Episode Archives

Filter episodes by the year they originally aired.
To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Lauren Weedman grew up knowing she was adopted.  When she became a teenager, she decided she wanted to meet her birth mother, but the hospital records were sealed and the search seemed hopeless.  Then Lauren’s mom got in on the act, and today Lauren has two moms – and a one woman show...Read more

Original Air Date:

May 12, 2002

Soldiers on in the battlefield prior to the World War I Christmas Truce

On Christmas Eve of 1914, German soldiers in the Flanders trenches lit candles on small Christmas trees.  British, French, Belgian and German troops serenaded each other with songs.  Soon enemy soldiers broke bread with each other and exchanged letters.  In this hour of To the...Read more

Original Air Date:

December 16, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Comfort food’s selling like hotcakes.  People haven’t forgotten the importance of good nutrition, but these days we crave things that’ll make us feel better.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, seeking solace in a scary world.  Diane Ackerman talks about her garden, and...Read more

Original Air Date:

December 02, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

You think Greta Garbo was good at ducking the paparazzi?  She could have learned a thing or two from the giant squid.  No one has ever seen one alive.  Zoologist Clyde Roper should know, he’s spent most of his life in pursuit of this low profile ocean monster.  In this hour...Read more

Original Air Date:

November 25, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Most of us probably have heard of someone else who shares our name, and there are probably others, but unlike British comedian Dave Gorman, we haven’t traveled 24 thousand miles and spent thousands of dollars to meet all of them.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, magnificent...Read more

Original Air Date:

November 25, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Maybe home is where you live, raise your family and mow the grass. Or it's where you grew up. Or where the whole clan gathers for major holidays. Wherever home is, it's never mattered more. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, stories of home, from the Texas hill country to the ‘hood....Read more

Original Air Date:

November 04, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

We’ve got a million expressions for death: kicking the bucket, checking out, buying the farm - but what do we do when words aren’t enough?  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, artisans are finding new passages through grief, from graffiti memorials to handcrafted coffins. ...Read more

Original Air Date:

October 28, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Sometimes you can’t separate beauty from brutality in the African bush. Safari guide Mark Ross is still figuring it out.  In 1999, Ross and a group of  tourists were kidnaped by Rwandan rebels. What happened that day changed the rest of his life. Next time on To the Best of Our...Read more

Original Air Date:

September 16, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Organic food is now a booming billion dollar industry.  And today’s top chefs are its biggest cheerleaders.  They say locally-grown, organic food will help save the planet.  But not everyone agrees.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, an argument for why celebrity...Read more

Original Air Date:

September 02, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Have you ever had one of those moments when you know you really should think about a different line of work?  For Daniel Pink, it was a scorching hot June day in Washington, D.C. when he almost threw up on Al Gore.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Daniel Pink’s career as...Read more

Original Air Date:

September 02, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

A couple of years ago writer Michael Pollan was curious about the world of illegal, underground marijuana gardens.  What he found surprised him.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Mary Jane goes high tech.  A look at drug cultures past and present, a visit to a rave,...Read more

Original Air Date:

August 26, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Suppose you grew up with one of the world’s great scientists.  How would that shape your view of the world?  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, an intimate look at the great conservationist Aldo Leopold: we’ll talk with three of his children.  Also, comic novelist David...Read more

Original Air Date:

August 19, 2001

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

A police officer's shooting of a young, unarmed Afrian American man here in Madison joins a long list of national tragedies.  So we devote this hour to conversations about race and justice.Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Violence may be a national scourge, but an awful lot of people devour shoot-‘em-up movies and video games.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, the seduction of violence.   Why, for instance, four and five-year-old children love fantasy games where they kill each other.  Also, the...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Think you know your history?  Then, of course, you remember Martin Luther King's famous "If I Had A Hammer" speech.  And you know that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife...and she was at rest on Mount Arafat.  And you don't need me to remind you that Marie Curie won the Noel Prize for inventing the...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Forget the deerstalker cap and the calabash pipe. The real Sherlock Holmes is much hipper than that. One scholar suggests that with his violin, creative spirit, cocaine and costumes, Holmes was the rock star of his day. We'll investigate the elementary Sherlock Holmes, from the new annotated...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Al Green is often referred to as the minister of L-O-V-E. You know, a couple of candles, a back-rub, and Al Green on the stereo. In 1976, Al Green put all that behind him and became a real minister – the Reverend Al Green of the Full Gospel Tabernacle Church in Memphis, Tennessee. But now he's...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Are you an experimental innovator who works by trial and error and is most creative later in life, like Cezanne? Or are you a conceptual young genius like Picasso? We'll explore a theory that those are the two life cycles of artistic creativity.Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

What’s the face of the future? Not flying cars and life on Mars… What’s the future of our faces? With new facial transplantation surgeries and the latest news about the NSA collecting images for facial recognition anaylsis, we're wondering about what we see in the mirror every day. 

Also...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

When the Taliban took control of Kabul, many Afghans destroyed their books and TV sets.  Belquis Ahmadi’s family left the country when women lost their rights.  Today, Ahmadi lives in exile, campaigning for women to play a major role in a new Afghan government.  Her story in this...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Ben Kilham has some unusual playmates - black balls of fur who scratch, wrestle and climb all over him.  They are orphaned bear cubs.  And Kilham is their surrogate mom.  He’s raised two dozen bear cubs and then released them into the wild.  Next time on To the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll trek...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Phil Harvey gives away tens of millions of dollars every year to fight AIDS and promote family planning in such places as India, Brazil, Vietnam and Ethiopia.  Where does the money come from?  Harvey runs the largest mail-order erotica business in the world.  In this hour of To the Best of Our...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Abigail Adams, Elvis Presley. Know what they have in common? They're all on Daniel Wolff's list of great Americans. Wolff explains the unique ways those people learned what they had to know. We'll also take a hard look at IQ and its relationship to race and class, and...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Ronald Reagan had it.  Jonathan Swift, Iris Murdoch, and, most likely, Ralph Waldo Emerson had it too.  Alzheimer’s disease is on the rise, and scientists predict that up to one hundred million people will develop it in the next fifty years.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, the...Read more

Pages