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Episode 1608

In the Ballpark

Novelist Charles Dickens and the musician Prince were very different types of artists, but they also had a lot in common. A new book chronicling their extraordinary careers becomes a larger meditation on perfectionism and creativity itself. Plus...

Jinx! You Owe Me a Book!

You know how when two people accidentally say the same thing simultaneously, they then race to yell Jinx!? There may be hundreds of versions of this game. Anne and her young daughter Amina in Jacksonville, Florida, say versions they’ve heard...

Um, Actually Word Game

On the game show Um, Actually, the host reads out a series of supposed facts about various geeky subjects, and contestants must interject with the correct information, prefacing their answers with the phrase Um, Actually. That’s the...

Episode 1592

You Talk Like a Sausage  

Do you refer to your dog or cat as “somebody”? As in: When you love somebody that much, you don’t mind if they slobber. In other words, is your pet a somebody or a something? Also, for centuries, there was little consistency in the...

Inside “Inside Baseball”

In the early days of baseball, the term inside baseball referred to a particular style of play that emphasized sneaky strategies and clever teamwork as opposed to the power hitting that dominates today’s game. Later inside baseball came to...

Episode 1607

Old College Try

In just seconds, online text generators and chatbots can produce whole paragraphs of sophisticated prose. But what do advances in artificial intelligence mean for writers? What is lost and what’s gained when machine-writing replaces the work...