Latest Stories

Jenny Odell
Articles

Lately it’s been feeling like time is speeding up.  Whether it’s the news cycle, social media, the information economy or global warming, the pace of life is accelerating beyond what many of us can handle. Jenny Odell blames the clock. 

Length: 
18:02
Natalie Merchant
Audio

Singer Natalie Merchant rediscovered poetry in the company of her young daughter. Why does she love the poems by Victorian and early 20th century poets?

Length: 
14:18
Picking up leaves on a leisurely hike.
Dangerous Ideas

Our lives have never been more optimized to save us time. But is it all time well spent? Maybe it’s time to embrace inefficiency, argues typewriter collector and philosopher Richard Polt.

Length: 
3:39
Digital projector
Articles

Eliza Smith is the CEO and cofounder of Cosmic Standard, a podcast company. She also has a new podcast in the works – based on fear. She tells Anne Strainchamps that horror stories help her manage and work through her anxiety.

Length: 
14:01
Jennifer Michael Hecht
Audio

When it comes to wonder and awe, historian and poet Jennifer Michael Hecht, the author of “Doubt” and “The End of the Soul,” says there’s another, even older tradition we can all access – poetry.

Length: 
16:15
Dacher Keltner
Articles

Psychologist Dacher Keltner says that awe is a unique experience, distinct from all other emotions, and it can make us feel better in a lot of ways.

Length: 
14:29
Lulu Miller
Articles

Lulu Miller's latest project is a "Radiolab" podcast series for children: "Terrestrials." She explains for how nature and child-like sensibility can help adults rediscover a sense of wonder.

Length: 
18:39
David Olson in his lab.
Articles

Could you get the same therapeutic benefits of a psychedelic drug without actually tripping? Neuroscientist David Olson wants to re-engineer psychedelic molecules to remove the trip. If successful, he might revolutionize the treatment of mental disorders.

Length: 
16:35
Charles Raison
Audio

Psychedelic therapy has shown great promise for treating depression, but it's still unclear why exactly it works. Psychiatrist Charles Raison wants to know if it's the drug or the trip that makes psychedelics so potent. Is it biology or consciousness?

Length: 
17:23
phantom islands
Interactive

Uzbekistani electronic musician Andrew Pekler is fascinated by "phantom islands" — islands that 15th and 16th century explorers made up to please wealthy patrons of their expeditions. So, he built an digital map of them, and added a soundtrack.

Length: 
10:25
Anne's mental map.
Audio

Bill Limpisathian is a professor of cartography and specializes in a brand new field – map cognition, or how we use and see and think about maps in the brain.

Length: 
9:20
Articles

Samoan journalist Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson was born and raised on the island of Savai'i. Rising sea levels washed away the small barrier islands that protected her home, eventually, forcing people to move — just one example of climate change disappearing islands in the South Pacific.

Length: 
19:22
Charmaine Minniefield
Audio

"Praise houses" were places where Black people would gather in secret to affirm their African identity and cultural practices. Artist-activist Charmaine Minniefield explains how her Praise House Project pushes back against the erasure of history.

Length: 
12:47
Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfattah
Audio

Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah are the producers and hosts of "Throughline" from NPR. They explain why history belongs in the news and how they fell in love with it.

Length: 
23:32
Jamelle Bouie
Articles

Jamelle Bouie is a New York Times columnist and political analyst for CBS News with a knack for providing historical context for present-day debates. It’s given him a distinctive voice among today’s pundits.

Length: 
23:32
Google maps versus paper maps
Audio

The debate is cartographer today is about which is better — a paper map, or a digital one? Cartographer Mamata Akella argues that there are merits and downsides to both.

Length: 
10:03
A wolf eyes the horizon
Articles

Horror writer Stephen Graham Jones loves werewolves. He redefined the genre with his 2016 novel "Mongrels," about a family of werewolves on the run in a hostile American landscape — a story drawn from his own background.

Length: 
11:45
pie
Bookmarks

Lulu Miller, author of “Why Fish Don’t Exist,” first read the young adult book “The Search for Delicious” when she was in that transformative and uncertain stage in between childhood and adulthood.

Length: 
5:16
The Löwenmensch figurine after restoration in 2013
Audio

Shapeshifting images run deep in human history, going back to ancient cave paintings. Archeologist Chris Gosden says they're linked to the shaman's ability to cross into the spirit world where humans and animals merge.

Length: 
8:15
the raven
Audio

Bad things happen when people lose their connection to the more-than-human world. "Animals know something that we that don't," says psychologist Sharon Blackie. That's one lesson you can take from the old shapeshifting myths and fairy tales.

Length: 
13:41
Articles

Marjolijn van Heemstra is the poet laureate of Amsterdam. As her anxiety about climate change and other problems ratcheted up, she found solace in the larger cosmos and became a "dark sky" activist.

Length: 
12:33
Audio

Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born.   

Length: 
12:08
Audio

Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.

Length: 
24:49
space guy
Articles

A conversation with "rational mystic," physicist Marcelo Gleiser.

An old barn near Sandy Neck on Cape Cod, Massachusetts in December 2012
Audio

Simon Winchester is a British journalist and best-selling author who spent decades on the road before finally buying a small farm in the Berkshires. The experience led to his book “Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World."

Demonstrators near the Standing Rock Reservation.
Articles

Land Back is a movement that demands the return of native lands to indigenous people. One of its leaders, Hayden King — executive director of the Yellowhead Institute — explains why the movement is gaining traction in Canada.

Makenna Goodman on her homestead in Vermont
Photo Gallery

Makenna Goodman is a modern-day homesteader and novelist in rural Vermont. She was inspired by Scott and Helen Nearing, who were back-to-the-land pioneers. But she says their philosophy of "the good life" reeks of class privilege.

Length: 
18:45
19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels scroll on their smartphones
Audio

China Mieville is a writer best known for speculative fiction, but he's also written a lot about Marxism, most recently in a history of the Communist Manifesto called “A Spectre, Haunting."

Length: 
15:36
Nancy Fraser
Articles

Over four decades, philosopher Nancy Fraser has worked to expose the deep roots that connect all the crises of our time: racial violence, environmental devastation, the impoverishment of families, challenges to democracy. Think of each as the toxic byproducts of capitalism.

Length: 
18:50
Nancy Fraser
Audio

Hinge points are moments of crisis where a new system can be made. Philosopher Nancy Fraser believes the particular crises we face today are so severe they actually present an opportunity.

Length: 
16:32

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