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What happened in Iowa politics the week of Jan. 19-23
Listen to IPR's Katarina Sostaric and Meghan McKinney review the latest from the Iowa Capitol. In week two of the legislative session, lawmakers considered bills related to property tax relief, eminent domain and higher education.
'Your eyes don't lie.' Trump, ICE, a death and a turning point
In an era of smartphones, Americans don't have to believe federal officials or journalists. They can watch what happened for themselves.
Stranger Things' Joe Keery says he listens to Donkey Kong music while cooking
Stranger things have happened
Newsom hands out 'Trump signature series kneepads' at international conference
Newsom also addressed what happened on Wednesday in Davos.
Panthers season in review: The rushing offense
With the 2025 season in the rearview, it’s time to reflect on what exactly happened in all of the phases in the game and look at what can and should be done with them going into 2026. We start with my personal favorite part of the game, running the football. How It Went Chuba Hubbard […]
Defiant Trump continues calls for acquiring Greenland : The NPR Politics Podcast
The president continued his fight to acquire the Danish self-governing territory of Greenland during a speech billed as an address related to domestic affordability issues. We explain what happened.Then, members of Congress met with Danish and Greenlandic officials in Copenhagen last week to discuss the increased tensions with the U.S. We talk about how the meetings went, and what Danes are thinking about it all.This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben, congressional correspondent Barbara Sprunt, and senior political editor & correspondent Domenico Montanaro.This podcast was produced and edited by Casey Morell & Bria Suggs.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.
Mental health counselor and client stabbed during session
It all happened around 9 p.m. on Monday at White's office in a building off of Lee Road in Winter Park.
What happened after the Trump administration upended childhood vaccine planning
Pediatricians say they’re fielding more questions from confused parents and finding some even more determined to vaccinate their children.
3 start-up business founders lived rent free in Alabama for a year: Here’s what happened next
Three entrepreneurs tell their story.
Whatever happened to this former Washington Commanders' 2nd-round pick
Mathis was another overdrafted player from the previous regime who didn't even finish his rookie contract in Washington.
There is an old-school urban political machine that has controlled Minnesota for a while, Deputy HHS Secretary says
Deputy HHS Secretary Jim O'Neill unpacks alleged fraud in Minnesota and reveals what happened when he visited the state on 'The Will Cain Show.'
Two years after new leaders promised change, Louisiana Democratic Party is still a mess
It’s been nearly two years since a group of upstart Democratic Party activists and voters, frustrated by years of neglect and failure, forced out the Louisiana state party’s chair and some other entrenched leaders. But what has happened since?
UCLA 71, Penn State 60: More Frustration
Stop if you’ve heard this one before. Penn State, playing at home, battled tooth and nail with a probable NCAA tournament team before finally faltering in the final minutes. Well, it happened again on Wednesday night at the BJC with UCLA leaving town with a 71-60 win that still has the Nittany Lions (9-8, 0-6 […]
A mother and daughter received the same cancer diagnosis. Here's what happened.
Matching multiple myeloma diagnosis shocked a mother and daughter. But they refuse to give up hope.
What happened to Minneapolis businesses when ICE came to town
Federal immigration agents have been circling El Burrito Mercado, a prominent Mexican supermarket and restaurant in St. Paul, Minnesota, for the last week.
Lee Byung-hun didn’t plan for global domination (but it happened anyway)
The South Korean star of “Squid Game” and “KPop Demon Hunters” returns to the big screen in “No Other Choice,” with one eye on the Oscars.
Jaguars turn ball over on downs, Bills score after challenge
Here's what happened when the Buffalo Bills challenged the spot of a Jacksonville Jaguars fourth-down attempt.
Americans have long been skeptical of ICE. That debate just became a lot more urgent.
One day – probably very soon – college psychology and political science lectures will be based on what happened Wednesday in Minneapolis.
Hidden in storage, a University of Utah research associate happened upon the only known copy of this ‘revolutionary’ software
It took careful work to recover the UNIX V4 operating system from the 9-track magnetic tape. The software is foundational for most devices used today, including iPhones.
