Episode Details

Each book Neil Gaiman writes gets written twice. He writes the first draft by hand, because a pen is slow enough to think a sentence all the way through, then types the whole thing up. Lucretius, Darwin's finches and Chris Rock all ran the same test.

Featuring: Neil Gaiman, Chris Rock, Stephen Greenblatt, Poggio Bracciolini, Peter Sims, Rosemary Grant, Jonathan Weiner

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Chapters:

(00:00) Seneca on fire testing gold
(00:06) Neil Gaiman writes each book twice
(00:15) Copying principles by hand each month
(00:26) Lucretius's poem survives a copy of a copy
(01:06) The Grants track finch beaks on Daphne Major
(01:31) Chris Rock tests jokes at the Stress Factory
(01:53) The cost of the test

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Click here to view the episode transcript.