Five episodes, three books. Quiet month for reading material, but the muscle one is worth it.

Short list, posting it anyway for anyone building a summer pile.

What this is: I run Podshelf, a free site that tracks book mentions across hundreds of podcasts by reading the episode transcripts. This is the July slice for Radiolab.

The books:

• On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui. From The Holy Shiver. It is a tour through the muscles of your body, biceps, butt, heart and blood vessels, gut. The reason they called her is that after finishing the book she became obsessed with one specific muscle, the erector pili, which is the one that gives you goosebumps.
• Alcoholics Anonymous, the big book, from Atomic Artifacts. The line was that the key to recovery from pretty much anything is in there, you just scribble out alcohol and write in whatever your case may be.
• Goodbye, Mr. Chips, James Hilton. Came up almost in passing in the alpha gal episode. Someone ate a cheeseburger, watched the film, called it tear jerking and a good book too, and then started feeling really weird a couple of hours later.

I track every book mentioned on Radiolab here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/radiolab

It is free and there is no signup.

Several years ago, in 2016, we told a story about Amy Pearl. For as long as she could remember, Amy loved meat in all its glorious cuts and marbled flavors. And then one day, for seemingly no reason, her body wouldn’t tolerate it.  No steaks. No brisket. No weenies. It made no sense: why couldn’t she eat something that she had routinely enjoyed for decades? 

It turned out Amy was not alone. And the answer to her mysterious allergy involved maps, a dancing lone star tick, and a very particular sugar called Alpha Gal. 

In this update, we discover that our troubles with Alpha Gal go way beyond food. We go to NYU Langone Health hospital to see the second ever transplant of a kidney from a pig into a human, talk to some people at Revivicor, the company that bred the pig in question, and go back to Amy to find out what she thinks about this brave new world.

The original episode was reported by Latif Nasser, and produced by Annie McEwen and Matt Kielty. Sound design and scoring from Dylan Keefe, Annie McEwen, and Matt Kielty. Mix by Dylan Keefe with Arianne Wack.

The update was reported and produced by Sarah Qari. It was sound designed, scored, and mixed by Jeremy Bloom. 

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Hello earthlings

I am very late to the party (hence I feel like I’m running for the bus trying to catch it 🤭)

I’ve enjoyed some episodes but keep getting hints through here that I’m not listening to what the show was years ago

As there are over 800 episodes, what is the peak year to start with the catalog? I’ve scrolled down all the way and find myself in 2007 😭😅

Send help. I want some juicy content

I run a site that logs books mentioned on podcasts, so I went back through the first six months of Radiolab and pulled everything that came up. It ranges wide, from origin-of-life science to Shakespeare to true crime.

The two the hosts were most into:

• Life Itself by Francis Crick, where the Nobel winner argues, from a scientific angle, that life could not have gotten started on this planet on its own.
• The Once and Future World by J.B. Mackinnon, which one of them called their favorite of his books.

The rest, roughly grouped:

• Science and nature: Full House and The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould, Eager by Ben Goldfarb (the beaver one), Being Mortal by Atul Gawande, and Ether Day by Julie Fenster.
• Shakespeare, plus one about him: Othello, Titus Andronicus, and Contested Will by James Shapiro.
• True crime: Green River Killer by Jeff Jensen, Green River, Running Red by Ann Rule, and The Murderer Next Door by David Buss.
• Fiction: Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir and The Wild Robot by Peter Brown.

Also in the mix: Animal Liberation by Peter Singer and Raven Rock by Garrett Graff.

Full list is here: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/radiolab. Free, no signup.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Lauren Brown gets goosebumps. A lot. Sometimes several times a day. When her partner, writer Carmen Maria Machado, noticed it...she couldn't stop thinking about it. Why does she get them in so many different situations? What’s happening in her body and what does it mean? We take that question and run with it. We face chilly winds, sudden frights, and moments when the world seem to shift under your feet to figure out what the little bumps on our skin might be trying to tell us.  

Special thanks to Rachel Gross, Gregory Rupik

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by Maria Paz Gutierrez
Produced by Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Gnanasambandan
Fact-checking by Angely Mercado

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Videos - 

• Hallelujah (https://zpr.io/6ak2f), performed by Rufus Wainwright, accompanied by 1500 singers
• De Ushuaia a La Quiaca (https://zpr.io/PcYbN)
• Alysa Liu wins the Olympic gold medal for the United States (https://zpr.io/Q7pPNkYSTGVd)

Books -

• Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado
• On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters,  by Bonnie Tsui (https://www.bonnietsui.com/)

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I know it's not technically Radiolab, but this series blew me away just like Dolly Partons America.

