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.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Politics and History
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.More
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. More
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.More
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.More
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.More
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.More
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.More
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.More
“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.More
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.More
During his traditional Sac and Fox funeral in Oklahoma, Jim Thorpe's body was stolen and sold to a small Pennsylvania town. His body is still there as a trophy and tourist trap. Native American activist Suzan Shown Harjo tells the story.More
Jim Thorpe was stripped of the Olympic gold medals awarded to him in 1912, but activists finally got them back in 2022. Today, Thorpe's legacy is about more than medals or even correcting historic wrongs — young Native Americans are looking to him for inspiration.More
Drawn from conversations with hip-hop artist Tall Paul, journalist Patty Loew and biographer David Maraniss, we hear stories from the NFL, from baseball, and, of course, from what made Thorpe a legend —the 1912 Olympic Games.More
Bernardine Evaristo became the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019 for her novel “Girl, Woman, Other.” Evaristo talked with Shannon Henry Kleiber about how her childhood and her writing energize her advocacy supporting artists and writers of color.More
If you want to cancel a famous writer because of his retrograde politics, Rudyard Kipling — author of "The White Man's Burden" — is an obvious choice. So should we still read Kipling? We ask novelist Salman Rushdie and literary scholar Chris Benfey.More
People in these disaster zones now face an agonizing choice: rebuild or relocate? Urban planner Brian Stone says we need radical new thinking for our cities to survive.More
Lightning hitting your house or a storm flooding your basement used to be an “act of God.” But can you call a flood or wildfire a “natural” disaster if climate change is the cause and humans failed to prevent the calamity? More