The bedtime stories of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin are enchanting stories. They’re also much more: violent, sexually explicit, political, and feminist.Read more
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Episode Archives
It's the "silver tsunami" — the massive numbers of people now entering their senior years. And for all those now retiring? They’re trying to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives.Read more
Original Air Date:
January 26, 2014
Everybody makes choices. Some of them matter for an hour, others for the rest of your life. For thousands of young people forty years ago, the choice was to go to war in Vietnam or accept the consequences of refusing.Read more
Original Air Date:
January 19, 2014
How often do we credit children with deep thoughts? With profound or subtle thinking? In this hour, we introduce some youngsters who've accomplished remarkable things: written books, gone viral on the internet, and helped heal a community. And we talk with psychologists...Read more
Original Air Date:
December 15, 2013
After 13 years of war, the US will leave Afghanistan next year. There will be many conversations about the country’s political and military future. But we’re taking a different look at Afghanistan - through the lens of Afghan fiction: films, poetry and folk tales, and...Read more
Original Air Date:
June 23, 2013
America invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003. Ten years on, questions linger. What was our mission? Were we prepared? Did we succeed? What’s the state of post-war Iraq? We answers these questions from the perspective of American “boots on the ground.”Read more
Original Air Date:
March 24, 2013
Everybody used to learn handwriting in school. And whether or not our handwriting was beautiful, we knew cursive and studied penmanship. Today, clasroom instruction hours are shrinking and who needs penmanship when we have keyboards and autocorrect? This hour, are we witnessing...Read more
Original Air Date:
February 10, 2013
The a**hole certainly isn't on any endangered species lists. Quite the opposite, in fact. We're seeing a population explosion. So we have to ask — Are we living in the "Age of the A**hole"?Read more
Original Air Date:
January 27, 2013
Is this Philip K. Dick's world and are we just living in it? It sure seems like it these days. This hour, we explore his life and work. Read more
Original Air Date:
January 20, 2013
We peer into one of the most fascinating investigations of consciousness: Stanislav Grof's pioneering study of LSD.Read more
Original Air Date:
December 02, 2012
We explore one of the world's most controversial and secretive religions — Scientology. Also, how much do we really know about the Mormon faith?
Original Air Date:
September 30, 2012
The driving force behind modern computers, Alan Turing was born a hundred years ago. He launched the digital age, founded the fields of computer science and artificial intelligence, and helped the British win WWII by cracking the Nazi "Enigma" codes. He was persecuted by...Read more
Original Air Date:
August 19, 2012
We put together our favorite interviews with female athletes.Read more
Original Air Date:
July 29, 2012
"I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the next century. The great airports are already suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose faubourgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its...Read more
Original Air Date:
May 06, 2012
Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate psychologist. So he’s the perfect person to give us a new way of thinking about thinking, which is exactly what he does in his new book, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” In this hour, Kahneman tells us about the two systems that drive the way we think....Read more
Original Air Date:
January 15, 2012
We meet an anthropologist whose life was transformed by Amazonian shamans and the hallucinogen ayahuasca.Read more
Original Air Date:
January 01, 2012
Many animals, from fish to bees and ants, cannot survive alone. They need to live in groups, and these groups have a kind of collective intelligence. You might say the internet has developed its own "hive mind." In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we'll tell you how the modern science...Read more
Original Air Date:
January 23, 2011
At the end of Mary Shelley's classic novel, "Frankenstein". Victor Frankenstein dies but his creation lives on. What happens to Frankenstein's monster is left to the reader's imagination. At least it was until Susan Heyboer O'Keefe wrote her novel, "Frankenstein's Monster," which picks up...Read more
Original Air Date:
January 02, 2011
Just because we've all grown up and aren't supposed to believe in fairy tales and magic doesn't mean we don't still need them. This hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge offers conversations with Neil Gaiman, A.S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie about the uses of enchantment.
Original Air Date:
December 19, 2010
Science and the Search for Meaning: Five Questions, Part Five: Can Science be Sacred?
What if you don't believe in God, and the thought of church makes you queasy? Can you still experience the sacred? There's a growing movement of secular scientists who revel in the awe...Read more
Original Air Date:
December 19, 2010
Are you a sucker for a sad song? “Greensleeves.” “Yesterday” by the Beatles. For some reason, we love a melancholy tune. But why? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll explore our love of sad music. We’ll look into the effects the minor third has on our brains and we’ll delve...Read more
Original Air Date:
December 12, 2010
Everyone knows you can choose your friends, but not your family. Well, maybe that used to be true, but today’s families are a lot more flexible about defining themselves. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we’ll hear NPR’s Scott Simon rhapsodize about his two adopted...Read more
Original Air Date:
December 05, 2010
Recycling breaks materials down and uses them again -upcycling is using old stuff to build new things, from cigar box guitars to juice pouch messenger bags. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we explore the new world of upcycling, from the scavenger life of a do-it-yourselfer to the...Read more
Original Air Date:
November 21, 2010
"Art is a more trustworthy expression of God than religion." That's a line from Rosanne Cash's new memoir, "Composed." In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Rosanne Cash talks about following in the footsteps of her father, country music icon, Johnny Cash, and how she found her own...Read more
Original Air Date:
November 14, 2010