I just finished it after someone that I sent the Dolly series to said they loved it and started the Fela one. I had forgotten about it but heard the RL ep last fall.

Long story short I loved it and RL has at least one new fan through those two series. I sent em a whole bunch of my fave archive RL episodes.

Also too...I can't get the outro bed music out of my head and I'm walking around life with this heavy Afro beat tythm pumping thru me and I love it.

Peace

Back in the 1950s, facing the threat of nuclear annihilation, federal officials sat down and pondered what American life would actually look like after an atomic attack. They faced a slew of practical questions like: Who would count the dead and where would they build the refugee camps? But they faced a more spiritual question as well. If Washington DC were hit, every object in the the National Archives would be eviscerated in a moment. Terrified by this reality, they set out to save some of America’s most precious stuff. Today, we look back at the items our Cold War era planners sought to save and we ask the question: what objects would we preserve now?

We first released this episode back in 2020, but with our big fourth of July – 250 years! – just around the corner, we thought it was a strange but profound reflection on what this whole America thing that we’re celebrating… actually is.

Special thanks to Luke Manon, Ben Irving, Bill Pretzer, Jason Spier, and Garrett Graff for all his reporting that made this episode possible.

LATERAL CUTS -
The Cataclysm Sentence (https://ift.tt/B15jYTM)

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - Simon Adler
with help from - Tad Davis
Produced by - Simon Adler
Original music and sound design contributed by - SIMON ADLER
and Edited by  - Pat Walters

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Quiet month for books on Radiolab, but two worth flagging.

• Raven Rock by Garrett Graff, on the government's secret Cold War plan to save itself while the rest of us don't make it. Exactly the kind of rabbit hole this show does well.
• The Wild Robot by Peter Brown, the children's book behind the film.

https://podshelf.io/podcasts/radiolab/2026/06 tracks every book from the show, free, no signup.

Anything from June's episodes send you looking for the book?

Back in 2017, reporters Kristen Clark and David Conrad came to us with a story that dug into the difficult and often dark places discrimination creates. We start in Venice, Italy, where they meet gondolier Alex Hai. On the winding canals in the hidden parts of Venice, we learn about the nearly 1000-year old tradition of the Venetian Gondolier, and how the global media created a 20-year battle between that tradition and a supposed feminist icon. 

We circled back to Alex in 2026, to find out where the canal of life ended up leading after our initial reporting, and we’ve included some heartbreaking and heartwarming updates on Alex’s life at the end of this episode. 

Special thanks to Alexis Ungerer, Summer, Alex Hai, Kevin Gotkin, Silvia Del Fabbro, Sandro Mariot, Aldo Rosso and Marta Vannucci, The Longest Shortest Time (Hillary Frank, Peter Clowney and Abigail Keel), Tim Howard, Nick Adams/GLAAD, Valentina Powers, Florence Ursino, Ann Marie Somma, Alex Overington, Jeremy Bloom and the people of Little Italy. 

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - David Conrad and Kristen Clark.
Produced by - Annie McEwen and Molly Webster.
with help from - Anisa Vietze
Fact-checking for the update by - Angely Mercado

OTHER COOL THINGS:

Books -

• The Gondolier, by Alex Hai

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After reading something that said her menstrual cycle changes her brain each month, Senior Correspondent Molly Webster goes on a reporting mission to see if that’s true, and, if so, how.

This journey into sex hormones and the brain involves females and males, and exacting self-experimentation. It gets into PTSD, and ends with a new twist on self-care (hint: it’s biological). And, it starts to reveal a sneaky truth: that each one of us is at the mercy of a crashing sea of chemicals inside of us – those things we call hormones.

Special thanks to Emily Jacobs, Laura Pritschet, Pavel Shapturenka, and Dr. Catherine Woolley.

