communicator, an artificial intelligence engineer, a futurist, and a digital innovation professional. His most recent book is called "Cyber Republic: Reinventing Democracy in the Age of Intelligent Machines" (MIT Press, 2021).

In this conversation, KMO and George discuss:

Francis Nimmo is a professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His research specialty is understanding the structure and evolution of rocky and icy planets.

KMO and Francis discuss:

Lauren Aguirre is an award-winning science journalist who has produced documentaries, short-form video series, podcasts, interactive games and blogs for the PBS series "Nova." She has covered everything from asteroids to human origins to art restoration, but is particularly fascinated by the brain. "The Memory Thief" is Lauren's first book.

In this conversation, Lauren and KMO discuss:

Dr Jean-Marie Volland is a scientist at the Laboratory for Research in Complex Systems and an affiliate scientist at the Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute. He is also the lead author on a recent research paper that announced the discovery of something that most people, including biologists, had scarcely thought possible: a gigantic bacterium which is thousands of times larger than its fellow microbes – so large, in fact, that it can be seen with the naked eye.

In this conversation, KMO and Jean-Marie discuss:

Host and Guests:

Links and Resources:

Dr. Batja Mesquita is a social psychologist, an affective scientist, and a pioneer of cultural psychology. She is the author of "Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions." In this episode's first interview, KMO and Batja discuss:

Our second guest, Simon Ager, is the founder, developer, and proprietor of Omniglot.com, an online encyclopedia of languages and writing systems. In this episode's second interview, KMO and Simon discuss:

Host and Guests:

Dr Paul Thagard is a Canadian cognitive scientist and philosopher of mind. He is the author of many interdisciplinary books, including, most recently, "Balance: How it Works and What it Means." In this conversation, KMO and Paul discuss:

Host and guest:

Links and references: