Radio Motherboard

  Why would someone willingly spend years hanging out with people who make fun of recently dead teens? To write a book about the experience, of course. Motherboard meets Whitney Phillips, a Humboldt State University researcher and author of 'This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things,' an academic look at why internet trolls act the way they do. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more informati...

  In 2017, Valery Spiridonov hopes to become the first human to have his head transplanted onto a new body. We talk to Val, his would-be surgeon Sergio Canavero, and Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist about the process. Then, Motherboard's staff talks about Cookie Clicker, our new office obsession. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do we have to die? The world's first transhumanist candidate for president doesn't think so. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The ​Silk Road trial has only been going on for two weeks, and already it’s had its fair share of drama: There have ​been setups by the prosecution, ​accusations and alternative theories tossed out by the defense, and, ​yes, selfies. Motherboard’s Kari Paul has been at the trial every day of the week, and our reporters have been covering Silk […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more inf...

​If you see the words “copyright” and “law” juxtaposed next to each other, and your eyes glaze over, we don’t necessarily blame you. But copyright law is insane, and a wonderful, constant source of nutty human interest cases that explore every part of art, culture, and greediness. This week on Radio Motherboard, we invited the Electronic Frontier […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

The ​first season of the ultra-popular podcast Serial is over, but lots of questions remain, in no small part due to the lack of evidence tying then-high school student Adnan Syed to the 1999 murder of his ex-girlfriend, Hae Min Lee. Huge swaths of Sarah Koenig’s longform storytelling (and reporting) experiment are dedicated to frustratingly minute details of what cell […] Hosted on Acast. See aca...

In her filmmaking, the director Laura Poitras—my guest on this edition of Radio Motherboard—likes to document reality as it happens, those moments of uncertainty that often don’t appear on film. “There’s something about how we look at the past which has a kind of finality and closure to it, where life doesn’t usually happen that way,” she told me. […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for mor...

Interstellar may not be a great film—then again, it might be—but it does cut to the heart of quite a few of the themes we regularly hit on here at Motherboard: Space colonization, ecological collapse, near and far future dystopias, theoretical physics, the enduring power of love. Maybe not so much that last one, but […] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.