Jan. 6, 2021: Five Years Later : The NPR Politics Podcast
Five years ago, a mob attacked the United States Capitol as lawmakers were working to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election. NPR's investigations team has been cataloging and maintaining an archive of documents, videos & court testimony related to the insurrection. We take a look at the aftermath of the events, including how President Trump and his allies are trying to rewrite the history of what happened.Listen to NPR's investigation into what happened on Jan. 6, 2021.This episode: senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith, national justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and investigative correspondent Tom Dreisbach.This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.
Holiday Sports Wrap: What happened locally on the basketball court and wrestling mat
The Holidays are over, which means that tournament and pre-conference play is mostly behind us on the hardwood and wrestling mat. With that in mind, let’s take a look at […]
Fifth anniversary of Jan. 6 brings fresh division to the Capitol
On the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, there is no official event to memorialize what happened that day
In China, a Debate About Political Power Ignites After Maduro’s Capture
The reactions online revealed a Chinese society divided: Some saw what happened in Venezuela as a playbook for seizing Taiwan, while others warned about ideological rigidity.
Trump said Venezuela stole America’s oil. Here’s what really happened
At 7 a.m., the earth began to rumble. Suddenly, oil blew out of its well in a massive eruption that towered 200 feet in the air and sprayed the fearful villagers of La Rosa.
What happened to Vickie on 'Stranger Things'? Duffers hint at Robin's relationship fate
What happened to Vickie on 'Stranger Things'? Show creators Matt and Ross Duffer hint at the status of her and Robin's relationship after the series finale.
Health officials warn of potential measles exposure at popular KY attraction
The potential measles exposure happened at the Ark Encounter in Williamstown and a nearby hotel. Here's what we know.
BBC Sport 2025 sports quiz: 12 months, 12 questions - how many can you get right?
How much have you paid attention to what has happened in the world of sport over the past 12 months?
Working Families bet on 2026 as the right time for a third US party after a wave of wins
The progressive party is now active in 18 states and much of its expansion happened in the past five years
Here’s what happened in politics and with Trump’s presidency in 2025
This school banned phones. Remarkable things happened.
After Ballard High School banned phones, they saw a 67 percent increase in students checking out library books. We hear from psychologist Jean Twenge about what phone bans can do for kids.
The Year in Entertainment 2025: Trends that took over
If you're not careful, you can find out that it's not clocking to you that you haven't been standing on business by knowing all of the cultural trends that happened this year. That's why we're going over the memes, viral moments and trend-setting sensations that dominated the cultural landscape of 2025:
Arch Linux Drops Support for NVIDIA Pascal and Older GPUs
Linux can be a solid option for anyone looking for an operating system that supports older hardware, but bleeding-edge distributions like Arch Linux often drop support for older hardware sooner than other distributions. This is exactly what happened recently, as the development team behind Arch Linu...
Scientists Released Caged Mice Into The Wild, And an Incredible Thing Happened
This may have implications for humans.
Explosion at a Pennsylvania nursing home kills at least 2, governor says
The explosion collapsed a part of the building and happened just as a utility crew had been on site looking for a gas leak at Bristol Health & Rehab Center in Bristol Township, just outside Philadelphia.
NASA launches science balloon in Antarctica | Space photo of the day for Dec. 22, 2025
The first scientific balloon flight happened on Dec. 16, 2025.
Recap: What happened at OKC Thunder's Sunday, Dec. 21 practice
Recap: What happened at Oklahoma City Thunder's Sunday, Dec. 21 practice.
Armed man in mental health crisis shot dead by Springfield officer, police say
The Hampden County District Attorney's Office is investigating a fatal officer-involved shooting that happened Saturday afternoon in Springfield.
Forget sit-ups — I tried the sprinter bridge instead to boost my core strength, and here's what happened
Mix up your core routine with the sprinter bridge
Eagles-Commanders Preview
ASHBURN, Va. (AP) Jalen Hurts played the worst game of his career two weeks ago and one of the best of this season last week. Another good one could help the Philadelphia Eagles do something that hasn't happened in two decades: winning consecutive NFC East titles.
The head of Amazon's AGI team is leaving
Rohit Prasad led Amazon efforts to build leading AI models. That hasn't happened so far, with the company's Nova models trailing rival offerings.
