Interviews By Topic

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

The celebrated cartoonist Chris Ware has a graphic novel called “Building Stories.”  It is full of stories. It is an actual building. Steve Paulson says, “it’s like nothing he’s even seen or read before.”More

mellotron

Dianna Dilworth is a filmmaker and journalist. Her latest documentary is called "Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie."More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Pranks aren’t just for April Fool’s Day. Sometimes they can be powerful vehicles for political and social change.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Edward Wohl tells us about the death of his father in 1999.More

ghosts

Deborah Blum talks about the serious scientific effort undertaken by an elite group of scientists and scholars a hundred years ago to investigate the supernatural.More

poisoner with needle

Deborah Blum tells the remarkable story of the scientists who invented forensic medicine and figured out how to catch murderers using poison.More

BookMarks

Eric Liu reviewing “Inventing America” by Gary Wills.More

Alaska

Aidan Campbell was 15 when she butchered a caribou at -35 degrees. Now she's 17 and she's already made three trips deep into the Alaskan wilderness with her dad, James. They describe some of their hair-raising adventures into places that few people go. More

David Foster Wallace

TIME magazine's book critic calls David Foster Wallace a literary ventriloquist who captured the spoken speech of Americans more accurately, hilariously and lovingly than any other writer. More

David Foster Wallace in 2006

David Lipsky is the journalist portrayed in “The End of the Tour,” a film about Lipsky's 5-day road trip with David Foster Wallace.  The two hit it off, sharing a wide-ranging conversation about fame, depression, pop culture and junk food. Speaking to Jim Fleming for "To The Best of Our Knowledge" in 2009, Lipsky remembers Wallace and traces the evolution of the depression that ultimately claimed his life.More

Australopithecus africanus at the University of Zurich.

Ann Gibbons is an award-winning science writer and author of “The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors.”More

Why is filmmaker Errol Morris is still outraged by the famous philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn?More

man playing guitar

Famous for his stories of people with brain disorders, Oliver Sacks wrote a lot about neurological mysteries, like the way a song can activate parts of the brain that language can’t even touch.More

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Given the hyper-realism of author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s "My Struggle," you might be surprised to hear that the formative books of his childhood were filled with magic and imaginary worlds. He says Ursula K. Le Guin’s "Earthsea" fantasy series shaped him as an early reader.More

muskrat

Here's an Anishinaabe poem and creation story by Kimberly Blaeser. It's the story of the lowly muskrat, and it reminds us that we are constantly building new worlds - since the beginning of time and even now.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

The celebrated poet Edward Hirsch says the history of poetry is the history of poetic forms. And to prove it he wrote a 700-page compendium about all things poetry.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

TTBOOK technical director Caryl Owen explains why she’s always been fascinated by rocks and the language of geology.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

In 2014, Dan and Judy Pierotti invited us to be part of the end of Dan's life. From early conversations with Dan - a retired Lutheran...More

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