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The Dopamine Economy

Note: this story was picked up by WAMC, Northeast Public Radio, and also broadcast on the WGBH affiliate WCAI/WNAN, on the Cape and Islands!
dopamine brain Wall Street on Drugs: What motivated these former masters of the universe? And why did they act like kindergartners? ThoughtCast’s Jenny Attiyeh speaks with James Poterba, the Mitsui Professor of Economics at MIT, and Jonah Lehrer, the author of “Proust Was a Neuroscientist” and “How We Decide”, as well as the writer and public intellectual Jim Holt and the Harvard economist Alberto Alesina.
Here’s another question — don’t the continental Europeans like dopamine as much as we do? And — where do we get our fix now??

Click here to listen (3:24 minutes.)

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Turbulent Times for Truth Tellers? Just ask the Nieman Foundation…

This year’s Narrative Journalism conference, sponsored by Harvard’s Nieman Foundation, was titled “Telling True Stories in Turbulent Times.” With magazines folding and newspapers shrinking, these are hard days for narrative journalists: they need space, time and funding to do their work, all of which are in short supply in today’s web-driven media economy.  ThoughtCast spoke with several of the presenters at the conference, including keynote speaker and Pulitzer prize-winning columnist Connie Schultz, award-winning author and journalist Adam Hochschild, and Nieman’s own Joshua Benton. The title does indeed appear to be apt…

To watch this ThoughtCast program on the Forum Network, click here!