Growing up in Appalachia, Crystal Wilkinson learned that food was about community and family. Now she is passing her stories and recipes down to her own children and grandchildren in her new book, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts.”More
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Interviews By Topic
Religious groups have long had rules and traditions that become part of the fabric of a lifetime. Master food preserver Christina Ward set out to find those histories in her book "Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat."More
Aimee Nezhukumatathil takes us through the layers of food emotion and nostalgia, encouraging us to slow down and experience taste and all the wonder it brings with it.More
When Joe Hardtke was a kid in the 1980s, Jumbo's Drive-In in Kewaunee, Wisconsin was the place all the farm kids hung out. 40 years later, people still talk about their fries. Joe went back to his hometown to investigate what made those fries so perfect — crispy and filled with flavor — and how the story of Jumbo’s is a reflection on how we all see our hometowns. More
The Frans Hals Museum in the Netherlands holds an exquisite collection of 16th and 17th century Dutch art — and the largest collection of paintings by artist Frans Hals himself. Steve Paulson takes us along on a tour of Hals’ work, and talks with Steven Nadler, a philosopher who has written a new book about Hals.More
In her latest novel, Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell takes us into the world of Renaissance Italy, where she unravels the tale of a young woman, Lucrezia de’ Medici. Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with O’Farrell about what we can learn about history and ourselves through the many layers of portraits.More
Peter Brathwaite has now researched and re-imagined more than a hundred paintings of Black subjects. What began as a game is now a book and a museum exhibition called “Rediscovering Black Portraiture.”More
The nocturnal songs of nightingales have captivated artists, poets and musicians for generations. Folk singer Sam Lee celebrates their annual return through intimate nighttime duets—performed in total darkness—that blend human voice and nightingale song.More
Witnessing the beauty of synchronous fireflies in the Great Smoky Mountains inspired author Leigh Ann Henion to turn off her porch light and discover the vast natural world that thrives in the darkness.More
Turns out there is an emerging science of uncertainty — a new frontier in psychology, artificial intelligence, and surgery — where things can go very wrong when people are missing a crucial skill set: being unsure. Maggie Jackson explains.More
There are two sides to giving up. The virtue of sacrifice – and the sin of despair. So how do we decide which is which? That’s the question psychoanalyst Adam Phillips asks in his newest book “On Giving Up.”More
Fasting is an ancient practice that’s experiencing something of a revival right now in health and fitness circles. But when John Oakes set out to explore the concept, he took it a lot deeper.More
Suzanne Simard transformed our understanding of forest ecology by uncovering the fungal networks that trees use to communicate with each other. Anne Strainchamps went walking with Simard to see firsthand how a forest is like a kinship network.More
Journalist Zoë Schlanger has been tracking the new science of plant intelligence. Plants can exhibit some of the same behaviors as animals with nervous systems, including decision-making and elaborate defenses against predators.More
Are the really big psychedelic experiences just hallucinations, or do they crack open some transpersonal dimension of consciousness? Philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes believes we need a metaphysics of psychedelics to explain these experiences.More
When painter Sougwen Chung paints something in collaboration with an AI she trained — say, a black oil-paint brush stroke — a robot mimics Chung. But at some point, the robot continues without Chung and paints something new. So how creative is AI?More
The internet is indeed overflowing with fake content, says computer scientist Walter Scheirer. But the vast majority of it seems aimed at the creation of connection—rather than destruction.More
Does AI have a fundamentally different kind of intelligence than the human mind? Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn is fascinated by this question. Her investigation into machine intelligence became a very personal journey, which led her down the rabbit hole into questions about creativity and the nature of transcendence.More