When he was hiking the Appalachian Trail, Robert Moor began to wonder about the paths beneath our feet. On every scale of life on earth, he says, trails form that “reduce an overwhelming array of choices to a single expeditious route.” But how do they form? Why do some paths improve while others disappear? How does order emerge from chaos? Moor joins us to explore how pathways serve as an essential guiding force for trailblazers and trail followers, alike. (Rebroadcast)

Nowadays, all kinds of devices exist to help us find our way through the world. But before all that stuff, before even cartography, humankind navigated with nature as the guide. The adventurer Tristan Gooley is committed to recovering and teaching the lost arts of natural navigation. He sees compass hands everywhere he looks: in rocks, trees, grass, ducks, puddles, clouds, and the wind. Gooley joins us to share what he’s learned about natural navigation and the joys of learning nature’s subtle signs. [Rebroadcast]

If you’re a skeptic, you’re going to be outraged by the “scientific projects” conducted by the U.S. government into mind reading and other paranormal phenomena. For more than 40 years the government hired magicians and hypnotists to try to figure out what the enemy was up to. Investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen’s latest book tells the story of this top secret program, and Thursday, she joins us to explain what would make people spend so much time, energy, and money on such strange ideas. (Rebroadcast)

We’re live Wednesday morning, talking about Millennials and Mormonism. Religion scholar Jana Riess has been studying what she calls “The Next Mormons,” and while nearly all say they believe in God, the way they practice their religion is very different from older generations. And like other faiths around the country, the LDS Church is experiencing its share of young adults leaving the fold. We’ll talk with Riess and others about this generational shift, and what it means for Mormonism.

Robots have been displacing human workers since the dawn of the industrial revolution, and that’s not about to change. If anything, says the futurist Martin Ford, the accelerating pace of tech innovation means that robots will be taking more jobs, including some we thought couldn’t be automated. White-collar workers like paralegals, journalists, even teachers, may soon find themselves replaced by artificial intelligence. Ford joins us Tuesday to explain what the rise of the robots means for the future of work.

Henry David Thoreau famously went to Walden Pond to “live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life.” But as the scholar Laura Dassow Walls shows in a new biography, there was much more to Thoreau’s life and work than his brief experiment at Spartan living in the woods. He was an inventor, a manual laborer, a gifted naturalist, a writer of great originality, and an uncompromising abolitionist. Walls joins us Monday to explore Thoreau’s profound, complex, and influential life.

If you’re worried that the word “literally” now means “figuratively,” or if you fret that acronyms are replacing actual words, today’s show will do one of two things: make you pull out your hair, or it’ll change your mind. The linguist John McWhorter says that changes to the English language are nothing new. Language, he says, isn’t some static thing that just is, “it’s actually something always becoming.” McWhorter will join us to discuss how languages evolve and why we should embrace the changes. (Rebroadcast)

The film High Noon was a hit when it debuted in 1952, and it remains a revered Hollywood classic. But the tale of a sheriff awaiting a showdown held deeper meaning for screenwriter Carl Foreman. For him, it was a political parable. Communist fear gripped the nation, and Foreman was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to answer for his past. Journalist Glenn Frankel has written a book about the making of High Noon and its high-stakes allegory. He joins us Thursday to talk about it. (Rebroadcast)

36 million people rely on the Colorado River for water, but how often do they think about what happens downstream? Journalist and New Yorker staff writer David Owen wanted to understand the ecosystem, culture, and politics that surround the crucial waterway, so he trekked from the headwaters to the once-lush, now desert terminus. The result is his latest book, and Wednesday, Owen joins Doug to explain “Where the Water Goes.”

Tuesday, we’re talking about a proposed ballot initiative aimed at addressing perceived flaws in how Utah draws its electoral districts. Redrawing district lines to benefit the political party in power, AKA gerrymandering, is almost as old as America itself. But the bi-partisan organizers behind the initiative say the way electoral boundaries are drawn in Utah allows politicians to choose their voters, when it should be the other way around. We’ll talk about their efforts, and we hope to hear from you, too.