Radiolab

Fela Kuti: Enter the Shrine

Radiolab hosts Latif Nasser and Lulu Miller welcome back Jad Abumrad, who explains how he became obsessed with Nigerian musician and Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and turned that obsession into a 12-part podcast series called "Fela Kuti, Fear No Man." They play Chapter 3, "Enter the Shrine," which explores Fela's Lagos club the Shrine, the sensory and social atmosphere around it, and how the structure of his long, hypnotic songs leads listeners into a trance-like state that makes his political messages land deeply. The episode closes with a preview of the series' upcoming installment about Fela's mother and her own extraordinary, music-fueled activism.

Nov 28, 2025

Our Common Nature: West Virginia Coal

Radiolab introduces a special episode from the series "Our Common Nature" in which host Ana Gonzalez and cellist Yo-Yo Ma explore West Virginia's coal country to understand how coal, music, race, and nature shape people's lives. Through stories from miners like Chris Saunders and his mother Zora, poet-activist Crystal Good, musician Kathy Matea, and others, the episode examines the pride, danger, and environmental harm tied to coal, as well as the resilience and community that persist in Appalachia. The journey weaves together mine history, the Upper Big Branch disaster, iconic songs, rafting on the New River, and intimate moments of grief and connection.

Nov 21, 2025

Quantum Refuge

Radiolab host Lulu speaks with 28-year-old Gazan physicist Qasem Walid about how quantum physics has become both a language and an inner refuge for him while living through war, displacement, and loss in Gaza. Over months of conversations, he describes daily life under bombardment, the deaths of his professor and relatives, and his experience of feeling like Schrödinger's cat-trapped in a box where his survival is uncertain and unseen by the outside world. He uses concepts like superposition, quantum tunneling, and harmonic oscillators to make sense of his own existence and to plead for the world to "open the box" and truly look at what is happening in Gaza.

Nov 14, 2025

The Wubi Effect

The episode traces how China grappled with the challenge of fitting its logographic writing system into Western-designed computers and keyboards, focusing on Professor Wang Yongmin's Wubi input method that decomposed characters into components for fast typing. It connects earlier debates over abandoning Chinese characters, the proliferation of competing input methods, and the later shift to pinyin-based phonetic typing with broader political and cultural consequences. The story then explores how predictive and cloud-based input, as well as the QWERTY effect, show that our writing tools now subtly shape our language, behavior, and even thought.

Nov 7, 2025

The Glow Below

Host Molly Webster talks with deep-sea explorer and oceanographer Edie Witter about her decades studying bioluminescence in the deep ocean. Witter describes her first encounters with glowing deep-sea creatures, the many survival functions of bioluminescence, and the surprising evolutionary origin of light-producing bacteria. The conversation explores how light operates as camouflage, weapon, and communication system in the deep sea, and how interacting with bioluminescent life can profoundly affect human perception and awe.

Oct 31, 2025

What Up Holmes?

This episode traces how Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, initially hostile to broad free speech protections, radically changed his views during World War I and authored the famous Abrams dissent that introduced the 'marketplace of ideas' metaphor. The hosts, along with law professor Thomas Healy, explore what caused Holmes's shift, then examine how that marketplace metaphor has shaped a century of First Amendment thinking and how it breaks down in the age of social media and misinformation, drawing on MIT researcher Sinan Aral's Twitter study and media lawyer Nabiha Syed's critiques. The episode closes by proposing that free speech should be seen as an ongoing democratic experiment that must be continually rethought, including by centering listeners' rights and information health.

Oct 24, 2025

Content Warning

Host Simon Adler talks with law professor Kate Koenig about how social media content moderation has shifted in recent years, especially under the influence of TikTok's proactive, algorithm-driven model. They contrast earlier "keep it up unless we have to take it down" approaches with newer systems that pre-screen and algorithmically promote or bury content, raising concerns about prior restraint, invisible censorship, and concentrated power over public discourse. The episode also revisits controversies like the Hunter Biden laptop story and COVID-19 lab leak discussions, explores the idea of platforms as "platform islands" or camouflaged broadcasters, and considers the future "productification" of speech.

Oct 17, 2025

Creation Story

Host Latif Nasser interviews paleoanthropologist and evolutionary biologist Alaa Alshamahi about her journey from an ultra-conservative, creationist Muslim upbringing and teenage missionary work to becoming an evolutionary scientist. She describes studying evolution at University College London as a "double agent" intent on disproving Darwin, the specific genetic evidence that shattered her creationist worldview, and the personal cost of leaving her religious community. Alaa then connects her own experience of crossing worlds to the story of human evolution, including interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and explains how her crisis of faith now shapes a more empathetic approach to people who reject scientific findings.

Oct 10, 2025

Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

Radiolab revisits the Supreme Court case Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, centered on the custody of Veronica, a child eligible for Cherokee Nation membership, and the application of the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA). The episode traces the mid‑20th century history of widespread removal of Native American children from their families that led to ICWA, then walks through the conflicting narratives of Veronica's adoptive parents, her Cherokee father Dustin Brown, and their lawyers as the case moves through the courts up to the Supreme Court. A 2025 update explains that Veronica was ultimately returned to her adoptive parents and that, despite repeated legal challenges, ICWA was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2023 but continues to face ongoing challenges.

Oct 3, 2025

The Spark of Life

Host Molly Webster speaks with applied biophysicist Narosha Murugan about the discovery that living cells emit extremely faint light tied to their metabolism, and explores how this challenges the traditional lock-and-key view of cellular signaling. They discuss possible mechanisms for how this light is generated in mitochondria and potentially guided through cellular structures, its hypothesized roles in brain function and consciousness, and how its distinct signatures can already be used experimentally to detect cancer and distinguish living from dead tissue. The conversation ends with reflections on "life flashes" at fertilization and death, and on thinking of living beings as organized patterns of energy and light.

Sep 19, 2025