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fireflies
Articles

As a documentary poet, Camille Dungy writes not just about headline-making news, but about news on a more intimate scale — about motherhood, marriage, and her garden. It’s an approach she says was very much inspired by the "godmother" of documentary poetry, Muriel Rukeyeser. 

Length: 
16:13
Boots at right angles.
Articles

Kaia Sand is a journalist whose day job is executive director of the community newspaper Street Roots in Portland, Oregon. She’s also a poet and she uses both lenses – journalism and poetry – to write about the people she knows and things she sees firsthand in her city. 

Length: 
10:16
Audio

Our walking journey in the footsteps of Dorothy Day begins in Union Square in New York City, where the first Catholic Worker newspaper was distributed in 1933, and continues to St. Francis Xavier Church, where a tapestry of Day looks over all who walk through the doors.

Length: 
19:00
Audio

Longtime Catholic Worker volunteer and resident Jane Sammon and former Maryhouse chaplain Fr. Geoffrey Gneuhs tell Shannon about Dorothy Day's life at Maryhouse, the Lower East Side community that feeds and houses the poor.

Length: 
16:32
Audio

At Manhattan University and on the Staten Island ferry, the “Dorothy Day,” theologian Kevin Ahern and George Horton and Carolyn Zablotny, who are all working toward Day’s canonization, talk with Shannon about the future of the Catholic Church and what it means to be a saint.

Length: 
13:08
Articles

Samoan journalist Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson was born and raised on the island of Savai'i. Rising sea levels washed away the small barrier islands that protected her home, eventually, forcing people to move — just one example of climate change disappearing islands in the South Pacific.

Length: 
19:22
Google maps versus paper maps
Audio

The debate among cartographers today is about which is better — a paper map, or a digital one? Cartographer Mamata Akella argues that there are merits and downsides to both.

Length: 
10:03
Anne's mental map.
Audio

Bill Limpisathian is a professor of cartography and specializes in a brand new field – map cognition, or how we use and see and think about maps in the brain.

Length: 
9:20
phantom islands
Interactive

Uzbekistani electronic musician Andrew Pekler is fascinated by "phantom islands" — islands that 15th and 16th century explorers made up to please wealthy patrons of their expeditions. So, he built an digital map of them, and added a soundtrack.

Length: 
10:25
Audio

At a small think tank in Italy, scientists and philosophers debate the nature of intelligence. Dartmouth neuroscientist Peter Tse traces the evolution of human intelligence — and says our imagination is both our greatest gift and deadliest weapon. 

Length: 
18:38
Audio

A group of scientists, philosophers and writers discuss and debate the many different kinds of “intelligence” — and why we’re still grappling with our understanding of sentience in plants, animals and AI. Is a robot dog actually smart?

Length: 
7:18
Audio

At the Galileo Museum in Florence, there’s a dazzling collection of old scientific instruments, including the telescope Galileo used to discover new moons. Cosmologist Marcelo Gleiser explains how Galileo revolutionized the scientific worldview.

Length: 
6:50
Audio

Astrophysicist Adam Frank says there’s an emerging science of “planetary intelligence,” which regards the Earth itself as sentient. It’s a radical idea, with far-reaching implications, and it may just help save the planet. 

Length: 
16:04
Audio

A Maori conservationist in New Zealand, Mere Takoko is arguing for granting personhood for whales, who she says are her Indigenous Polynesian ancestors.

Length: 
13:38
Audio

Scientists at Project CETI exploring the sounds of whales have found a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.” Carl Zimmer, author and science writer for The New York Times, puts the latest whale communications research and news into perspective.

Length: 
18:18
Audio

Roger Payne revolutionized the science of whale biology by discovering the songs of humpback whales. In this 1995 interview, Payne (who died in 2023) described the thrill of touching a whale, and why he fears for the future of whales.

Length: 
11:20
Audio

Marine biologist Shane Gero has spent decades listening to whale conversations. Through Project CETI, he’s found recent success using technologies like artificial intelligence to better understand what whales are saying. 

Length: 
17:07
Audio

Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.

Length: 
24:49
Articles

Marjolijn van Heemstra is the poet laureate of Amsterdam. As her anxiety about climate change and other problems ratcheted up, she found solace in the larger cosmos and became a "dark sky" activist.

Length: 
12:33
Audio

Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born.   

Length: 
12:08
Video

During their visit to Addis Ababa, Anne and Steve caught a show put on by a household name in Ethiopia — the boundary-crossing, border-hopping jazz virtuoso Meklit Hadero.

Length: 
16:27
listening
Articles

Valmont Layne grew up under apartheid in South Africa. Music, along with protest movements, radicalized him. He tells Anne and Steve that South African jazz became a musical current that’s traveled across oceans, spreading ideas about freedom.

Length: 
9:24
trumpet
Articles

Political repression and censorship forced a generation of Black jazz musicians out of South Africa and into clubs in Europe and the US. But jazz critic Gwen Ansell says some musicians remained, and they left a legacy of unforgettable music.

Length: 
9:33
Audio

David Kessler is a world-renowned grief expert. He argues that as a nation, Americans are dealing with a lot of unacknowledged post-pandemic grief.

Length: 
19:02
Audio

Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and author of “The Republic of Suffering,” draws compelling parallels between the grief experienced after the American Civil War and the mourning process following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Length: 
15:09
Audio

Lauren DePino started singing at funerals as a child. As a professional funeral singer, she thinks of her work as a form of alchemy — a way to transmute grief into something bigger.

Length: 
15:10
Audio

“Bad River” is Mary Mazzio’s documentary about a small tribe, the Bad River band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and their legal battle to get rid of an oil pipeline. She examines the conflicting ideas we have about how to live on the land and even whether it can be owned.

Length: 
14:26
Quannah Rose Chasinghorse-Potts in a black jacket riding a white horse in a desert landscape.
Articles

Quannah ChasingHorse is both a Native American activist and a supermodel in the fashion industry. In her early twenties, she represents the next generation of activists working to protect Native land rights.

Length: 
10:48
Articles

Jessi Kneeland, a fitness trainer turned body neutrality coach, suggests that aiming for a neutral stance toward one's body — rather than unconditional love — might be more realistic and attainable for many of us.

Length: 
19:53
feet
Audio

Rae Johnson is a somatic movement therapist and the author of “Embodied Activism.” They say the process of making change is more sustainable when you listen to your body. 

Length: 
13:38

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