Fallout 5 Will Exist in a World Where 'The Stories and Events of the Show Happened or Are Happening,' Todd Howard Confirms
Fallout 5 will indeed take into account the canon events of the Fallout TV series, Bethesda development chief Todd Howard has confirmed.
A JetBlue jet had a near-miss with an Air Force plane close to Venezuela. Cockpit audio shows how it happened.
A JetBlue flight was ascending out of Curaçao, near Venezuela, when the pilot spotted an Air Force plane. "It's outrageous," he told ATC.
Houston Museum of Natural Science's Foucault Pendulum has stopped after decades of swinging. Here's what happened.
Houston Museum of Natural Science's Foucault Pendulum has stopped after decades, and here's why.
Sherrone Moore’s firing and its shocking aftermath raises tough questions about the culture of Michigan’s athletic department
A series of scandals over the last several years begs a simple, yet critical question: Is what happened with Sherrone Moore a serious, but isolated, incident or a symbol of a broader, cultural problem within the walls of Michigan athletics?
57 things that happened to Rory McIlroy in 2025
A fast-paced look back at Rory McIlroy's eventful—and historic—year.
The Grinch is surprisingly more popular than ever. Here's how that happened.
The Grinch seems to be everywhere lately. At McDonald's. In the aisles at Walmart. In memes online. It's a sign of our times.
Jalen Hurts had an unprecedented two turnovers on one play
Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts did something on Monday night that may never have happened before in the NFL: He turned the ball over twice on one play.
Trump lashes out as latest Charlotte light rail stabbing reignites political fight
Trump and other Republicans were quick to criticize Democratic policies after a new stabbing happened less than four months after a fatal one made national headlines.
Passenger Jet Suddenly Dropped From Sky for a Wild Reason, Airbus Says
Apologies to our art director, who must depict a plane plunging after being blasted by cosmic rays, which is something that actually happened.
Cosmic rays are cause behind JetBlue flight suddenly plunging in the sky. This is why it happened
The plane suddenly lost altitude while traveling from Cancun to New Jersey in October.
BBC Sport weekly quiz: Which keeper did Erling Haaland score his 100th Premier League goal against?
How much attention have you paid to what's happened in the world of sport over the past seven days?
King County health department reports measles exposure at Sea-Tac Airport
The possible exposure happened between Nov. 11 and 17.
Science must move from materialism to mystery
Theoretical physicist and neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín argues that modern science has become trapped in a framework that mistakes matter for the whole of reality. In this wide-ranging interview, Gómez-Marín challenges the foundations of materialism, defends the scientific study of near-death experiences, and calls for a new type of science grounded in mystery and a renewed sense of the sacred. He suggests that abandoning materialism could open the door to a deeper understanding of consciousness, death, and the purpose of human existence. Simon Custer: You are both a theoretical physicist and a neuroscientist, and you have also been fiercely critical of materialist theories of mind and consciousness. What do you think the ultimate nature of reality is?Àlex Gómez-Marín: I don't know what the ultimate nature of reality is, but what I try to first assess is whether the stories that they [mainstream science] have told us about it are right, or maybe whether there are other alternatives. That's why I've been a fierce critic of materialism. As a scientist, I realized that they had sold us this idea that to be a good scientist you also had to subscribe to many other -isms, like materialism, reductionism, and even secularism. And so first I think one needs to unmount these -isms, and then, as is happening today in consciousness studies, we have a huge landscape where there isn't only one game in town, the idea that matter is the only thing that really exists. But because we are studying the hard problem of consciousness, it may be the case that other views of reality, like idealism, or even dualism, or other theories like dual aspect monism... these are philosophical ideas that now, I think, have room in science to be taken seriously. How does something like materialism relate to dualism or idealism? What is materialism in the first place?Well, materialism is the philosophical position that matter is the only really ‘real’ thing in the universe. And I think that worked kind of well because science started 400 years ago and Galileo made that split, I call it the foundational wound. It was a great business move.He said, let's start doing science on that portion of reality that lends itself more easily to mathematization and measurement. So, for some reason, the solidity of this table or the movement of planets lend themselves very well to this foundational idea of science. But as time went on, 400 years later, we realized that we had forgotten the other side, which is what really matters.What really matters is pain, is love, is feelings, sensation, consciousness, which is very hard to define, but very intimate. We all know what it is. It's that thing that disappears when we go into deep sleep and comes back in the morning. SUGGESTED VIEWING On the edges of knowledge With Michael Shermer, Rupert Sheldrake, Güneş Taylor It's what it is like to be, as Nagel said. It's the feeling of being alive. So, materialism