Historian Garry Wills details Jefferson’s complex relationship with slavery and says its legacy still haunts us.More
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Politics and History
Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a practicing Catholic. He tells Jim Fleming that the apostle Paul didn't say most of the things people blame him for.More
Brian Boyd talks with Anne Strainchamps about how our love of storytelling helped us evolve.More
Writer Karen Armstrong's dangerous idea is to love your enemies.More
Bart Ehrman talks about the complex set of beliefs that existed in the early days of Christianity and says it was several hundred years before a single version of the truth was negotiated.More
Pranks aren’t just for April Fool’s Day. Sometimes they can be powerful vehicles for political and social change.More
Ann Gibbons is an award-winning science writer and author of “The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors.”More
Larry Brilliant is best known as part of the United Nations team of doctors responsible for curing smallpox. But back in the 1960s, he was a hippie whose guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox.More
One way to survive on not quite enough sleep? Writer Daniel Pink swears by what he calls a "nappuccino," a short nap with a cup of coffee. You might want to take notes on this one.More
Staff meetings, family reunions, dinner parties — even with all the digital ways we have to connect, face-to-face gatherings are still a regular part of our lives. Priya Parker thinks we need new traditions to make those gatherings meaningful.More
Steven Pinker presents a Dangerous Idea: things today are actually better than they've ever been.More
Conceptually, hope feels big, amorphous, hard to define exactly. But for the past few months, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producers have been trying anyway. Scientists, activists, futurists, theologians, artists, authors all weighed in on what they think when they hear the word "hope."More
Samantha Power was President Obama's ambassador to the UN, taking part in life-and-death decisions, including whether to launch military strikes. She talks about her two biggest foreign policy challenges — whether to intervene in Libya and Syria.More
Was Qassem Soleimani 'assassinated'? 'Killed'? The legal differences are complicated, says Brookings Institution fellow Scott Anderson.More
Dagmawi Woubshet and Julie Mehretu were both born in Addis Ababa and then moved to America. They wonder what the city's explosive growth will mean for its unique character — one rooted in Ethiopia's history as the only African nation never colonized.More
The families of Dagmawi Woubshet and Julie Mehretu fled Ethiopia because of the brutal Communist regime that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. The violence and corruption in the post-colonial era decimated the hope and idealism of many Africans.More
In Addis Ababa, curator Meskerem Assegued and artist Elias Sime have created Zoma Museum as a visionary model of an urban future, using ancient Ethiopian building techniques. They say modern development can be much more than concrete high-rises.More
Journalist Anand Giridharadas says that sometimes, major philanthropic gifts are a lot less altruistic than they may appear.More