Well-Informed & Open-Minded

Sport is obsessed with streaks—with dynasties that seem unstoppable and teams so cursed they appear incapable of winning. From the record-breaking dominance of the 1971–72 Los Angeles Lakers to the years-long misery of the Cleveland Browns or the American Samoa football team, winning and losing runs are woven into how fans explain success and failure. In this episode, we explore what really lies b...

Chinese cuisine is often reduced in the West to takeaway staples, but a new book invites readers to taste something far deeper. Fuchsia Dunlop’s Invitation to a Banquet uses thirty carefully chosen dishes—not recipes, but stories—to reveal how food expresses Chinese history, philosophy, and everyday life, from the quiet elegance of a final cup of broth to the prized textures of slippery, crunchy k...

For more than a century, tennis has ruled the world of racket sports, crowned by global stars, billion-dollar tournaments, and a reputation for athletic and cultural prestige. Yet on courts from Miami to Madrid, quieter challengers are gaining ground. In this episode, we explore how padel and pickleball—easier to learn, more social, and especially appealing to older players—have surged in populari...

Urban planning is often presented as a technical exercise, but at its core it is a political act—one that decides who benefits from city life and who bears its costs. From exclusionary zoning and racially restrictive covenants to modern debates over gentrification, planning has long reflected the interests and power of those able to shape it. In this episode, we explore how planning evolved from i...

Ever since the Concorde’s final landing in 2003, commercial air travel has been getting slower, not faster—despite decades of technological progress. The reason lies less in engineering limits than in economics and physics: supersonic flight creates disruptive sonic booms, guzzles fuel, and forces airlines onto narrow, unprofitable routes. In this episode, we explore why modern jets cruise below 9...

In one of the world’s most tightly managed cities, an unlikely form of freedom splashes into view. Along Beijing’s rivers and canals, residents—once mostly retirees, now joined by younger swimmers—slip past fences and warning signs to plunge into forbidden waters, building informal swimming holes complete with chairs and makeshift diving boards. In this episode, we explore how “wild swimming” has...

Born from the shockwaves of the atomic age, Godzilla first stomped onto Japanese screens as a creature of terror and trauma—a living metaphor for nuclear destruction in a country still reeling from war. Inspired by the 1954 exposure of a Japanese fishing boat to an American hydrogen-bomb test, producer Tanaka Tomoyuki imagined the monster as nature’s revenge, awakened by human hubris. In this epis...

Once a quiet inhabitant of Mexico’s ancient canals, the axolotl has become one of the internet’s most recognizable creatures—smiling, pink, and endlessly reproduced in games, memes, and toys. Revered by the Aztecs and later rediscovered by scientists for its uncanny ability to regenerate limbs and remain forever youthful, the salamander’s leap to global fame came through Japanese kawaii culture an...

Each spring in parts of Oklahoma and Texas, rattlesnake roundups draw crowds eager to watch hunters flush snakes from their dens, parade them through town, and turn them into spectacle, food, and local income. What began as a practical response to fear and ranching life has evolved into a ritual that now sits uneasily with modern ideas about conservation and animal welfare. In this episode, we exp...

Half a century on, Jaws is still hailed as the first great summer blockbuster, remembered for its thrills, its iconic score, and the stoic heroism of Police Chief Brody. But a closer look reveals a stranger, darker film beneath the legend. Plagued by technical failures and nearly undone by the decision to shoot at sea, Steven Spielberg was forced to hide the shark—turning absence into suspense and...

From bustling marketplaces to gleaming waterfronts, the modern city center is the product of repeated reinvention. Once forged by the convergence of railways, ports, and commerce in the late nineteenth century, downtowns later became targets of mid-twentieth-century urban renewal schemes that sought to erase “blight” through large-scale redevelopment—often at the cost of local communities. In this...

Often reviled as symbols of death, vultures are in fact among nature’s most effective public-health workers. Armed with stomach acid strong enough to neutralize pathogens like rabies, cholera, and tuberculosis, they strip carcasses clean before decay can poison water and soil, quietly stopping outbreaks before they begin. In this episode, we explore how these “plague-busting heroes” evolved to tur...