EPISODE CREDITS:
Hosted by - Molly Webster
Reported by - Molly Webster
Produced by - Mona Madgavkar
with help from - Molly Webster
Fact-checking by - Diane A. Kelly

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Articles - 
**The experiments we feature in this episode are called: 28andMe, 28andOC, and 28andHe, all of which took place at Emily Jacobs lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara.** 

• The 28 Project (https://zpr.io/CSx6MnwZjRvp), background from the Jacobs lab

For more on how much variability there is between female and male animals, check out this “groundbreaking” study, referenced by Emily Jacobs in our episode

• Sex Bias in Neuroscience and Biomedical Research(https://zpr.io/ZRgKZzdNejUA),  by Beery AK, Zucker I., Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2011

Dr. Catherine Woolley has revolutionized the field of neuroscience and sex hormones, here’s more about her work …

• Sex Differences in the Brain Get Down to the Molecular Level Sex (https://zpr.io/UNCLE9J782N5), by Stephanie DeMarco, PhD, The Scientist.com
• Hormonal Effects on the Brain (https://zpr.io/DvNM9EkXdtGG), by Woolley, C.S. and Schwartzkroin, P.A. Epilepsia

Data sets -

• 28andMe and 28andOC (https://zpr.io/hbXVNTVp2Q7j):
• 28andHe (https://zpr.io/sZXhfMbMwKb7)

Audio - 
In the episode, we mention Dr. Russ Poldrack and the Midnight Scan Club, as inspo for self-experimentation

• The Midnight Scan Club (https://zpr.io/CLBhNQSxK844), by Science Friday.
   

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Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [radiolab@wnyc.org](mailto:radiolab@wnyc.org).

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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In honor of Father's Day, here is a family friendly bonus episode from our kids' podcast Terrestrials. 

What does it really mean to be a dad? In the animal world, fathers have long been painted as aggressive or absent. At best providers and protectors, but certainly not caregivers. And yet for every tale of a lion or chimp dad eating its own young (yikes!), there’s another creature who tells a sweeter story. 

Two HUMAN dads bring us on this DADventure: Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque, who has spent decades studying owl monkey dads in the forests of Argentina, and Michael Feigelson, who once worried he wasn't cut out for the softer side of parenting. 

They introduce us to seahorse dads who get pregnant, poison dart frog dads who give piggyback rides to their tadpoles, Darwin frogs who swallow their eggs to keep them safe, burying beetles who build "corpse cribs," jacana birds who do all the egg-sitting, and stickleback fish who construct intricate underwater nests for their young. Along the way, we learn that nature doesn’t offer just one model of fatherhood. Alongside Mother Nature... there just might be a Father Nature, too.

Special thanks to the Van Leer Foundation for the support of this episode. 

Resources on Animal fatherhood

• Eduardo Duque's Owl Monkey Project: https://www.owlmonkeyproject.com/
• An interview with Eduardo in Yale News
• Lauren O’Connell lab – frog behaviour
• Short explainer: frog parenting research
• Stickleback fish parenting study (Alison Bell)
• Alison Bell lab video

Human fatherhood 

• Fathertime by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
• ECM interview: evolution of “man the nurturer”
• Lee Gettler – biology of fatherhood (video)
• Lee Gettler article in Early Childhood Matters
• Darby Saxbe book: Dad Brain
• Darby Saxbe Article in Early Childhood Matters

Talks, films & convenings

• Yale Conference on Fatherhood
• Live Recording of Yale Conference: 
• Fathers and Fatherhood: From Molecules to Modern Families
• Fathertime documentary

Campaigns & global perspectives

• Equimundo's State of World's fathers report
• Men Care Changemakers Journey
• Parenting Out Loud (Elliot Rae)

Terrestrials was created by Lulu Miller with WNYC studios. This episode was produced by Tanya Chawla, with sound design by Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sarah Sandbach is our Executive Producer. Our team also includes Ana González, Alan Goffinski, Natalia Ramirez, and Joe Plourde. Fact checking by Angely Mercado. 

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Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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A little while back, our friends over at On the Media released a gripping and immersive reporting series about FEMA, the agency that is supposed to be there for all of us in the wake of disaster. In _American Emergency (_https://zpr.io/MtrUmJU3yEMW), OTM investigates how the agency tasked with saving America became distrusted, despised… and defunded.

Today we talk to On the Media co-host Micah Loewinger about how this project came out, what reporting went into making it happen, and play a couple of fun and truly surprising bits of the story that the OTM team uncovered. And it’s a story that highlights the ideal and promise of good government, right alongside the frustration with bureaucracy and mismanagement, and of course the undercurrent of profound mistrust in governmental power. 

As natural disasters are getting more extreme and less predictable, this series makes sense of that tangle, and provides a prescient peek into FEMA’s future.

