Programming Note: Darts and Letters is off. We are producing a new season on Cited Podcast, which is called “the Rationality Wars“.

Bill Nye’s Bow Tie: the Politics of Science & Medicine

  • Thumbnail for EP51: This is Your Brain on Trial (ft. Andrew Scull, Tess Neal & Roland Nadler)

    EP51: This is Your Brain on Trial (ft. Andrew Scull, Tess Neal & Roland Nadler)

    Imagine reading or watching The Minority Report and thinking of that as a model for the criminal justice system. Well, plenty of forensic types are doing just that. Can you figure out if you are a criminal by scanning your brain? On this episode of Darts and Letters, guest-host Jay Cockburn and our guests explore the study of the criminal mind, from the history of madness, to spotty personality tests, to the emerging neuroscientific frontier.
    Listen now

  • Cited: America’s Chernobyl (2 of 2)

    We’re on break for two weeks. But we thought this was a good opportunity to celebrate our predecessor show, Cited Podcast.  America’s Chernobyl is our favourite episode. Here’s part #2.

    Hanford is the most-polluted place in America. On our last …

    Listen now

  • Cited: America’s Chernobyl (1 of 2)

    We’re on break for two weeks. But we thought this was a good opportunity to celebrate our predecessor show, Cited Podcast.  America’s Chernobyl is our favourite episode. Here’s part #1.

     

    Richland, Washington is a company town that sprang up …

    Listen now
  • Thumbnail for EP17: Pathological: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith

    EP17: Pathological: The Work of Dr. Charles Smith

    Dr. Charles Smith performed autopsies at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, ON. The cops kept turning to him with new corpses, and he kept claiming that these deaths were the result of foul play. He was thought of as a God in his field–few people were willing to question his work. That is until a 2008 inquiry, which found evidence of errors in 20 of the 45 autopsies they reviewed. Dr. Smith’s judgements played a role in 13 wrongful convictions. On this episode, we tell one of those stories.
    Listen now

  • EP16.1: Mesmerizing Convolutions: The Rise of Fingerprint Identification

    In this bonus episode, Gordon Katic speaks with Simon A. Cole, a professor of Criminology, Law and Society at University of California Irvine. He’s the author of “Suspect Identities: A History of Fingerprinting and Criminal Identification”. We do a deep dive into the social and political story of fingerprinting, and how it took more than a century before anyone tried to figure out if it actually worked
    Listen now