Interviews By Topic

Tents of scientists during Antarctic summer

When Jane Willenbring was a young scientist working in Antarctica, she was the target of constant hazing by her team leader. Years later, she filed a complaint. David Marchant was recently found guilty of sexual harassment by Boston University.More

Ann Bishop's Wikipedia page

Women are underrepresented on Wikipedia. So Emily Temple-Wood recruited people to write more articles about notable women. In return, she got rape and death threats. Now, every time she's trolled, she writes a new Wikipedia bio of a female scientist.More

Ada and the Memory Engine.

Lauren Gunderson is currently the most produced playwright in America. And she has written at least half a dozen plays about the forgotten women who changed science. She says we're living in a golden age for these remarkable stories.More

Natto

"Natto" is gaining popularity with home fermentation enthusiasts.  Producer Erik Lorenzsonn heads to the Reedsburg Fermentation Fest to ask why, as well as ponder other fermentation mysteries.More

Suzanne Lee of BioCouture explains how to make clothes from bacteria

What if we could harness nature to grow clothing for us?  London-based fashion designer Suzanne Lee explains how.More

Yogurt

The future belongs to a cultured dairy product, in science fiction writer John Scalzi's short story "The Day the Yogurt Took Over."  Read by Adam Hirsch.More

An outhouse. For pooping.

At the University of Colorado, microbiologist Rob Knight is exploring a new frontier — the human microbiome.More

god and man

Yuval Noah Harari's sweeping and provocative "Sapiens" retells the history of our species from an entirely new perspective.More

Kraut

Sauerkraut, kimchee, kefir, kombucha — Sandor Katz calls himself a "fermentation fetishist."More

Fermented shark meat

Take a big slab of shark meat, bury it in a pit and let it rot. Then dig it up and hang it in a windy shack for four months. No wonder the Vikings took to sea.More

Still from "My Friend Dahmer"

Filmmaker Marc Meyers talked to Charles Monroe-Kane about the challenges of finding reliability in a character like Jeffrey Dahmer while not denying the monster he would ultimately become.More

Jukebox hero

In 1985, The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean started traveling around the country to find out how Americans spend their Saturday nights. One thing she discovered? How many Saturday night songs there are.
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Still in bed

People in every century, every age have complained about feeling exhausted. What’s changed over time are the explanations. Cultural historian Anna Katharina Schaffner lays them out in her new history of exhaustion, "Exhaustion: A History."More

Jet Lag

Christopher J. Lee says jet lag has become more than a temporarily scrambled body clock. It’s become a way of life.More

stove

To The Best Of Our Knowledge producer Doug Gordon explains what it’s like to live with obsessive compulsions.More

Scythians at the Tomb of Ovid c.1640 (CC0)

When Donna Zuckerberg noticed references to classical writers popping up on neo-Nazi and white supremacist websites, she decided to investigate. Why are they so invested in the classics?More

The parthenon

As a French-Tunisian Muslim and political scientist, Nadia Marzouki has come to believe that Americans are actually ambivalent about some of our own sacred values - like freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Even democracy.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

We take a closer look at one of Shirley Jackson's most haunting short stories, "The Daemon Lover." Joan Wylie Hall is our guide.  She's the author of "Shirley Jackson: A Study of the Short Fiction."More

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