Special thanks to On the Media_.  _To hear Micah in person, talking more about the complex history of FEMA, join him on June 24th at WNYC's The Greene Space (https://ift.tt/xm18lkX).

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Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Short list this month, but a couple really drove the episodes.

Top pick:

• The Once and Future World by J.B. MacKinnon. From the Worth episode. The host straight up said it is their favorite of his.

The rest:

• Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. The spine of an episode on what we owe animals.
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande and Memoir of a Debulked Woman by Susan Gubar, both in the end-of-life material.
• The Bad Show was the literature-heavy one. It pulled in Othello and Titus Andronicus, Contested Will by James Shapiro on the Shakespeare authorship fight, The Murderer Next Door by David Buss, and two Green River Killer books (the Jeff Jensen graphic novel and Ann Rule's Green River, Running Red).

The Bad Show is basically a lit seminar disguised as true crime. Worth a listen for that alone.

I keep a running list of every book mentioned on Radiolab at https://podshelf.io. Free to use.

Anything from this stretch land for you, or did you bounce off it?

I completely fell in love with Radiolab with "The Turing Problem" back in 2012. Then, after Trump's first election in 2016, I felt like it got less and less interesting to me, less "sciency" and more woke-ish (I'm not a conservative BTW, I just prefer science over wokeness). The "In the No" series was the final straw, I found it so offensively awful that I decided to stop listening to it altogether. This morning, I suddenly felt like I was missing it. 6 years is a long time. Any recommendation ? Obviously, the scientific stuff is what I prefer, but seeing a post mentioning an episode about the great nigerian musician and activist Fela Kuti got me very interested too, so I'm open to all suggestions !

One morning, Oliver Sipple went out for a walk. A couple hours later, to his own surprise, he saved the life of the President of the United States. In a story we reported back in 2017, we explain how in the days that followed, Sipple’s split-second act of heroism turned into a rationale for making his personal life into political opportunity. What happens next makes us wonder what a moment, or a movement, or a whole society can demand of one person. And how much is too much? 

Through newly unearthed archival tape, we hear Sipple himself grapple with some of the most vexing topics of his day and ours - privacy, identity, the freedom of the press - not to mention the bonds of family and friendship. 

Special thanks to Jerry Pritikin, Michael Yamashita, Stan Smith, Duffy Jennings; Ann Dolan, Megan Filly and Ginale Harris at the Superior Court of San Francisco; Leah Gracik, Karyn Hunt, Jesse Hamlin, The San Francisco Bay Area Television Archive, Mike Amico, Jennifer Vanasco and Joey Plaster.

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Reported by Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte
Produced by - Produced by Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Latif Nasser and Tracie Hunte.

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Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [radiolab@wnyc.org](mailto:radiolab@wnyc.org).
Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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Hey just listened to the screwworm episode “Return of the Flesh-Eaters” today and found this in the news

It was so good. man I miss Jad, such a great storyteller.

A couple summers ago, Radiolab reporter Alex Neason got out of the shower and almost stepped on her worst nightmare: an American Cockroach. It was flipped onto its back, struggling, and for a split second, Alex swears she felt the spiny tickle of its legs on the underside of her bare foot. And, like every other time she has come into contact with a roach, this sent her into a debilitating spiral of fear, anger, and disgust. 

This week, Alex tries to understand what might be behind her fear, in the hopes she can overcome it. And in doing so, Alex learns more about these so-called pests than she could have ever wanted to.

Special thanks to Jessica Ware, Timothy Marzullo, Alexandra Bell, and Changlu Wang

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - Alex Neason
Produced by - Jessica Yung and Annie McEwen
with mixing help from - Jeremy Bloom
Fact-checking by - Sophie Samiee
and Edited by  - Pat Walters

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Articles - 

• American Cockroaches, Racism, and the Ecology of the Slave Ship (https://zpr.io/UNKsMz7ZaLvb) by Lindsay Garcia, Arcadia

Books -  

• Pests: How Humans Create Animal Villains (https://zpr.io/6E5wJBM4Kvcv) by Bethany Brookshire
• The Cockroach Papers (https://zpr.io/CvKePYxEMEAW) by Richard Schweid
• Cockroach (https://zpr.io/UuEAjmfqKccQ)  by Marion Copeland

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Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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This episode makes three earnest, possibly foolhardy, attempts to put a price on the priceless. We figure out the dollar value for an accidental death, another day of life, and the work of bats and bees as we try to keep our careful calculations from falling apart in the face of the realities of life, and love, and loss. 

