The Anne Levine Show with Michael Over There
A weekly exploration of the BIG QUESTIONS, the beautiful, and the nearly interesting with Michael Over There.
Expect curious detours through brains, behavior, consciousness, comedy, cinema, culture, history, science, and the wonderfully unexpected. Every episode follows unlikely connections and asks the kinds of questions that are easy to understand but surprisingly difficult to answer. Sometimes we find answers. Sometimes we discover better questions.
Dedicated to the one and only Anne Hall Levine: a force of nature, the love of my life, and the one person who could make us all laugh.
Episodes
99 episodes
Hello?
Years ago, driving back toward Spokane, the city itself never mattered as much as the feeling that arrived before I could name it: home. Later, crawling through summer traffic toward Cape Cod, the same thing happened on the Sagamore Bridge. Tha...
The No Show
The word “no” sounds simple, but it carries an entire theory of reality inside a single syllable. We start with a scientist trying to date the Earth and accidentally uncovering a public health disaster: Claire Patterson’s work on isotopes colli...
The Eternal Question
The hot dog question is a trap in the best way: it lures us into a simple argument, then exposes how much we rely on labels to navigate the world. Sure, the USDA and state rules may treat a hot dog in a bun like a sandwich for regulation and ta...
The Beanie Baby Problem
Scarcity has a strange power: it can turn a cute little object into a “must-have” overnight, even if we did not care about it yesterday. We follow that switch from curiosity to urgency and ask why our brains react so fast when we hear “sold out...
What Remains
Learning doesn’t start with a syllabus. It starts with “What is this?” and the courage to be wrong long enough to find out. We take a surprising tour through how humans actually learn, from newborn brains binding voice, face, scent, and warmth ...
Think About It
Every cathedral, every symphony, every scientific discovery, every terrible mistake, every joke that ever made you laugh, every act of kindness, every "I love you" and every "I'm sorry" all began the same way:Someone had a thought.
Anybody Really Know What Time It Is?
Time is the thing we trust most and the thing we understand least. We start with a deceptively simple question: how long is one day? From there, we unpack why solar time and sidereal time disagree by about four minutes, and how that tiny gap re...
Backstories
We abandon a planned “believable lies” story when our body refused to cooperate, then follow the real-life weirdness of objects that won’t stay simple. We trace how keys, boxes, marks, and junk drawers turn into evidence, memory, and obsession,...
Hidden In Plain Sight
A kitten on a mountain trail turns into a bobcat. A $4 flea market frame turns into a multimillion-dollar Declaration of Independence discovery. A jar of pickles becomes a roadside legend that refuses to disappear. We built this hour around one...
Samba, So Many Bees, and the Great Buffalo Controversy
A capybara sprints into freedom, a buffalo becomes a political lightning rod, and a cemetery turns out to be one of the biggest bee neighborhoods scientists have ever documented. That’s where we start, and it only gets better from there. We’re ...
Mayor Minerva, Robot Rover, and the Pink Pigeon Problem
A cat runs for office with an honest one-word platform, “Crime,” and somehow that’s only the start. I’m Michael Over There, and I’m keeping The Anne Levine Show rolling with the same curious tone, a little grief in the ...
Grief, Robots, And The Future
I’m back behind the mic after a long silence, and I’m doing it without Anne, the absolute love of my life. Losing her changes everything about how this show feels, but I still want a place where we can hang out, be curious, and talk about the s...
Can't Stop Buying shirts
Prednisone is supposed to help, but what happens when it flips every switch in your body at once? We’re talking candidly about corticosteroid side effects and the real day-to-day fallout: a heart that won’t settle down, sleep that disa...
Cardinal Pizzaballa: Meet Baloney Pockets
The headlines feel like they’re written by a prankster, so we start where any sane Tuesday begins: an April Fool’s argument about Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, and whether “What A Fool Believes” can possibly be called a cover. Then the mood ...
Adrian Broochy At The Oscars
Feathers in faces, wisteria on bodices, and a brooch so big it becomes a character. We’re coming to you from WOMR/WFMR with our full 2026 Oscars roundup, and we’re not playing it safe. Michael and I start with something that’s been bugging us a...
Fluff & Fold
Ever wonder what happens when a Hollywood designer lands on Cape Cod with a toolbox, a memory bank full of backstage stories, and an eye out for robots? We invited Jonathan “Silver Lake” Stockwell Baker into the studio and into our home, where ...
I Came For Oxygen And Got Boat Shoes
A blizzard rolled in the same weekend my lungs gave out (again), and suddenly everything we rely on—power, cell phone reception, hospital routines, even the simple act of getting a meal—buckled. We found ourselves riding the fault line between ...
Quad God, Curling, And Doctor Storytime
The week felt like a sports movie that refused to stick to the script. An allegedly slushy Olympic rink turned figure skating into survival mode, where clean edges mattered more than big jumps and a single stumble reshaped the podium. We break ...
Who's Elijah Wood?
What happens when the biggest game of the year can’t keep up with its own halftime show? We start with a Super Bowl that slogged through three quarters, then got eclipsed by a jaw-dropping, Spanish-language performance built like livin...
Barbey Girl
A blizzard at the end of a long Cape Cod driveway is a bad setting for a breathing crisis—especially when you live with a rare lung disease. Before we could dial for an ambulance, we needed a snowplow. That’s how our week of sirens, scans, and ...
Stop The Sparkly Spit
A nor’easter pounds the Cape, the house runs cold, and we warm up by arguing about the most electric late-night guests ever and the sneaky power of real-life detail on screen. From Robin Williams’ cyclone energy to Martin Short’s masterclass in...
More Socks Than Plot
What makes a moment stick—the heat, the heart, or the craft? We start courtside in Melbourne, reliving a giddy exhibition with Federer, Agassi, Barty, and Hewitt that turns pure fun into a lesson on mastery. A tight Venus Williams match reminds...
Rocky Mountain Chai
Start with a mislabeled bag and watch an hour unfold. We kick off with a global roll call and a story that turns “chai” into “Chai,” then tumble into a surprisingly tender argument about taste: why a younger friend devoured <...
Sports Bras, Snow, And A Butt That Won’t Quit
A cold Cape Cod morning sets the scene for an hour that swings from laugh-out-loud awkward to quietly profound. We open with a hallway full of chairs, a pair of black scrubs bursting at the seams, and winter outfits that defy reason. It’s funny...