You're holding a letter. What's inside? A weather report from 5,000 miles away? Some devastating family history? A single word? A heartfelt dispatch from your past self that's about to change the course of your life?
Read moreAllusionist 66. Open Me part I
From Me To You’s Alison Hitchcock and Brian Greenley didn’t know each other well. But when Brian was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, Alison offered to write him letters. 100 letters later, their lives were changed.
One of the newest members of Radiotopia is Ear Hustle, a podcast made inside San Quentin by and about the men incarcerated there, in collaboration with Nigel Poor. In prison, a letter is a precious thing.
Read moreAllusionist 65. Eponyms III: Who's That Guy?
Roman Mars returns for our annual dose of eponyms - words that derive from people's names. This year: explosive revelations about the origins of the word 'guy'.
Read moreAllusionist 64: Technobabble
You've encountered technobabble when Doc Brown is shouting about flux capacitors in Back To The Future, or when Isaac Asimov writes about positronic brains. Astrophysicist Katie Mack and NASA JPL technologist Manan Arya discuss how science fact relates to science fiction.
Read moreAllusionist 63: Evolution of Accents
"Accent is identity. It's a way of encoding and signaling - almost completely at an unconscious level for most people - who they feel like they are, who they want to be seen as, what group they feel like they belong to."
Read moreAllusionist 62: In Crypt, Decrypt
Crossword-solving is often a solitary activity - over breakfast; on the train; on the loo... But a few times a year, crossword puzzle enthusiasts gather in their hundreds to compete to be the fastest, most accurate crossword-solver.
This episode comes to you from a church basement on the Upper East Side of New York City, wherein takes place America's second largest crossword puzzle tournament: Lollapuzzoola.
Read moreAllusionist 61: In Your Hand
"It's sort of frozen body language; that's what handwriting analysis is about."
Since it caught on a couple of hundred years ago, graphology - analysing handwriting to deduce characteristics of the writer - has struggled to be taken seriously as a practice. But undoubtedly, there are things about ourselves that we can't help but reveal in our handwriting.
Read moreAllusionist 60: Zillions
They look like numbers. They sound like numbers. You kinda know they are numbers. But they're not actually numbers. Linguistic anthropologist Stephen Chrisomalis explains what's going on with indefinite hyperbolic numerals like 'zillion', 'squillion' and 'kajillion'.
Read moreAllusionist 59: One To Another
Translation, A Love Story:
Translator listens to The Allusionist. Translator hears about the podcast The Memory Palace. Translator listens to The Memory Palace. Translator immediately becomes smitten with The Memory Palace. Translator translates The Memory Palace from English to Brazilian Portuguese, and turns it into a book - O Palácio da Memória - which will be published in Brazil two weeks hence.
But, like any love story, it's not quite that simple.
Read moreAllusionist 58: Eclipse
It's August 2007. Lauren Marks is a 27-year-old actor and a PhD student, spending the month directing a play at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. She's in a bar, standing onstage, performing a karaoke duet of 'Total Eclipse of the Heart'... and then a blood vessel in her brain bursts. When she wakes up in hospital, days later, she has no internal monologue, and a vocabulary of only forty words.
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