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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Where's the line between craft, art and design? The head of research at London's Victoria and Albert Museum says, at heart, craft is about "showing your commitment to an idea."

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Philosopher David Chalmers is famous for outlining the "hard problem of consciousness."  He says the materialist framework of science will never be able to explain subjective experience. 

You can listen to the EXTENDED interview - and find the transcript - here.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Azar Nafisi reads from her memoir "Things I've Been Silent About." She created a sensation with her book "Reading Lolita in Tehran."

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Novelist Olivia Laing's Dangerous Idea? Loneliness is a gift.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

One future that most of face is seeing someone in the mirror we don’t quite recognize. Here’s Donna McNeil’s story about facing aging.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Angie da Silva is a historian of black cultural life in the United States, going back to the Civil War. She collects stories, both through oral history and archival research. But she's not merely a writer. She brings these stories to life through historical reenactment, often as a slave character she's created named Lila.  She says that the stories she hears and tells are too often left out of our history books.

In this interview, she talks about her work and tells the story of Mary Meachum, a free black abolitionist who worked on the Mississippi in St. Louis.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

David Thorpe is a filmmaker who went in search of his voice. Specifically, he wanted to know why he and many other gay men ended up markers of a "gay voice"—one with precise enunciation and sibilant "s" sounds. He spoke with his family and several speech therapists to better understand, control, and inhabit his voice.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Writer Elizabeth Royte spent some time on Panama’s Barro Colorado Island, the best-studied rainforest in the world.  She describes some of the naturalists she met and their work in her book “The Tapir’s Morning Bath.”

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