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Monkey Mind
Premium Audiobooks
A Study in Scarlet
What makes us us? Is there a feature that unites humans as a species while setting us apart from every other animal? Tool use, perhaps, or language or consciousness? This episode is about the hunt for a biological trait that would pull us all together...
A Theory of Dog Ears
Why do people treat their books so differently? Some people like to keep their books in near-mint condition, handling them with metaphorical gloves on and making sure that there is not a single scratch to be found on their cover. Other people, like...
Drowning a Dragonfly
Why do kids kill insects? It is a strange, disturbing fact that so many of us have, at some early point in our lives, plucked wings off butterflies, burned ants with magnifying glasses, or, in Sophus’s case, drowned a dragonfly. But where does...
Forgetting to Forget
We all have something we would like to forget, or something we would like others to forget about us. But it can be surprisingly difficult to forget. You can try to make yourself hold on to a memory, but letting go of it can be much trickier....
Going Blank
When Sophus’s grandfather died, he left behind an old encyclopedia with a mysteriously empty page. In this episode, Sophus talks about happens when we run out of words, as when the mind is made blank by old age or when our loved ones die and we grieve...
Monkey Mind
Sophus launches the podcast with a deep-dive into the human mind, this engine of chaos and expanse of possibility we all carry around inside us. The episode begins with a reminder—taken from, of all places, the British tax collection agency—to marvel...
Serendipity
The episode traces the history of a single word, serendipity, across seven centuries and just as many countries. A "serendipity" is a "happy and unexpected discovery", and the history of the word is itself full of happy and unexpected discoveries,...
Spellbound
We all make typos. Spelling mistakes range from the harmless to the disastrous, and they are almost impossible to get rid of. But what can typos teach us? What do they reveal about language and the human mind? This episode explores the hidden history...
The Sex Talk
When we speak of “sexual orientation,” we really just mean whether people are gay, straight, or bi. But people differ from each other in many other interesting ways. Sex, as a realm of difference, is much richer than this single orientation implies....
Why Alexander Wept
Desire is a strange thing. It is always raging inside us, driving us on to our next pursuit. But figuring out where it comes from or where exactly it is taking us can be surprisingly tricky. Sophus ponders the nature of desire, reflecting on a quote...
