Thinking Aloud

You may think that your cellphone or high-falutin' digital car stereo will be the most complicated tool you'll use today, but there is another tool that is so much more sophisticated that it leaves any modern electronics in the dust: language.  Linguists still haven't completely figured out how it works, but they have learned that many of our long-held myths about it are wrong.  Today's guest is a linguist who just wrote a book explaining why those myths are misguided and that teaches us a great deal about its intricate workings along the way.

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, 15 new states became independent nations.  Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania--usually called the three "Baltic States"--have fared far better than most of the other nations in the 25 years since then, creating stable, prosperous countries.  Today, Brad Woodworth, the Director of Yale's Center for Baltic Studies, talks to host Marcus Smith about where the Baltic states are now and their possible futures.  

As technological advancement leads us to confront an ever-larger bombardment of information, we have to ask ourselves: which of all this information is true or accurate?  Today's guest believes we can tell the difference between solid data and media junk if we learn how.  He's here to help us begin that important process of learning discernment amid an ocean of media.

Tonight's interview is with the BYU linguist Dirk Elzinga. Invented or constructed languages have gained a growing following of late, in part because they play an important role in so many popular movies and television shows. Linguists take these new languages quite seriously because they have important things to teach us about the origins and workings of language itself and humanity's apparent inborn, genetic propensity for language. Oh, and for another reason: because they're so darn fun.

Our guest today on Thinking Aloud is Jonathan Balcombe, a specialist in ethology, or animal behavior, who tries to peer across that inter-species gulf every day of his working life. Balcombe will introduce us today to the intelligence of an animal whose smarts you probably never suspected: fish.

Up until the 1970s, truckdriving was the best blue collar job in America.  Today, truckdrivers often work 80 hour weeks, spend weeks on end away from home, and do it for pay as low as the minimum wage. What happened?  Today's guest is an academic sociologist and former truckdriver who explains what went wrong in this rucial profession we all depend on every day.

Kramer’s new book is called Ordinarily Well: The Case for Antidepressants.  In it, he analyzes the recent belief that antidepressants are little more than placebos. He also explains the moral concerns behind “cosmetic” medicating, and helps us understand the other difficulties inherent in the development, testing, and utilization of antidepressants.  He concludes that although modern psychiatric medications are not by any means universal wonder drugs, they are still our most effective tools in the struggle to relieve human emotional suffering.

Roy Baumeister is a psychologist who has helped to discover several surprises about human willpower, primarily that it is not static: it can grow and develop with practice, it can be depleted when overused in a finite amount of time, and it is more malleable than we may have guessed.  He joins us on Thinking Aloud today to discuss the latest in our understanding of willpower.

The journalist Sebastian Junger—tonight’s guest on Thinking Aloud--has a surprisingly original idea about why the transition back to civilian life is so difficult for so many soldiers of our generation. The problem, he believes, lies not only with the challenges of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but with the modern, impersonal and comparatively society they return to from the brotherhood of the military.

Many Americans believe the Founding Fathers argued for a limited government. Yale Historian Steven Pincus thinks that is not, however, what they actually wrote. Especially taken in the context of the colonial events leading up to 1776, Pincus argues that our nation's forefathers wanted a government which did more, not less, than England had been doing for them.