Our goal is wellness and health, which seem ever elusive amid a pandemic, the challenges of racial injustices, and the toxicity of our politics. We yearn to move on and past these strains. In this episode, we’ll instead lean into them. You’ll hear unique perspectives, explore uncomfortable topics and experience the power of truthful dialogue. We’ll move ahead together in a conversation with Dr. Jeff Gardere, psychologist and professor, and Dr. Andra Gillespie, political science professor and public scholar.
President Peter Salovey and Professor Willie Jennings discuss the shared endeavor of learning, the beauty of discovery, the dangers of isolation, and cultivating the habits and practices of a healthy intellectual life.
In 1968, Dr. Bernie Krause was leading a booming music career. A prodigiously talented musician and early master of the electronic synthesizer, Krause was busy working with artists like the Doors and the Beach Boys and performing iconic effects for blockbuster films. Then Warner Brothers commissioned him to create an album incorporating the sounds of wild habitats, so he headed into Muir Woods with his recording equipment. What he heard changed his life and triggered a fifty-year odyssey.
Then and there, Krause decided that he wanted spend the rest of his life recording and archiving the music of wild animals and wild places. He quit Hollywood and began traveling the world. The soundscapes he recorded were full of epiphanies about the origin of our own culture and music, about the profound connectedness of creatures, and about the unseen tolls of human activity. Previous wildlife recordings isolated the calls of individual creatures, but Krause recorded habitats as a whole. He soon proposed a new theory of ecosystem functioning: that each species produces unique acoustic signatures, partitioning and occupying sonic niches such that the singing of all of the creatures in a healthy ecosystem can be heard, organized like players in an orchestra.
Today, Krause’s astonishing archive contains sounds made by more than 15,000 species. It is, as The New Yorker aptly put it, “an auditory Library of Alexandria for everything non-human.” Fifty percent of the recorded habitats no longer exist due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human din. We spoke with Krause about the beauty of and perils facing wild music, the extraordinary science of soundscape ecology, and how sound impacts the welfare of animals. The music in this episode is from Wild Sanctuary (www.wildsanctuary.com).
In this episode, co-hosts Carrie Ann and Emma discuss six steps in the basic biology of fertilization. They also discuss the history of fertilization research and the often overlooked active role of the egg in the process.
In today’s episode, Naomi and Casey speak with Nobel laureate William Nordhaus (a Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale), Fran Moore (an Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at UC Davis), Howard Shelanski (a Law Professor at Georgetown University and former White House administrator), and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (US Senator from RI). They seek to understand the theory behind the “social cost of carbon”: the economic backbone of all carbon pricing schemes.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced healthcare systems to make decisions about how to ration medical treatments – and many have chosen to explicitly de-prioritize people for these treatments based on pre-existing disabilities. Professor Samuel Bagenstos and attorney Alison Barkoff join us to talk about their work on COVID-19 medical rationing advocacy and what lessons we can take away from how this issue has played out.
In this installment of our YJBM Sex Education series, hosts Felicia and Chelsea bust some myths surrounding sex for pleasure and go into why humans have sex, the biology and evolution behind orgasms, sex differences in experiencing pleasure, the biochemistry behind pleasure, and the importance of conversations around pleasure in sexual health research and sex education courses.
Welcome to Pricing Nature, a new podcast from The Yale Center for Business and the Environment, and the Yale Carbon Charge. In this first episode, we break down the basics of pricing carbon dioxide, and other harmful greenhouse gases. We’re joined by Susanne Brooks, Senior Director of U.S. Climate Policy & Analysis at EDF, to talk about how to design good carbon pricing policies.
When wealthy individuals are spending record amounts on electoral politics and the Supreme Court has refused to limit campaign spending, how can the law help low-income communities assert their democratic rights? Professors Kate Andrias and Benjamin Sachs join us to talk about the power of mass-membership organizations to equalize the political voice of citizens who lack the political influence that comes from wealth. Ai-jen Poo, co-founder and Executive Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, shares insights from her work building power on the ground.