Perched in the hills of southern Italy, San Giovanni Lipioni has become a symbol of a nation’s demographic reckoning—a village of just 137 residents, once dubbed Italy’s oldest town by average age, now hollowed out by decades of emigration. Empty houses line its streets, the last grocery store has shut, and the nursery school is gone, leaving an aging population and a fragile local economy clingin...

In France, aging is being quietly recast—not as a retreat from visibility, but as a moment of release. From actress Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu’s unapologetic embrace of daring fashion in her sixties to a wave of books celebrating single, self-directed life after 50, older women are pushing back against the idea that desirability and power have an expiry date. In this episode, we explore how changin...

A viral trend has turned a design shortcut into a nationwide crime wave. Videos posted by the so-called “Kia Boys” show just how easily certain Kia and Hyundai models can be stolen, and the results have been felt on city streets from Chicago to New York. In this episode, we examine how the absence of a basic, low-cost immobilizer—standard in many other countries—helped fuel a surge in car thefts,...

In a world where water is supposed to be tasteless, a small but growing group insists it has terroir. At a Fine Water Summit in Atlanta, judges swirl, sip, and score bottled waters from around the globe, parsing mineral content and mouth-feel with the seriousness of a wine tasting. In this episode, we explore the rise of water connoisseurship, from the influence of Michael Mascha, the Austrian eva...

Once seen as a niche or nostalgic mode of travel, the bicycle—supercharged by the rise of the e-bike—is rapidly reshaping cities around the world. From Paris to New York, protected lanes and better batteries have turned cycling into a practical alternative to the car, cutting congestion and pollution while reclaiming urban space. In this episode, we explore why the pandemic, new technology, and sa...

For generations, abundance at the Chinese table has been measured not by what is eaten, but by what is left behind—where full plates signal generosity, status, and face. In this episode, we examine how that deeply ingrained culture of waste is being challenged by a top-down campaign led by Xi Jinping, who has framed food waste as a threat to national food security shaped by his own memories of hun...

Along Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast, the global appetite for lobster is sustained by some of the most dangerous labor on earth. In the impoverished, largely Indigenous community of Puerto Cabezas, divers descend ever deeper with faulty equipment and little training, risking paralysis or death from decompression sickness in order to survive. In this episode, we follow the story of Edmundo Stanley Ant...

For much of the past decade, democracy in Asia appeared to be in retreat, as strongmen consolidated power, courts and media were weakened, and coups and crackdowns—from Myanmar to the Philippines—seemed to confirm an authoritarian tide. In this episode, we examine why that narrative is no longer complete, tracing recent moments of democratic resilience and revival, from peaceful elections in Malay...

Downtown skylines are changing, not with new towers but with new lives inside old ones. As hybrid work leaves offices empty in cities around the world, developers and policymakers are betting on a radical reuse: turning vacant commercial buildings into housing. In this episode, we explore why projects like the massive conversion of 25 Water Street in New York have become symbols of a new urban str...

The modern digital economy runs not just on clicks and code, but on habit. Behind the apps and platforms that dominate daily life are designers who study human psychology, borrowing ideas from behavioral science to keep users returning through variable rewards, social validation, and subtle cues that turn ordinary users into “uber-users.” In this episode, we explore how internet companies engineer...

For decades, China’s leaders have wrestled with how to manage a faith they have long regarded as foreign—and since 2015, that struggle has taken a new form in Xi Jinping’s campaign to “sinify” Christianity. In this episode, we examine how five-year plans now seek to reshape Christian belief and practice around socialist ideology and “core socialist values,” affecting tens of millions of believers...

For more than a century, urban planning has swung between opposing ideals—escape the crowded industrial city, then repair the damage left by suburban sprawl. From Britain’s postwar “new towns” to the automobile-fueled expansion of low-density suburbs, each solution carried unintended consequences: longer commutes, higher infrastructure costs, environmental strain, and traffic that only worsened as...

A routine breakfast turned dangerous in 2010, when millions of eggs from Iowa became the source of a widespread Salmonella outbreak—an episode that revealed how an invisible microbe can slip unnoticed from farm to plate. In this episode, we trace how Salmonella moves from chickens and eggs into the human body, survives stomach acid, and uses specialized molecular tools to invade intestinal cells a...