Losing yourself in wilderness can also be a way of finding yourself, and one place you can do that is in our national parks. Renowned nature writer Terry Tempest Williams reflects on her love for these parks — especially those with desert landscapes.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Science and Technology
It turns out that even the most basic things we believe about ourselves are often wrong. Neuroscientist Julian Keenan says it has to do with how the brain works. He’s the author of the “Face in the Mirror: How We Know Who We Are.” More
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the death of Rachel Carson, a pioneer of the environmental movement. Rob Nixon holds the Rachel Carson chair in English at the UW-Wisconsin. He says she was something of a reluctant activist. More
Richard Holmes talks with Steve Paulson about how art and science influenced each other during the Romantic period.More
Jonah Lehrer says that the great French writer Proust described insights into the way the mind processes memory long before the scientists could prove how the brain worked.More
Ray Kurzweil tells Steve Paulson humans will merge with new technology and vastly improve their intelligence.More
Nature is more than pristine meadows and eroded canyons. There's also a history of how people have shaped and sometimes fought over the land. Lauret Savoy uncovers this shadow history and the racism that's embedded in the American landscape.More
The story of finding and recording the rarest bird in America: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.More
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says most neuroscientists have downplayed the differences between the left and right sides of the brain. He says he thinks the left hemisphere has become so dominant in Western culture that we're losing the sense of what makes us human.More
James Gardner is the author of “Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe.”More
Biologist David George Haskell spent a year making weekly visits to the same one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest near his home in Tennessee. His writes about his experiment in "contemplative science" in a series of gorgeous essays, called "The Forest Unseen".More
Brian Boyd talks with Anne Strainchamps about how our love of storytelling helped us evolve.More
David Abrams tells Steve Paulson about his animistic beliefs and recounts a remarkable story about a shaman who could turn himself into a raven.More
Renowned biologist E.O. Wilson talks with Steve Paulson about the difficulty of reconciling science and religion.More
Where do you go if you want to see dinosaur footprints, ancient rock art and remote desert wilderness? There's no better place than the Grand Staircase-Escalanate National Monument in southern Utah. Steve and Anne spent an afternoon exploring this area with nature guide Nate Waggoner.More
Are we witnessing the birth of a new "dark green religion"?More
Lauret Savoy believes too many nature writers focus on pristine wilderness and neglect the gritty reality of the places where people actually live - in cities, for instance, maybe even near toxic waste sites. And writing about these places means grappling with difficult questions about race and poverty. More
Deborah Blum talks about the serious scientific effort undertaken by an elite group of scientists and scholars a hundred years ago to investigate the supernatural.More