Sing for Science

Brooklyn rapper, producer, and singer-songwriter Kota the Friend joins Brown University professor and author Dr. Kevin Quashie for a conversation about Black life, language, world-building, and the possibilities of imagining a Black world beyond narratives defined by violence.

Using Kota’s “For Colored Boys” alongside ideas from Quashie’s Black Aliveness, or A Poetics of Being, the conversation explores Black aliveness, Black pessimism, audience, self-love, conformity, spirituality, and the extraordinary power of language to create new ways of seeing and being.

Recorded live at Poster House NYC on September 2, 2026, in conjunction with its Act Black: Posters from Black American Stage & Screen exhibition.

How do the specific objects and places of our past shape our understanding of personal and collective history?

In this episode of Sing for Science, singer-songwriter ⁨Jensen McRae sits down with Williams College historian Dr. Christine DeLucia to explore the intersections of songwriting, material culture, and historical memory.

Starting with a deep dive into the specific imagery of Jensen’s song "Massachusetts"—specifically the lyric referencing a souvenir pilgrim ashtray—they examine how ordinary objects serve as powerful conduits for memory.

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What happens when artificial intelligence is given a directive without a human conscience to constrain it?

Multi-instrumentalist, producer, and singer-songwriter Sean Ono Lennon joins AI ethics researchers Dr. Jason D'Cruz and Dr. Anat Perry for a conversation inspired by The Great Parrot Ox and the Golden Egg of Empathy, Sean's concept album and companion comic book co-created with Les Claypool.

Using Nick Bostrom’s famous "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment as a jumping-off point, the panel explores the alignment problem, the nature of theory of mind, and the fundamental tension between cold, mathematical optimization and human empathy. Together, they unpack whether true empathy requires a conscious, mortal experience of existing—and examine the risks of integrating persuasive, simulated empathy into courtrooms, therapy, and everyday human relationships.

This episode was produced in partnership with the Harvard Radcliffe Institute and recorded live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Country star Brantley Gilbert joins us for a conversation about his song “Sins of the Father” with Texas Tech University Climate Scientist and Evangelical Christian, Dr. Katharine Hayhoe. We talk about the relationship between faith and science, how to have conversations with people you disagree with, the truth about what’s causing our planet to warm and so much more.

How does the brain transform the physical world into the rich inner experience we call reality?

Singer-songwriter Debbii Dawson joins Caltech neuroscientist Dr. Daw-An Wu for a conversation inspired by her songs "Where Have All the Good Men Gone" and "Chemical Attraction."

Together they explore psychophysics, the science of perception, asking how illusion, consciousness, free will, love, and even spirituality emerge from the brain's interpretation of the world around us.

From medullas to panpsychism, this wide-ranging discussion examines the mysterious space where objective reality becomes subjective experience.