is good to study certain things, but then when it ossifies into this ideology and then is dressed like science, now it's preventing us from understanding these key questions that are really that everybody wants to know.Why are we here? Why do we feel reality? Where do we go when we die? And so we need other ways. We need pluralism. I'm only asking for having more options on the table and taking them seriously. Why does materialism fail to explain consciousness? For example, if you were to lobotomize me, I would not be a functional human being. What do you say to someone who might think that materialism adequately explains the mind?Well, here we could speak about different things. We could talk about physics or about neuroscience. I happen to have training with both.For instance, for neuroscientists, 99% of them, I'm not included in that portion, believe that the brain can only be a productive organ. It's an organ that somehow, somewhere, consciousness emerges. It's like a lamp. And then something happens, magic happens, and then consciousness emerges.That's the position you need to be if you're a materialist because if the only really ‘real’ thing is matter, then you need to say, just give us some more time and money and we'll figure out how mind emerges or is produced from matter. There are many philosophically sophisticated ways of criticizing this.Now there's another option, which is the brain as a permissive organ. This was said by William James more than 100 years ago.Now then the brain wouldn't be like this machine, like for instance, a heat engine whose smoke is consciousness, which is what we would have in the first big model, the productive model. But in the permissive model, the brain would be a kind of a filter. And so the brain would still have a very important role in consciousness, but it wouldn't be a productive role.It would be permissive, much like a filter or much like a prism which would receive light. And - I'm speaking metaphorically - it would receive the light of the mind and then it could reflect it and refract it.Now, with these two big options on the table, I think we can make progress into what I call the edges of consciousness, which are all these experiences, weird experiences that many people have, but we don't talk about enough, like near-death experiences, precognitive dreams, synchronicities. These experiences are very important for humans and they have a place in the permissive hypothesis and they are literally impossible in the productive hypothesis. So that's yet one more reason to explore alternatives to materialism. There may be anecdotal evidence for near-death experiences, but is there robust evidence that would be accepted by the majority of scientists who subscribe to the scientific method?Sure. And the plural of anecdotes, someone said, is data.And there's a lot of data. Actually, this year is the 50th anniversary, half a century, since Dr. Raymond Moody realized that we have two ears and one mouth and started listening to what his patients had to say about their experiences while they were clinically dead.The heart had stopped, breathing had stopped in these patients. These patients would come back and tell him these amazing stories that some people may say are hallucinations, but for the patients were hyper-real, like seeing light at the end of the tunnels, seeing deceased family members waiting for them, feeling bliss.___I would say the evidence suggests that the mind can survive the death of activity of the brain.___And so he and others started taking them seriously and writing their accounts down. And then you can do a science based on that material of experience that people have. Now, on the more objective side, more recently people have started to measure what's going on in the brain when people are clinically dead and brought back. This has opened a proper field of study, which is near-death studies.Evidence is a difficult word, because sometimes people think that when you say evidence, this is just the final proof. Evidence is like in a jury. You bring testimony, you bring pieces of data that point in one direction or another.I would say the evidence suggests that the mind can survive the death of activity of the brain. When brains are broken or shut off, there can still be mind going on. And that's revolutionary.That would entail that when we die, it's not game over, which, by the way, is the thesis of materialism. If consciousness survives, materialism dies. It's game over for materialism if something of us continues after we die. Do you think that there is mental continuity after death?Well, I think so, and I believe so, and I could also say I may have experienced it myself, because four years ago I had a near-death experience. I was in the hospital, I lost a lot of blood, and I saw those beings at the end of the tunnel, three beings, and there was yellow light. I was in a well, I was looking upwards, and I hadn't read about NDEs by then, but when I came back from this experience, I decided I would try to integrate this also in my professional life. Not just my personal life, of course, but my professional life as a physicist and as a neuroscientist. So I may have had the experience of glimpses of what an afterlife would be, and I'm not ashamed to say it in this way, and then one can do science of it, and then one can do philosophy of it.One can think about what -isms we were discussing, what views on reality would allow those experiences to be really ‘real,’ as opposed to, well, poor guy, the brain was kind of broken, it must have been a hallucination. Do you have a view about