Latest Stories

ROSS GAY
Bookmarks

Because he’s fascinated by the process of collecting and by the impulse to document everyday life, poet Ross Gay recommends “Gene Smith’s Sink,” by Sam Stephenson. It’s a portrait of another collector — the legendary documentarian and photographer, W. Eugene Smith. 

Length: 
4:04
Wendel Patrick/Kevin Gift (Via Artists' Websites)
Audio

Kevin Gift is an acclaimed classical pianist. Wendel Patrick is a rising hip hop artist. And many people have no idea as they’re the same man.

Length: 
16:19
Susan Orlean
Bookmarks

For as long as she can remember, Susan Orlean has had a favorite book, "The Sound and the Fury," by William Faulkner. A Southern gothic novel set over a period of three decades, the book explores the lives of the members of one family, the Compsons. Told from multiple perspectives and set in several time periods, it’s not a chronological or easy read.

Length: 
3:01
'RuPaul's Drag Race' Season 11
Articles

The streaming age means our shows are watched individually, on our own time. That makes it all the more remarkable that a television show about drag queens can bring people together in person.

Length: 
11:52
gathering for food
Articles

Staff meetings, family reunions, dinner parties — even with all the digital ways we have to connect, face-to-face gatherings are still a regular part of our lives. Priya Parker thinks we need new traditions to make those gatherings meaningful.

Length: 
13:34
boring meeting
Articles

Author and speaker Mamie Stewart offers six ways that your meetings could be more productive — and less miserable.

Length: 
12:13
Reaching for 0 decibels
Articles

The world is getting noisier and it's hurting us. When George Mickelson Foy got worried about all of the toxic noise in his life, he set on a quest for absolute silence.

rock and roll
Audio

For author Jennifer Egan — whose novel "A Visit From The Goon Squad" documents the inner life of lifelong rock and roll stars—the pauses in rock ballads might say as much or more than the riffs.

A lonely Antartic landscape.
Articles

In 1993, Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge became the first person to cross Antarctica alone. It took him 50 days. The thing that had the biggest impact on him was the silence.

Football
Articles

Point of attack. Defensive Line. Football and war have a lot in common. Former foreign policy advisor to President Bill Clinton Michael Mandelbaum talks conflict and the game.

Length: 
6:20
Paul Beatty
Bookmarks

Paul Beatty, the Booker Prize Winning Author of "The Sellout" recommends "The Nazi and the Barber," a novel by Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath. 

Length: 
2:25
Steven Pinker
Dangerous Ideas

Steven Pinker presents a Dangerous Idea: things today are actually better than they've ever been.

Length: 
3:18
Articles

Conceptually, hope feels big, amorphous, hard to define exactly. But for the past few months, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producers have been trying anyway. Scientists, activists, futurists, theologians, artists, authors all weighed in on what they think when they hear the word "hope."

Yuval Noah Harari
Bookmarks

Sometimes you stumble upon a book that sets you on a whole new path. For Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari — author of "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" — it wasn’t a novel, a memoir, or even a history book that changed his world. It was a book about chimpanzees.

Length: 
4:29
Airmen pose with an MQ-9 Reaper at Creech Air Force Base.
Articles

Was Qassem Soleimani 'assassinated'? 'Killed'? The legal differences are complicated, says Brookings Institution fellow Scott Anderson.

Length: 
10:04
Lidia Yuknavitch
Bookmarks

The main character in Jeff VanderMeer’s other-worldly tale is a polymorphous bear who moves in magical and unexpected ways, and keeps secrets in his fur. It’s both a futuristic story and one with deep history, the kind of dystopian fiction that drew Yuknavitch in, again, and again.

Length: 
3:25
George Saunders
Bookmarks

The author of "Lincoln in the Bardo" recommends Victor Klemperer's two-volume diary that reads as a slow-motion picture of what the Holocaust looked like before it was known Holocaust.

Length: 
3:34
robot brain
Video

Steve sat down with logician and mathematician Roger Antonsen and computer science pioneer Barbara J. Grosz to talk about how AI will challenge our own perception of intelligence in ways we might not expect.

Lynne Cox swimming.
Articles

Lynne Cox is an extreme swimmer. At 18, she swam between the islands of New Zealand. She broke the men's and women's records for the English Channel. Then she did the unthinkable — swimming to Antarctica.

Length: 
10:22
Margaret Atwood
Bookmarks

Jean Rhys takes up a "mad" wife’s story in "Wide Sargasso Sea," an overlooked novel recommended by "Handmaid’s Tale" author Margaret Atwood.

Lorrie Moore
Bookmarks

Writer Lorrie Moore says Alice Munro’s book of short stories, "Carried Away," shows mastery of the architecture of the short story that is both brilliant and can’t be imitated.

Length: 
2:58
Cash
Articles

Journalist Anand Giridharadas says that sometimes, major philanthropic gifts are a lot less altruistic than they may appear.

Length: 
15:11
give the gift of a clean kitchen
Articles

Psychologist Elizabeth Dunn on how to spend money on ourselves and others in a way that maximizes happiness.

Length: 
08:54
Werner Herzog
Bookmarks

Filmmaker Werner Herzog, whose films include "Grizzly Man" and "Cave of the Forgotten Dreams," recommends a nonfiction collection of J.A. Baker's observations of peregrine falcons, recorded in the early 1960s.

Length: 
3:18
Martin Amis
Bookmarks

Martin Amis has written his fair share of novels and essay collections. For a writer, you expect their favorite books to be a source of inspiration. For Amis, Saul Bellow's 1953 novel is a source of writer's block.

Length: 
3:58
desks
Articles

Young people seem to be feeling the pressure to be perfect more than anyone else. Social psychologist Tom Curran tells us how neoliberalism and the digital age created a generation that feels guilty about falling short of flawlessness.

Length: 
6:54
Kim on screen
Articles

Author Lucas Mann writes that calling reality TV a guilty pleasure is "the dumbest cultural cliche." "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producer Haleema Shah asked him about his relationship with reality TV and the person he watches it with — his wife.

Length: 
9:58
Alice Walker
Bookmarks

Alice Walker recommends Richard Yates' novel following an advertising executive whose seemingly successful life quietly fractures under the pressure of mundanity, alcoholism, anger, and recklessness. She says she was drawn to the book because Yates' world was so different from hers.

Length: 
2:54
Circe
Articles

Circe, the all-powerful goddess from Homer’s “The Odyssey,” is known for turning men into swine, and for her mastery of potions. The artwork “Circe,” imagined by Romare Bearden, is a black woman surrounded by mystical animals and a skull, wearing West African garb with a calm but defiant look on her face.

That Tree in April 2017
Photo Gallery

Mark Hirsch took 365 photos — one a day for a year — of a single Bur oak tree. The project changed his life.

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