My favorite pastime: history podcasts
We are all born with a tremendous curiosity, and a need to explore and understand the world around us - to understand how and why things work, and how we fit into it. It is so fun to watch babies and toddlers and young children go through this process. I suspect that my sense of curiosity was partially stunted through 16 years of formal education. But when I was in graduate school (Chemical and Biological Engineering, University of Wisconsin - Madison) around 2008 I started to follow politics, having a vague sense that something different was happening and things were changing in the word. I felt my curiosity drive began to resurface, and I opened a new chapter in my intellectual life. (Maybe it had something to do with developing and practicing critical thinking techniques in a new way as a graduate student.) Politics then gave way to the main question that planted itself in my mind, which was "How did the world come to be the way it is now, from how it used to be?" We