whether individuality or “the ego” persists after death, or whether we sort of merge into some sort of cosmic consciousness instead?I don't know, but my view would be along those lines you're suggesting. I think we could speak about a kind of universal mind, and then the problem is not how we emerge from matter, but how we fragment from a more holistic consciousness into these individual eddies and then when we die, this kind of dissipates.But I'm not sure. For instance, idealism would promote that view, but then what would survive of us after these eddies just vanish and become again the big Consciousness, I'm not sure what that would be. I don't know for sure, but I would tell you I believe something of us survives.And there are other lines of research, not just near-death experience, that can address this really hard question of survival. For instance, there are children who remember previous lives. This was studied by Ian Stevenson at the University of Virginia for more than 50 years.___Research takes place within a selection mechanism that also sometimes reinforces things that are not very scientific.___It's amazing research. He went all over the world, especially in the East, and collected all these case studies, all these stories. In plural, these were data of kids, very young age, who would describe up to 40 items that then he could go and verify.There was no internet. There was really no way the kid could know. Why would the kid say that when I was living in this other body and I was a woman and that's how my house would look like or that's how I would die, right? Again, there is evidence, not proof, but there's evidence not only that something weird and interesting is happening as we cross the threshold, but also when we come back to this life.Scientists should not be afraid of studying this, but they are because there's stigma. There's usually stigma upon the enigma, and this is so unfortunate. And one of the reasons is because of the ideology of materialism, because those things cannot be possible. What is wrong with the politics of science such that they have generated this stigma?So many things. Science is a human activity to begin with.So it falls prey to all our passions and ego and greed. That's one thing. Science is a job for the good and for the bad.You need to get a salary. You need to get grants. Research takes place within a selection mechanism that also sometimes reinforces things that are not very scientific.And then, we didn't have time to unpack this, but science for many years become entangled, as I was suggesting before, to other -isms, materialism, secularism. So anything that smells like the afterlife, people may think has to do with God, and then they freak out.Anything that suggests that there's something about the mind that may not need a physical material substrate to exist, it smells like non-materialism. So, all these -isms are ideologically blocking that kind of research, and then there are all these sociopolitical constraints as to what should be studied and what shouldn't be studied.I call it the backstage of science. Sometimes we scientists or science communicators seem to speak as if the data is the only thing that matters. We say, well, data and theory.But then there's a third leg of this stool, which is all the politics that goes behind the scenes. And we often don't speak about this, and it's quite vicious and petty, and it's very real. Why is materialism so attractive to most scientists?Well, an easy answer is because we've grown up with it.It's what the educational system promotes, and that's what you hear when you go to university. So it's like growing in a culture. It feels like the air in which you breathe.So it's very hard to begin with to detect, well, maybe there's another alternative. Maybe there are other ways of doing science, other environments in which one could do science. That's one reason.And other reasons maybe are more profound, and I'm not qualified to explain them, but I could say, looking at this 400-year history of science, since it started around 1623 with Galileo's book The Assayer, that science went and coupled with all what's going on in the West.And so the fall of religion, you could say, and science presented us this new alternative that then could be coupled very well with other -isms, and this idea of growth, and then science losing its good twin brother, which was philosophy. There's a whole natural history of science starting as philosophy, kind of emancipating or breaking out from philosophy, and then marrying technology, and then marrying other social systems.From that point of view, materialism is a very convenient idea to propose. There were attempts, like the German idealists tried to do a more romantic science. But no, the idea prevailed, like Francis Bacon said: You should pursue nature through all her corners, he said, and make her spill her secrets.Our attitude towards nature in the science that dominates is very much reflecting how we treat nature in our society, in our culture, like a resource to extract secrets by force and then dominate it. How is materialism related to the notions of growth and progress? What's wrong with having a productive citizenry?This is another very interesting and very difficult question to answer.But there's this recent book coming out by Paul Kingsnorth. In it, he explains this idea of the machine and this idea of progress. And this, again, this conflation of more is better, of we need to go forward always, and convincing us that the way to do that is to continually extract more from nature. But because we don't have the