"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
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
What if we could harness nature to grow clothing for us? London-based fashion designer Suzanne Lee explains how.More
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
At the University of Colorado, microbiologist Rob Knight is exploring a new frontier — the human microbiome.More
Yuval Noah Harari's sweeping and provocative "Sapiens" retells the history of our species from an entirely new perspective.More
Sauerkraut, kimchee, kefir, kombucha — Sandor Katz calls himself a "fermentation fetishist."More
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
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
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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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
Christopher J. Lee says jet lag has become more than a temporarily scrambled body clock. It’s become a way of life.More
To The Best Of Our Knowledge producer Doug Gordon explains what it’s like to live with obsessive compulsions.More
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
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
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
In addition to her haunting short stories and novels, Shirley Jackson also wrote comic essays about her struggles to balance her writing career with family life. Her children Laurence Jackson Hyman and Sarah Hyman DeWitt have assembled a collection of that writing called "Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings."More
Chuck Palahniuk has made a very successful career out of writing transgressive fiction. So maybe it's not surprising that Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" had a huge impact on Palahniuk.More
Ruth Franklin is the author of "Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life." In her book, Franklin argues that Jackson's body of work channeled women's anxieties at the time, representing "nothing less than the secret history of American women of her era."More