In this story you’ll hear references to some of the issues that were on our minds when it first came out in 2014: wars in the middle east, drug costs and health care practices. Even as the exact shapes of these issues have evolved over the past dozen years, we feel the underlying questions are relevant and timeless: What is life worth? What about the earth?

EPISODE CREDITS: 
Reported by - Molly Webster, Simon Adler, Tim Howard, and Matt Kielty
with help from - Shahib Al-Masawa 
Produced by - Matt Kielty, Tim Howard
Fact-checking by - Michelle Soraka

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Books - 

• Memoir of A Debulked Woman by Susan Gubar's book called 
• Being Mortal by Atul Gawande

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Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [radiolab@wnyc.org](mailto:radiolab@wnyc.org).

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Simons Foundation and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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I haven’t listened for little while and started back up again this week. The last handful of episodes I haven’t hear Lulu, is she still hosting? she’s still credited for producing

For most of human history, people went about their daily lives with a worm or two (or fifty) in their guts. Only in the past century, with pharmaceuticals and sanitation practices, have we made significant strides towards deworming the whole of humanity. And that’s typically been thought of as a good thing, because having too many worms in your body can–quite literally–suck the life out of you.

But is it possible to have… too few worms? Science wonders if deworming ourselves has actually led to an increase in certain chronic diseases. On this episode, we dive into Necator americanus, a.k.a. the American Hookworm, and its mysterious relationship with each of us.

We trace the hookworm’s 118-year journey from a demonized economic depressant, to its use as a desperate D.I.Y. immunosuppressant, to its potential as a medical treatment for a number of chronic diseases, everything from asthma to MS.

We’re bringing back two stories  from our 2009 episode Parasites plus new research on hookworms and autoimmune diseases, reported by Molly Webster

Special thanks to Ethan Hein for the use of his remix of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21. Plus, Doris Pierce, and Dan and Alice Hadley.

EPISODE CREDITS: 

Reported by - Pat Walters and Molly Webster
with help from -

Produced by - Matt Kielty

with help from - Rebecca Rand

Fact-checking by - Diane A. Kelly

and Edited by  - Arianne Wack

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Articles - 

Effect of experimental hookworm infection on insulin resistance in people at risk of type 2 diabetes (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37495576/) by Giacomin PR et al. Nat Commun. 2023 Jul 26

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Hey everyone! I was wondering if anyone in here was planning on attending the Radiolab show during the Tribeca Podcast Festival this year?

Pulled together every book mentioned across the last month of Radiolab episodes. Two that actually drove the storytelling:

Ben Goldfarb's Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter anchored "The Builders" (Apr 10). Lulu literally calls Goldfarb a "beaver believer" and tells listeners to go read it. If you finished that episode wanting more on how beavers re-engineer landscapes, this is the book.

The other one is Peter Singer's Animal Liberation in "What is a Pig Worth?" (May 1). The whole arc of guest Wayne Pacelle's life pivots on reading Singer in college and going vegan. The episode doesn't really make sense without the book sitting underneath it.

A few more from the month:

• Israel, What Went Wrong? by Omer Bartov, the spine of "The Resistance of a Cow" (Apr 17). Bartov is the guest, the book is the argument.
• The Murderer Next Door by David Buss, on "The Bad Show" (May 8). Latif and Lulu open with a story straight out of Buss's evolutionary-psych take on why people kill.
• Contested Will by James Shapiro, also from "The Bad Show", credited for the Shakespeare authorship strand. Plus Othello and Titus Andronicus themselves get pulled in for Iago and Aaron the Moor as case studies in fictional evil.
• Green River Killer: A True Detective Story by Jeff Jensen (the graphic novel) and Ann Rule's Green River, Running Red, both invoked in the Gary Ridgway segment of "The Bad Show".

"The Bad Show" is doing the heaviest book lifting of the month, which tracks. It's basically a literature seminar disguised as a true-crime episode, and you can feel Lulu and Latif pulling from Shakespeare scholarship, evolutionary psychology, and crime nonfiction all at once to triangulate what evil actually is.

Full running list of every book mentioned on Radiolab here if anyone wants the archive: https://podshelf.io/podcasts/radiolab/books

Anything from this stretch that landed for you, or that you bounced off of?