Once you acknowledge that plants are intelligent and sentient beings, moral questions quickly follow. Should they have rights? How can we think of plants as "persons"? Plant scientist Matt Hall sorts out these ideas with Steve.

As a plant ecologist, Brooke Hecht knows plants. But then a few years ago, while at a professional conference, her young daughter who'd tagged along got sick. And that's when the healing powers of plants came to the rescue.

In Madison, Wisconsin, there’s a place a lot of women with scars go. It’s a studio run by a tattoo artist — Alissa Waters — who specializes in the scars left from breast cancer surgery. Her tattoos help women reclaim their bodies.

Living through a global pandemic is giving us all a whole new awareness of skin. Producer Angelo Bautista has been thinking a lot about his own skin — how to claim it, care for it, and all the ways he lives in it.

Lydia Millet mined Bible stories and parables to write her very contemporary novel about climate change, "A Children’s Bible.” She says that fiction can help us sort through hard feelings about climate change in a way daily news stories can't.

When anthropologist Jason Pine traveled to rural Missouri, he wound up spending a lot of time observing underground meth labs. And he came to a startling conclusion: that the meth cooks of the Ozarks are today’s alchemists.

Pamela Smith's science history students spend a semester taking medieval alchemical recipes and re-creating them in a lab.

Writer, classicist, and stand-up comic Natalie Haynes makes a strong case for reading ancient Greek and Roman literature in the modern age.

Political repression and censorship forced a generation of Black jazz musicians out of South Africa and into clubs in Europe and the US. But jazz critic Gwen Ansell says some musicians remained, and they left a legacy of unforgettable music.

Anne Helen Petersen has been writing about burnout long before the pandemic. Now she says we’re really starting to run on empty.

Historian Marcia Chatelain found a surprising connection between McDonald's and civil rights history when researching her book "Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America." She writes about the intersection of race, capitalism and fast food.

John Givens invites us into his kitchen where he cooks his family's traditional greens.

Andrew Newberg is a pioneer in neurotheology. He says brain scans can show the neural signature of spiritual experience.

Ancient humans lived as hunter-gatherers, with animistic religions. So why did people start to believe in Big Gods? University of British Columbia psychologist Ara Norenzayan has a theory.