Pat Walters

For our episode, The Bad Show, Pat Walters reported a piece about a psychologist who found that 91% of men and 84% of women have had at least one serious homicidal fantasy. So P...

What would it take to make you do something truly awful?

When Pat Walters traveled to Romania with a few American reporters to teach some classes on narrative journalism to a group of Romanian writers, he had a coincidental run-in with a Ra...

In movies and daydreams, winning changes everything. But in real life, it's not always so easy to pin down which ending is the happiest, or who deserves the glory.

Later this week, Radiolab goes to northeastern Alabama in our new hour-long podcast. For more on that part of our country, and for one of the most honest American memoirs out there, pick up Rick Bragg's All Over but the Shoutin'.

Friday Night Lights -- This is one that's worth consuming in its original form.

We begin in the middle of a phone call with Lulu Miller, who tells us the story of a couple with a seemingly unsolvable problem. It's the 1970s, and Richard and Tucker are very much in love. They'd like to get married, but it's against the law. And that would have been the end of the story...except that Richard, worried about Tucker and frustrated that he couldn't legally provide for him, came up with a very unusual (but totally legal) solution.

Lulu says these moments, where one little switch can reframe reality, are a kind of duct tape for the ethereal sadness. It's a form of hope, where an imperfect workaround opens up a door and makes life a little bit better.

And that brings us to a man named Jim Eggers, who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at risk--it jeopardizes the safety of everybody around him. Producer Pat Walters explains how Jim found a way to manage his anger with the help of a bird named Sadie. African Grey Parrot expert Irene Pepperberg helps us understand how this could work, and shares some insights from her work with a parrot named Alex.

 

Zelda Gamson tried for decades to stop smoking.

In today's short, we get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts...until he meets a bird who can keep him in check.

Meet a man who grew up without language.

In the late 1970s, a new language was born.

An unlikely escape story begins in a supermarket, and ends in a boat off the coast of Maine.