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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Terry Ryan tells Jim Fleming that her mother loved crafting contest entries and matched her efforts to the tastes of specific judges. And we hear some of her winning verses.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Stewart Lee Allen explains why the ancient Greeks wouldn’t eat beans, how Spanish Christians began the tradition of eating ham for Easter, and what he’d serve at a dinner dedicated to the Seven Deadly Sins.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

There was a time when others bagged your groceries, planned your trips and pumped your gas, but now they're just another part of our daily routines. Craig Lambert says these are a few examples of the "shadow work" we've unwittingly taken on in service of companies and other organizations. He warns that it's chipping away at our leisure time, and turning us all into middle class serfs.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

A darkly comic debut novel explores the secretive world of industrial flavor manufacturers.  Stephan Eirik Clark skewers the food industry, flavor science, and the American way of life.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Piers Vitebsky is an anthropologist who studies the Eveny or Reindeer People of Siberia.  They depend on the reindeer for their survival.  They keep herds of them for meat -  but their connection goes even deeper.  Vitebsky says that they also have personal, consecrated reindeer animal doubles, which they believe will die for them.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Wendy Burden is the author of "Dead End Gene Pool," a memoir of her childhood among wealthy but highly dysfunctional remnants of the Vanderbilt fortune.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

In Sara Gruen's new novel "Ape House," a family of bonobo apes are captured to be the main attraction in a reality TV show.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Tom Key wrote and performs a one man play called “C.S. Lewis On Stage.”

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