Melanie Challenger is a naturalist who spends a lot of time in wild places. She’s intimately familiar with birth and death, and she believes any understanding of what it means to be human must start by tuning into our animal nature.

Four hundred years ago, London was full of magicians, but they weren’t like the wizards of Harry Potter. These were practitioners of “service magic.” Historian Tabitha Stanmore uncovers this surprising story in her book “Cunning Folk.” 

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.

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.

"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.

Social critic Alissa Quart says the American ideal of the self-made, rugged individual is built on a lie. In her book "Bootstrapped," she argues that even the people who preached the gospel of self-reliance, like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau, didn’t live up to it themselves. 

Albert Einstein shaped much of our understanding of the space-time continuum, but few know he had a deeply spiritual side. Einstein believed in both math and mysticism, and saw the human mind as a mirror of the infinite.

The Netflix documentary “A Trip to Infinity” is a wild ride, filled with animated shorts by artists from 11 different countries illustrating the concept of infinity and where to find it.

Jennifer Ackerman writes in her new book "What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds" about how owls are cryptic, hard to find, and difficult to understand. Speaking to Shannon Henry Kleiber, she said that’s part of the attraction.

Dreams are funny, confusing and surprising in the world of cartoonist Roz Chast. And they are occasionally disturbing and maybe necessary to process both our everyday and most bizarre thoughts, she tells Shannon Henry Kleiber.

Psychologist Kelly Bulkeley has been researching our night thoughts for many years, and keeps a dream journal himself. He talked with Steve Paulson about the spiritual wonder of dreams.

Scientists are revolutionizing our understanding of life and death. It’s now possible to revive patients hours after they’ve been declared clinically dead. Dr. Sam Parnia talks about these advances and the new science of near-death experiences. 

The time a person spends carrying their child during a pregnancy is only a brief time compared to the time they'll spend being a mother, but as Amanda Henry shares in her story, that time goes differently for everyone, shaping who you are and what impact you'll go on to have on the world around you.

These are tough times for people who care about insects. Roughly 40 percent of insect species face extinction. Poet Heather Swan is haunted by this specter of ecosystem collapse, but she’s also determined to live with love and even hope in a perilous time.