Hidden Brain

The easiest way in. Shankar Vedantam, who spent years as a social science correspondent at NPR, builds each episode around a researcher and a story that makes their work concrete, which is why it works so well for listeners new to the subject. The production is polished and the pacing suits a walk or a commute. It started at NPR in 2015 and is now made by Vedantam's independent company, Hidden Brain Media. The trade-off is that its warmth sometimes rounds a single study up into a life lesson, so treat the closing takeaways as starting points and the guest's own caveats as the part worth remembering.