Ahh, nature! It’s always such fun to watch on television. Let someone else stalk grizzlies and wrestle Amazonian snakes – real nature is hard work. But it doesn’t have to be. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we invite you to step out of your front door into the natural world. You...Read more
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Episode Archives
Celebrate Halloween with this spooky hour full of ghost stories from our wonderful listeners, and real-life tales of the paranormal. Haunted houses, near-death experiences, and spectral raccoons... so many ways to be un-dead.Read more
Bottle caps, coins, dolls, rocks. My Aunt Mary’s ceramic chickens. Most of us collect something. It seems to be in our genes. And for most of us it’s a fun hobby. For others, it can get a little time consuming. But for a few, collecting is an total obsession.
Amanda Petrusich is a music...Read more
A collection of all of Barbara Ehrenreich's interviews on "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" over the years. Read more
Jane Scott keeps strange company. While other women her age spend their time in knitting circles, Scott’s still hanging out with rockers like Lou Reed and Alice Cooper (and showing off her backstage pass.) It’s her job. Or at least it was until she retired as rock critic for the Cleveland...Read more
They can talk to angels, they're intuitive, and their aura is an unusual vivid blue. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll find out about indigo children. The new age movement says they're here to save the world, but modern medicine says they're normal kids with attention deficit...Read more
The geography of organized religion in America is changing. Today, more and more Americans identify themselves as spiritual, rather than aligning themselves with a particular religion. They're cobbling together faith and spirituality from sources all over the world, picking and choosing the...Read more
When somebody asks Josh Ritter what kind of music he plays, sometimes he ends up lying. After all, Ritter's music is hard to describe - a little bit rock n' roll by way of Bruce Springsteen with a twist of Bob Dylan. Anyway you describe it, Josh Ritter has arrived. We'll get inside the music...Read more
As Western economies struggle, some Eastern economies are booming. India and China now threaten to surpass the West as economic – and political – superpowers. But it’s not just politics that’s changing in South Asia. Across the region, centuries-old religious traditions are also entering a...Read more
Bombay is the largest city in the world. And one of the most confounding. Bar dancers, gangs, and Bollywood all call Bombay home, for better or worse. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, a Bombay-native takes us inside this Maximum City. Also, the writer of the hit movie "Monsoon...Read more
Whitney Houston, Celine Dion, Brittney Spears – divas? Nah. Maria Callas – now she was a diva! In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, two great ladies with leather lungs – Maria Callas and Judy Garland – their triumphs and tragedies from Onassis to Oz. And other...Read more
If you find Shakespeare a bit intimidating, you might want to check out the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Its actors do a version of “Hamlet” forward and backwards – all in two minutes. Next time on To the Best of Our Knowledge, Shakespeare as you’ve never heard him before. Also, the great...Read more
Supersized slabs of juicy ribs cooked over a wood fire until the meat slides right off the bone. Food doesn't get more American than barbecue. It's part of our roots. And it's tangled up in our racial history. In this hour, we celebrate barbecue and explore its secret history.Read more
Was Henry David Thoreau a failure? Hardly. Today, he's considered one of America's great writers. But his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called him the worst kind of failure: a dreamer. At Thoreau's funeral, Emerson said Thoreau was born for greatness, but he lacked ambition. He was nor more than...Read more
The downhill skiers in Sochi know cold weather, but for real cold -- try diving into freezing water above the Arctic Circle! In this hour, some sports too cold even for the Winter Olympics.Read more
Child rape at Penn State. A murderous rampage in Norway. A new civil war in Sudan. Ruthless drug cartels. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Hate Crimes. Murder. Genocide. What is wrong with us? Are we really that bad?Read more
Andrew Sullivan is not a Republican, but he calls himself a conservative. He does not believe in using religion to ground political ideals. But he himself is a person of faith. And he endorsed John Kerry, although Ronald Reagan is one of his heroes. In this hour of To the Best of Our...Read more
Right after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair magazine, declared “irony is dead.” Only a few months later Carter said, with a nudge and a wink, “I meant to say IRONING is dead - not irony.” This time on To the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll look at the rise of...Read more
On a scale of one to ten, how happy would you say you are right now? If someone could teach you how to be even happier, would you be interested? Next time on To the Best of Our Knowledge, how to boost your happiness IQ. Also, eating for pleasure, with chef and food writer Deborah Madison. ...Read more
The mind and the body meet in the brain. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, two of the world’s top brain doctors claim that what you feel affects how you feel. Dr. Norman Rosenthal, the man who discovered Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), says there’s an Emotional...Read more
Muddy Waters grew up on a cotton plantation with an insatiable hunger to play music. He beat on kerosene cans before he finally got a guitar. Muddy Waters went on to become a legendary bluesman. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, why some people grow up musical. Also, pianist...Read more
When it comes to religious practice, we don't always end up where we started. For some people, the journey away from their childhood religion is filled with serious, personal strife. For others, spiritual loss can be less dramatic or even – dramatically funny. In this hour of To the Best of Our...Read more
Somewhere along the way, did we ruin poetry? Have the heartfelt angst of young lovers and the epic elegies of heroes become elitist and academic? But poetry is back, and we have new technology to thank.Read more
Captain William Kidd is considered to be one of the most notorious buccaneers ever to sail the Spanish Main. But apparently history got it wrong – Captain Kidd wasn’t a pirate, he was a sea captain who hunted down pirates. Talk about being misunderstood!. In this hour of To the Best of Our...Read more