The 7th Avenue Project

Yale University psychologist Paul Bloom discusses recent research on infant morality. He says babies may not be saints, but they’ve got a much more developed sense of right and wrong than previously thought. Then, is youth wasted on the young? A large-scale study indicates that people get happier as they age, especially after 50. Psychologist Arthur Stone of Stoney Brook U. describes the findings.

A major new study led by UC Santa Cruz biologist Barry Sinervo has discovered that lizards around the world are dying off, and the culprit appears to be global warming. The finding suggests that an era of climate-driven mass extinctions may already have begun, sooner than scientists anticipated. Barry Sinervo and fellow biologists Donald Miles and Raymond Huey discuss the implications for reptiles and the rest of us.

For Mother's Day, we rebroadcast a 2009 interview with developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik. She's spent decades studying the minds of infants and young children. Her conclusion: babies are smarter, more aware and more caring than scientists previously realized. Also, inventor Joshua Klein on the surprising intelligence of crows.

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan studies the impact of facts on political views, and finds that often, reality doesn't matter. Journalist Robert Frank reports on the rich for the Wall Street Journal. He says that despite fears that they'd lose their fortunes during the financial crisis, many of the highly affluent are doing better than ever, and the gap between rich and poor has only grown.

Judith Tannenbaum was a teacher working in San Quentin. Spoon Jackson was an inmate serving a life sentence. We'll hear how they met, discovered a mutual love of poetry and forged a 25-year friendship. That friendship is the subject of their memoir, "By Heart."

Theoretical physicist Leonard Susskind on his long-running disagreement with Stephen Hawking about the nature of black holes, with the very foundations of physics at stake.

Anthropologist Hugh Raffles ruminates on human-insect relationships around the world in his new book Insectopedia. Japanese insect boys, Chinese fighting crickets, insect minds, insect music...

We consider the music and dance that captured the hearts of millions. Guests include tango historians Donald Cohen and Christine Denniston, and members of the Santa Cruz tango community. Show originally broadcast April, 2009.

Writer Gabriel Thompson went undercover to learn first-hand about the tough low-wage jobs done mostly by immigrants in America. He harvested lettuce in Arizona, toiled in a slaughterhouse in Alabama and did low-end restaurant jobs in Manhattan. He describes his year of working strenuously, and what he learned about immigrant labor.

In recent years, physics theory has gotten way ahead of the evidence. Now, researchers are going to extremes to figure out what’s true and what isn’t. They’ve launched a set of hugely ambitious experiments in some of the most forbidding places on Earth, from the South Pole to Himalayan mountaintops. Physics writer Anil Ananthaswamy travelled to these remote laboratories, and he tells us what he saw.

What Jane Goodall was to chimps, biologist Barry Sinervo is to lizards. He's spent the last 20 years studying lizards in the wild, gaining remarkable insights into the workings of evolution, social behavior and cooperation. He shares his discoveries, along with some very funny lizard stories.

Noted landscape painter Richard Mayhew discusses his life and work, including his childhood in a mixed African American and Native American community, joining the New York art scene at the height of the abstract expressionist movement, his second career as a jazz singer and helping to organize African-American artists in the 1960s.

Terry Castle takes on her own and others' self-deceptions in her latest collection of hilarious, brutally honest essays, "The Professor and Other Writings." Targets include sex, romance and youthful infatuations. She and Robert do their best to burst as many bubbles as possible.

Philosopher/Novelist Rebecca Goldstein discusses her latest book, "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction." She and Robert consider the case for and against religion.

In the aftermath of the Port-Au-Prince earthquake, the medical organization Partners in Health has played a key role bringing emergency aid to Haiti. On this edition of the 7th Avenue Project, Robert's 2003 interview with writer Tracy Kidder, discussing Partners in Health, its work in Haiti and its founder, Dr. Paul Farmer. Farmer was the subject of Kidder's best-selling book "Mountains Beyond Mountains."