religious context anymore, because God is dead, then what do we have? We have what we can do as humans with our own gadgets.It's kind of the story of the Promethean fire. We will just build anything to make ourselves God.A good example today is transhumanism. Transhumanism is this pseudo-religion dressed in technoscientific language whose goal is very religious. They promise immortality, they promise redemption, they promise transformation of the entire natural world, but it's done by human means through technology. Are you suggesting that we can't have ethics without religion?Well, we should have ethics with or without religion. That's another pruning that has happened in science. We say, forget about aesthetics, although some physicists still think that beautiful means probably true, and forget about politics. We pretend there's no backstage of science, and even let's forget about ethics.___Science needs to be in the service of mankind.___Scientists, when they become more like engineers, they're just thinking how to make things work so that they can go to the moon, go to Mars, make machines that think, but they don't think whether that's a good idea.And also consider metaphysics. Many scientists for a long time pretended, and maybe that comes from the stream of positivisms, that really one doesn't need metaphysics at all, except that materialism is always the metaphysics running the system.You see, it's not just ethics. It's the pruning of all of these, you could say, five main legs of philosophy that just makes a kind of unconscious science, a science that doesn't really know what it's doing. It's doing it very well locally, but it just doesn't know what it's doing globally. Do you think science has to have an ultimate vision and purpose behind it for it to be effective or for it to be meaningful and transformative?Yes, a way I would say that is that science needs to be in the service of mankind. And it hasn't been that. And we can see it through, you know, when we discovered the secrets of the atom, and all of a sudden, the Manhattan Project, and then we create nuclear weapons.And now we're trying to crack how machines may think, and now we're creating this mess, right? So science needs to be in service of mankind, not in service of a few ideas that maybe want to make more money or just dominate upon nature. What about planes, trains, automobiles, and modern medicine? Hasn't science served mankind by helping us develop those technologies?Yes and no. I see where you're going, and it's fair.I came here by plane, and it's a blessing. When I almost died, the surgeons did their job, and they saved my life. But these two forced choices between Luddites and Silicon Valley types, I think, of course, it's a false dichotomy.Progress, in a way, it's good, but we often don't speak about the dark side of the moon. We say the great things that progress has brought, and we don't speak about the disasters, the side effects that it has come with, and the same when we promise new technologies. We tend to think that any technology is great, that email is going to save us so much time because we don't need to write letters and send them anymore.Is that true? I spend so many hours a week writing emails. Let's just say there are great things about it and bad things about it. People like Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, for example, argue that we've made moral progress over time because of the Enlightenment. Do you think that's totally wrong-headed?I think he's emphasizing a side of the moon, and he does that very well, and you can find tons of plots where there's a slope going up and say it's great. But I think he should also tell the not-so-friendly story.But if your ideology is just to resist and continue to explain that the Enlightenment is the best thing ever and reason is the best thing ever… this feels to me like you're worshipping these abstractions.I'm very critical of it and also of these, again, science communicators and scientists that say, Oh, science says, in the name of science, experts say. It's like, come on, let's be careful because we can shoot ourselves in the foot by putting forth to the people an image of science that we know is not really true. Recently there's been a resurgence of spirituality and of people who say that they're spiritual but not religious, especially in the United States. If materialism is going away, what is going to fill that gap? Are we going to return to traditional religion? Do you see that being connected with the rise of the political right?I'm not a fortune teller, so I don't know what's going to happen. But, yeah, we could say we're in this post-materialist age and even post-secular age. One cannot come back to the past, but maybe just to contact with the roots is a good idea.What do I mean by that? I think we need to do a science 2.0, a science that says thank you to Galileo and thank you to materialism, but we need to reinvent even a new kind of scientific method. We need to do so in a culture where we realize humans cannot thrive in a vacuum where there's this idea that the sacred has to be removed.Now, how do we do that without bringing in back all the vices of religion? I don't know. I'm from a Catholic country.Here we are in England, so there are differences and interreligious dialogue has always been a challenge. But I think maybe a way of putting it is: after all these conflicts and branchings I was quickly alluding to, science from philosophy and then also from religion, now there's a time of reconciliation perhaps and maybe debates in the proper sense, like exchange of ideas