Radio Lab

As a public radio junkie, I have a very full listening schedule throughout the week. I have to listen to the full hour of This American Life, even if it is a re-run. I catch up on the news with Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and even pop in for Marketplace once in a while. Morning Becomes Eclectic isn't as important as it once was since Nic Harcourt has left the show, but I have Planet Money and Fresh Air to fill the time. Yes, I love public radio.

These are all wonderfully entertaining, educational and benchmark shows, but recently I find myself most looking forward--and most consistently surprised by--a show called Radio Lab. Radio Lab explores the questions and mysteries of science in a artful and sometimes poetic fashion. The makers of the show describe Radio Lab as "a little movie for your ear." Hosts Jad Abrumad and Robert Krulwich have taken listeners on a journey through the brain, the microscopic world of parasites, and to that fuzzy border between being human and being a primate. Along the way the complicated ideas they present are underscored by sound effects and music that are at times haunting, surprising, or surreal. Radio Lab's sound design seems shaped to emphasize the mysterious and mystical side of our reality. The show frequently asks questions that "Science" is not able to answer, and then leaves us to wrestle with that unsettling fact. This is perhaps the most remarkable thing about the show: that science is revered and studied, but not the source of all that is knowable. Instead, science is the starting point to understanding our world, taking us to the limits of our knowledge, brain power, and technology.

Abrumad and Krulwich seem to understand that there is still so much we don't understand, so much that we may never be able to explain about our world and ourselves. And very often, things that we can explain are based on fact so strange and fantastical that you wonder if you've wandered into the realm of science fiction.

If you've never listened to Radio Lab, you are missing out! Check out their website where you can listen to shows, read blogs and encounter wonderful words like "stochasticity"! Let me know what you think.