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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...