AJ Jacobs makes The Puzzler podcast, wrote The Puzzler book, and sometimes turns his whole life into a puzzle. He comes bearing word games, explanations of anagrams being used to precipitate wars and were key evidence in trials, tips for writing with a qu

Have you ever wondered why the planets in our solar system are all named after Roman deities, except two of them?One of those exceptions is Earth. The other is Uranus.Content note: there are mentions of Ancient Greek and Roman deities and their terrible

This is the Tranquillusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, say a load of words which arent really about anything, so that your brain gets a little gentle diversion from thinking and/or feeling. Today: a list of gay animals.Find a transcript at theallusi

The starting point is, and the research questions are all framed by: 'We know it's terrible to be fat, but how terrible is it?' Not: 'What would it take to give effective healthcare to fat people?' says Aubrey Gordon, writer of the new book You Just nee

It should just be an accurate descriptor of my body, but the word 'fat' has shaped so much more of my life, and our society. "There is this whole set of baggage that we are all culturally bringing to this word all the time," says Aubrey Gordon, writer of

Oh, you thought the Eurovision Song Contest was about songs? Or a fun international TV event that brings people together in lots of different countries? Or watching extremely vigorous dance numbers? OK, it is, but it's also about some pretty thorny langua

There aren't many multilingual, multinational television shows that have been running for nearly seven decades. But what makes the Eurovision Song Contest so special to me is not the music, or the dancing, or the costumes that range from spangletastic to

"You can't redead the dead by you saying something shit," says Cariad Lloyd of Griefcast and author of You Are Not Alone; nevertheless when you're bereaved, people still are usually so nervous to say the wrong thing that they often don't say anything at a

"The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language, but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of sorts?" says linguist and translato

Last episode, I mentioned that in London, Ontario, in 2019 a 9-year-old named Lyla Wheeler had launched a petition to rename her street, currently called Plantation Road. This episode, Lyla, now aged nearly thirteen, and her mom Kristin Daley recount the