in service of learning and getting into something higher than both poles. We need science to talk to religious people and it's interesting when people say they're spiritual and not religious.I think this is just a way of saying, no, I don't want to go back, I want to go forward. But at the end of the day, religions have offered us practices and grounding that we now desperately need. Everybody can and should just meditate or pray or do whatever they want, but we're in a crisis and it's time for reconciliation. What do you say to critics that say you are merely projecting our need for meaning onto a fundamentally indifferent universe?Yeah, I know that the typical science communicator says something like this. But we're not projecting. Human beings feed on meaning.It's the other way around. If you're a materialist, because the only thing that there is is matter, all that comes next, free will, consciousness, meaning, this is a kind of illusion that we need to explain.They're just craving for meaning, but there isn't really for them. I would also like to remind my materialist friends that for decades, if not centuries, they've said in the name of science, we know that this and this and this doesn't really exist. I think now they sense they're forced to say, well, actually, we don't know. We've been saying, for instance, that there's nothing after you die, and now probably they need to admit that they don't know the answer.___We need to do a science 2.0, a science that says thank you to Galileo and thank you to materialism, but we need to reinvent even a new kind of scientific method.___So it's a moment to open up possibilities and also to gently but fiercely critique these claims that I think harm society. If you say in the name of science, get on with it, when your father dies, you'll never see him again. Well, what the F do you know about it? You haven't studied the literature, you haven't had any of those experiences, and basically what you're doing is you're just doing marketing on ideology. This needs to stop. Do you think that it's scarier for some people to entertain the thought that there might be life after death, compared to a materialist worldview where you just die, given that there might be consequences for unsavory behaviour?Well, death and dying is scary. It's maybe the ultimate ending. It's a limit on life, and when we're in this conquest mode, we don't like limits.And it also has, there's a shockwave backwards, so I think if you change your notion of what death is or may be, you live differently. It also has consequences, as you're saying, for the future because this is not our only goal here and we come back in whatever form. And again, different religions would say different things. I the East, they are more happy with the idea of reincarnation, and here in the West, there are other preferences. But in any case, it changes how we live, and that's really what matters.It's not about just projecting or imagining what we'll be after, but how we live now and also how we treat those who are dying. So it goes from the individual to the families, to the hospitals.Now in the near-death research I do, this has ramifications at all these levels, all the way to society.But our society is thanatophobic. It has a phobia of death. We don't want to hear about death, and this is another thing we need to put on the table and be willing to talk about it. Do you think that we might get closer to answering ultimate questions like why is there anything at all if we jettison materialism?That’s an excellent question, Simon. Two things: we should stop treating reality, I believe, as a great sudoku, as an enigma, as something that with intelligence, money, and time that we will crack and instead treat reality more like a mystery. And what you do for in front of a mystery is not to be the clever guy in a class and say “I’ll solve you” but more like “I will bow and you will transform me.”I know this sounds a bit like a scientist speaking like a mystic. But I think this reorientation is needed. In the end, we won’t crack the big questions, but they will transform us. If we free ourselves from this prison of materialism, the way we will explore these questions will be freer, more creative, and in service of mankind. Do you think exploring mystery is the reason why we are here?I think we are here because, and this pseudo-theological argument I’m making off the cuff, But the One, the Absolute, if there is such a thing, had everything except limitation. We are that absolute experiencing that contingency. It’s like an act of divine proprioception. It’s a wonderful adventure, it’s just incredible to be alive. Perhaps we have forgotten why we are here and the whole point is to experience the flesh.Let me end by saying this. I criticize materialism harshly. I bang on this dead horse, because I think it’s dead. But matter is a great mystery. So maybe my invitation is as follows: hey materialist friends, come here, let’s work on materialism 2.0! Consciousness is a mystery, but matter is also a mystery. The fact that we can have an intersubjective experience consensus, the fact that we can apply mathematics, that we can measure things... the physical world we take for granted, but it is a great mystery too.Maybe that’s related to your last question: why are we here? Why did spirit decide to incarnate? Being in the flesh may be a great thing if spirit decided to do so.Àlex Gómez-Marín, thank you very much.My pleasure.
'Jeopardy!' recap: What happened on Nov. 28, 2025
See who played "Jeopardy!" on Nov. 28, who won, the Final Jeopardy! outcomes and final scores.