The Pulse

As summer winds down, some people are celebrating the approach of fall, while others are dreading the shorter, colder days. We know that weather can affect our mood — maybe we're extra irritable when it's hot, or gloomy when it's gray — but it can also influence our overall health. On this episode, a look at how weather affects well-being and health, from its impact on menstrual cycles to chronic conditions like asthma and pain.

Can extreme heat affect your menstrual cycle? The internet thinks so. In June, , a strange phenomenon went viral on social media — thousands of women experienced unexpected changes to their periods as temperatures soared. For some, it came early; for others, late. Still others missed it entirely, or reported having a second period shortly after their first. Pulse producer Nichole Currie investigates the potential connection.

Writer Alison Espach was taking a dip in the ocean one summer when something strange happened — she emerged covered head-to-toe in hives. She dismissed it as a fluke, but then it happened again when she swam in a lake, and again in a river. We talk with Espach about the bizarre culprit: her sudden allergy to cold. 

Heat waves don't just make for uncomfortable temperatures — they often lead to poor air quality, which, in many places, has been exacerbated by wildfires. Pulse reporter Alan Yu talks with patients affected by air pollution, why it's dangerous to our health, and the people working to better track air quality.

We talk with writer Lorraine Boissoneault about her new book of essays, "Body Weather: Notes on Chronic Illness in the Anthropocene," which explores the ways in which her own chronic illnesses mirror the weather changes wrought by climate change.

Psychologist Trevor Harley explains the science of how the weather affects our mental and physical health, the evolutionary roots of our sensitivity to the weather, and how we can use that knowledge to improve how we feel. His new book is “Head in the Clouds: How the Weather Affects Our Minds and Mental Health.”

A judge declared a mistrial in the murder trial of Lindsay Clancy after jurors said they were deadlocked over whether she should be held criminally responsible for strangling her three children in January 2023: Cora, 5, Dawson, 3, and Callan, who was just 8 months old. 
The shocking case touched a nerve with millions of people who have been following the trial and asking: How could a mother kill her three young children? 
British journalist Katinka Blackford Newman also followed the trial closely, but she has a different perspective. She says her own story could have ended up like Clancy’s. Newman describes how she became completely delusional after experiencing adverse effects to psychiatric medications. Quickly, her perfectly ordinary life went completely off the rails and teetered on the edge of catastrophe. 
Later, we’ll discuss postpartum psychosis, a condition Clancy’s defense team said she was experiencing at the time of the murders. Susan Hatters-Friedman, a psychiatrist specializing in maternal mental health, weighs in on diagnosis and treatment of postpartum psychosis and the conversations happening around the trial.

On this episode, a look back at our search for life on Mars. We hear about the Viking mission to Mars — the first to land a craft on the Red Planet — and the controversy over what it discovered, what drove a national obsession with the “Martian civilization” in the early 1900s, and how NASA repairs its rovers from millions of miles away.
Back in the early 1900s, a strange phenomenon was sweeping the nation — “Mars Mania,” a belief shared by scientists and the public alike that Mars was home to a sophisticated civilization poised to guide us into the future. We talk with science writer David Baron about what was behind these beliefs, why it became a nationwide obsession, and what happened when scientists discovered the truth. Baron’s book is “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America.”

Journalist Jon Ronson's new book starts with a series of panicked text messages from his son — who had been lured to a massive, gothic-looking castle in Connecticut. A female friend had been invited to a party by a wealthy older man from Tinder. But there was no party. Instead, they were asked to join a reality show that was going to be called "101 Princesses" where women compete for the castle owner’s affection. Ronson tracked down the castle's owner and found a much bigger story waiting inside. He joins us to talk about "The Castle" and men searching for purpose in all the wrong places. He also tells us about the millions of men who've quietly dropped out of work and life altogether and profiles influencers who chase clicks and purpose online to disastrous consequences.

Sometimes, modern life can feel like an endless cacophony of distractions. We spend our days being inundated with noise and traffic, news and emails, obligations and hectic schedules. Many of us long to escape to nature or the wilderness — someplace simpler, quieter — where we can find peace and reconnect with what's really important. But can we ever truly get away? We tend to think of the wilderness as land that's untouched by human hands — vast, and pristine. But the more you seek out that version of nature, the blurrier the idea seems to become. Even the most remote landscapes on Earth carry traces of human history and human borders. And preserving the wilderness, and having access to it, also means managing it. On this episode, the paradox of the wilderness — how we try to protect and control the wild. 

We talk with writer Cal Flyn about the myth of untouched nature, and what drives us to experience it. She talks about how our views of the wilderness have changed over time, from fearsome and untamed lands to places of spiritual escape; what she discovered about the human histories of supposedly wild spaces; and what the paradox presented by our desire to both preserve and interact with nature means for how we think of the wild. Flyn’s new book is “The Savage Landscape: How We Made the Wilderness.”

It started with a tip received by a dutiful New Hampshire Fish and Game warden — and quickly turned into a twisted tale of illegal baiting and hunting, one-upmanship, digital trophy rooms, and one of the biggest poaching cases in recent state history. New Hampshire Public Radio reporter Nate Hegyi tells the story in the podcast “Operation Night Cat.” We’ll hear an excerpt and talk to Hegyi about the case.