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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Billy Collins has stepped down as America’s Poet Laureate, but he hasn’t stopped trying to make poetry more accessible and more widely read.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

In this extended interview, Buddhist chaplain Steve Spiro talks about meditations on mortality, about setting the scene at a deathbed, and shares more stories of conscious dying and living.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Austin Kleon talks about his book, "Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative."

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Death is not a single moment; it’s can take hours – and some people live again after they die. So says resuscitation physician Sam Parnia. This UNCUT interview with him ranges from the new science of reversing death, to near death experiences, and the possibility of consciousness after death.  

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Rebecca Goldstein's Dangerous Idea?  Teach children to be rigorous critical thinkers.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Any of us could land on the unplugged side of the digital divide, all it would take is a natural disaster or civil conflict. But one group is building tools that make a cell phone connection all you'd need to share information during a crisis.

David Kobia is one of the founders of Ushahidi.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

We hate mosquitoes.

But why?  I mean, yes --- West Nile, dengue, malaria, Zika…not to mention ruined picnics, sleepless nights, and bites you scratch until they bleed … Those are logical reasons to dislike mosquitoes.  But admit it – they also just creep you out.

Jeffrey Lockwood gets at the psychology in his book “The Infested Mind.” He’s an entomologist who once had a truly horrific encounter with a swarm of grasshoppers.   He was left traumatized. Afterwards he wondered why we all fear and loathe insects so much.

Lockwood told Rehman Tungekar the answer is deep deep in our psyches.

 

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Pre-Modern hunter and gatherer cultures believed that dying was a kind of trial which didn't begin until you left your physical body and entered the supernatural world, according to sociologist Allan Kellehear. In these cultures, death is not the destruction of the body, but the annihilation of the personality and its transformation into something new.

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