Shorter Stuff

How your birth order impacts your career prospects. “It’s good to be first.”
LISTEN at Marketplace

Carbon accountants help firms keep their climate pledges. A new twist on an old profession aims to make sense of corporate emissions.
LISTEN at Marketplace

Ancient life awakens amid thawing ice caps and permafrost. Scientists discover long-dormant organisms in a warming Arctic.
READ at The Washington Post

What does “seasonally adjusted” mean, anyway? A seemingly boring statistical trick that helps us understand the economy.
LISTEN at Marketplace

The future of deep sea mining is being decided – without the U.S. Why America is stuck on the sidelines of the debate over seafloor minerals.
READ at Heatmap News or LISTEN at NPR’s All Things Considered

Companies have our data. Why do they keep asking if we like them? On those pesky feedback requests you get after you buy pretty much anything.
LISTEN at Marketplace

Ukrainian doctors get a crash course in lung transplant. The Russian invasion has devastated Ukraine’s healthcare budget. A transplant training program in Boston aims to fill in the gaps.
LISTEN and READ at NPR’s Weekend Edition.

Longer Stuff

In Challenger’s wake: On the science and ethics of sending regular people to space
LISTEN at Outside/In

How Russia’s shadow fleet is sailing around oil sanctions
LISTEN at Planet Money

A Whale-Oiled Machine. How our modern mechanical world was built in part by the brutal, long-defunct New Bedford whaling industry.
LISTEN at 99% Invisible

The city inside a glacier. How an unlikely team of researchers unlocked the hidden history of Earth’s climate.
LISTEN at Outside/In

What to think about deep-sea mining for clean energy minerals. I unpack the geopolitics, technology and environmental tradeoffs of deep-sea mining with David Roberts.
LISTEN at Volts

Should We Mine the Deep-Sea? A deep dive into the science and ethics of deep-sea mining, which could provide metals for the energy transition but could come at a cost to ocean health.
LISTEN at How to Save a Planet

Artistic License. The bizarre and contentious history of the American license plate.
LISTEN at 99% Invisible