The wonderful Helen Mirren is as honest and searching in conversation as she is in the rich characters she’s brought to us in performance after performance. She’s just as thoughtful and fun as you’d expect her to be.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

Alan and Clear+Vivid’s executive producer Graham Chedd preview the new season.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

And if it comes to that, wrist, elbows, and lungs? Neil Shubin found that fish in 375 million-year-old rocks in the Canadian Arctic. It was the earliest known evidence of what Neil calls the Great Transition, when life was about to emerge from water to land.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

Using her voice, her body, and a close observation of speech patterns, Anna Deveare Smith has chronicled our times with staged portraits of the people who lived them.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

Journalist John Colapinto blew out his voice singing too loud and too long in a rock band. The good news is that it inspired him to find out what happened – and that led to a terrific book about that remarkable instrument, the human voice.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

A searing experience with an apparently uncaring doctor when she was young helped make Dr. Jillian Horton a passionate advocate for a radical rethinking of how doctors are trained.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

Bill Bryson loves finding out about stuff – like how much the earth weighs and why you have a spleen – then letting the rest of us know what he’s learned in books that are delightfully clear and vivid – and funny. In conversation with Alan, he tells why and how he does it.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

In her new book, The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir, Sherry Turkle movingly—and candidly—weaves together events in her own life with her dawning understanding of the way technology can weaken human connections.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

Brian May, famed guitarist and founder of the rock group Queen, is also Dr. Brian May, astrophysicist. His research on the dust that swirls around the solar system and his fascination with 3-D imaging has led to his working with NASA on projects ranging from tracking asteroids to the Perseverance mission on Mars.Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid

Something is pushing the Universe apart. We don’t know what it is, but Michael Turner named it: Dark Energy. This cosmologist’s way with words helped raised the public profile of what Michael calls the greatest question in all of science. Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/clearandvivid