Quanta Magazine Partners With PRX and Cosmologist Janna Levin for Season 3 of ‘The Joy of Why’ Podcast

For two seasons of Quanta Magazine’s “The Joy of Why” podcast, mathematician and author Steven Strogatz has invited listeners to learn about the questions that drive the work of leading researchers.

Beginning February 1, listeners can look forward to season three of the podcast, with 24 new episodes and a new co-host, the cosmologist Janna Levin. A new episode will go out every other Thursday on the Quanta website, Apple Podcasts, Spotify and other podcast platforms.

This season’s guests include Fields Medalist and mathematician Terence Tao, Nobel Prize–winning physicist Frank Wilczek and psychedelics neuroscientist Gül Dölen. Tao’s episode, about the makings of good mathematics, will kick off the new season.

To help bring “The Joy of Why” to listeners everywhere on-demand, Quanta has partnered with public media organization PRX — one of the world’s top podcast publishers and public radio distributors.

“I have listened to previous seasons with delight,” Levin writes in a new column for Quanta. “An irrepressible curiosity ignites the science lover, and in this capacity, as hosts of a math and science podcast, we are proxies for you, and our curiosity is a proxy for yours.”

In season three, Strogatz and Levin take turns interviewing researchers about questions surrounding the neurobiology of depression, the nature of time and the flocking behaviors of animals. Levin, an author and the Claire Tow Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Barnard College of Columbia University, is an experienced interviewer. She is the director of sciences and co-founder of Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, where she hosts rich public discussions with scientists and mathematicians that weave together curiosity and culture.

“We hope you’ll marvel with us this season on ‘The Joy of Why,’” Levin writes in her new column.

Quanta Magazine is a Pulitzer Prize–winning, editorially independent online publication of the Simons Foundation. In 2023, Strogatz received a National Academies Eric and Wendy Schmidt Award for Excellence in Science Communications partly for his work on “The Joy of Why.”

Celebrating more than 20 years as a nonprofit public media company, PRX works in partnership with leading independent creators, organizations and stations to bring meaningful audio storytelling into millions of listeners’ lives. PRX’s portfolio of broadcast productions and podcast partners have received recognition from the Peabody Awards, the Tribeca Festival, the International Documentary Association and the Pulitzer Prizes.