How to Disagree Better

ON Sondheim The Turbulent Life of a Theatrical Genius

Drawing on 50 hours of previously sealed interviews, correspondence from 18 archives and fresh conversations with friends and collaborators freely talking after Sondheim's death, biographer Dan Okrent reveals the emotionally turbulent life of the man who reinvented the Broadway musical and what drove him: a monstrous mother, decades of alcoholism, a war against critics, and an inability to fall in love until he was 60 years old.

Inside the Alex Jones Infowars Conspiracy Machine

Josh Owens spent 4 years as video editor and field producer at Infowars, a media universe where unproven conspiracy theories were delivered with absolute certainty, having sprung from the manic mind and unhinged fantasies of the infamous Alex Jones. Owens talks about the lies he perpetrated, the communities he put in danger, the useless 'supplements' Jones sold to make himself rich, and with unflinching honesty, the damage he did while enthralled with the internet's most notorious conspiracy theorist.

What Science Says About Astrology

Award-winning science journalist Carlos Orsi talks about the history of the world's most popular and enduring pseudo-science, Astrology: how it morphed from a 5,000 year old vehicle for telling fortunes into a multi-billion-dollar business popularly used for personality analysis; why generic and banal descriptions of peoples' character are so easily believed; how newspaper astrologers get away with 'predicting' the future; the reasons its beloved by society's under-represented people and the ways a daily game-like pastime can cause harm.

The Very Strange History of Eyeglasses

Historians rank eyeglasses as one of the most important inventions in human history, but why did the Catholic church throw the inventor in a dungeon for 13 years? What did people do before glasses? Why was wearing glasses equated with devil worship? Why are they so expensive? Historian David King Dunaway answers all these questions and more as we talk about his book The Four Eyed World.

The Mystery of Blue and White

When Genevieve Wheeler Brown, a decorative arts expert from The Antique Road Show, was asked to evaluate a collection of blue and white pottery, hidden away for decades in an exclusive Manhattan townhouse, she had no idea that it told the centuries-old story of women's role in a ceramic that travelled from the Middle East to China to Holland and then to Gilded Age New York and eventually the China cabinets of ordinary New Englanders. This is fantastic story of Delftware.