Latest Stories

mcdonalds sign
Articles

Historian Marcia Chatelain found a surprising connection between McDonald's and civil rights history when researching her book "Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America." She writes about the intersection of race, capitalism and fast food.

Length: 
13:56
Farmers work the fields on Soul Fire Farm as part of their workshop series.
Articles

Farmer Leah Penniman, co-director of Soul Fire Farm in New York state, and author of "Farming While Black," is digging deep into the soil and her African history to change the story for a new generation.

Length: 
15:06
cooked greens
Audio

John Givens invites us into his kitchen where he cooks his family's traditional greens.

Length: 
3:34
land
Audio

The promise of 40 acres and a mule didn't materialize for most Black Americans. But attorney Savi Horne, executive director of the Land Loss Prevention Project, is fighting for Black farmers to get their land back, now.

Length: 
9:51
meditation
Audio

Andrew Newberg is a pioneer in neurotheology. He says brain scans can show the neural signature of spiritual experience.

Length: 
11:48
Experience the divine
Audio

Jeff Schloss is an evolutionary biologist. He’s also Christian. As a scientist, he’s trying to develop an evolutionary theory for the origins of religion. But he says science can’t explain everything about religion.

Length: 
9:47
lightning
Audio

Ancient humans lived as hunter-gatherers, with animistic religions. So why did people start to believe in Big Gods? University of British Columbia psychologist Ara Norenzayan has a theory.

Length: 
11:04
Articles

The Center for Humans and Nature provides a forum for wider discussion on the link between our evolution as a species and the emergence of religious thought and morality, including several essays by evolutionary biologists David Sloan Wilson and Jeff Schloss.

Chimpanzee
Audio

African chimps store caches of big rocks to throw at certain trees. And some scientists wonder, are those trees sacred to them?

Length: 
16:03
Barren wastes
Articles

Journalist and essayist Roy Scranton has been called "our Jeremiah of the Anthropocene." His book "We’re Doomed. Now What?" is a hard-headed — often terrifying — look at how climate change could transform our planet, and how that impact might shape our daily thoughts and experiences.

Length: 
13:35
man on mars
Articles

Fear about the future of the planet keeping you up at night? Aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin has a solution: it’s time to settle Mars. 

Length: 
8:25
A man and woman share a plate of bacon.
Audio

There’s a popular joke on the internet whenever a gender reveal party goes awry or a wife complains about babysitting her husband: Are straight people okay? Author Jane Ward investigates.

Length: 
11:39
Still from "Talking about Adultery" with a woman's exposed garter.
Articles

Filmmaker Bara Jichova Tyson had every reason to be cynical about romance after what she saw growing up under Communist rule. But it turns out love can come along when you least expect it — including while you're filming a movie about cheating and failed relationships.

Length: 
12:26
the new coffee date, on zoom
Articles

Living in this COVID-19 quarantine makes it especially tough for those looking for love, or at least a good date. But according to dating coach Logan Ury, there may be a silver lining to this enforced isolation — maybe even the jolt they need to break out of bad dating habits.

Length: 
10:06
A wall with the asexual flag colors
Audio

One of the first assumptions we make about a relationship is that it begins with sexual attraction. But what about desire without sex? Angela Chen explores the contradictions — and the possibilities — of asexuality in her new book.

Length: 
11:18
forest
Sonic Sidebar

Claire Peaslee is a naturalist who lives in Point Reyes, California, a place decimated by recent forest fires that sits literally on top of the San Andreas Fault. Yet she finds hope there through pilgrimage.

Length: 
4:22
A hospital staffer
Articles

Rafael Campo is a doctor who's also a prize-winning poet. He sees medicine and writing as two different modes of healing. And during the pandemic, writing poetry has been his way to bear witness to the many people who lost their voices to COVID-19.

Length: 
13:41
Budding hope
Articles

Hope can seem saccharine. Bland. Trite. But talking about hope with Andre Willis, a philosopher of religion, might make you realize you're not thinking big enough when you think about what hope means.

Length: 
14:32
Fruit bodies of the fungus Psilocybe pelliculosa
Articles

After the excesses of the 1960s — and an ensuing moral panic — psychedelic research was outlawed by the United States government for decades. But today, the research is blossoming as a promising treatment for depression and anxiety.

Length: 
14:30
Math of the universe
Video

For centuries, people have considered mathematics the purest form of knowledge — and our best bet for deciphering the universe's hidden order. Steve spoke with two people who love math: physicist James Gates and science writer Margaret Wertheim.

Length: 
14:59
exercise
Articles

Exercise is good for you. And while that might seem pretty obvious, Dr. Claudia Reardon says that it goes deeper than that — specific exercises can actually act as effective treatments for specific mental illnesses.

Length: 
8:41
fish
Articles

Lulu Miller's book “Why Fish Don’t Exist” — which examines ichthyologist David Starr Jordan — is a meditation on the shadow side of scientific classification, and the dangers of trying too hard to impose order on chaos.

Length: 
12:01
Audio

Putting aside the question of whether there's any validity to it, the ancient science of astrology has a lot in common with contemporary data science. In fact, data scientist Alexander Boxer calls astrology humanity’s very first set of algorithms.

Length: 
8:25
Eel
Articles

Eels are philosophically and scientifically slippery — they're still some of the most mysterious creatures on the planet. Journalist Patrik Svensson has been obsessed with them, and wound up writing a surprise bestseller — “The Book of Eels.”

Length: 
13:43
Audio

Wade Davis has been called the Indiana Jones of anthropology. He says the aboriginal people of Australia have a fundamentally different way of seeing the world than we do in modern society.

Length: 
8:07
Clock of the Long Now
Audio

Alexander Rose tells Anne Strainchamps about the Clock of the Long Now — an all mechanical clock being constructed in the high desert of Western Texas designed to run for ten thousand years.

Length: 
10:29
Clocks and clocks and clocks
Audio

Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme talks to Steve Paulson about the nature of time and the human obsession with clock time.

Length: 
8:12
Aluna rendering
Audio

British artist Laura Williams talks with Anne Strainchamps about Aluna — her design for the world's first tidal-powered moon clock.

Length: 
9:03
Clock
Dangerous Ideas

He’s one of the most frenetically productive, wired guys on the planet, but digital media theorist Douglas Rushkoff is backing away from the clock.

Length: 
3:45
Spruce Grain Picea #0909-11A07 (9,550; Sweden) Rachel Sussman
Articles

Photographer Rachel Sussman has documented 30 of the oldest living things in the world. Beautiful and romantic, her photos document both the adaptation and fragility inherent to surviving for tens of thousands of years. 

Length: 
9:25

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