Latest Stories

Art from Ingrid La Fleur's Afrofuturist mayoral campaign in Detroit. (Ingrid La Fleur)
Photo Gallery

Artist, activist, and Afrofuturist Ingrid La Fleur recommends collection of books, films and artists for those interested in understanding Afrofuturism as an aesthetic and as a movement.

Jeff Chang
Articles

Jeff Chang has long known that art can be a catalyst for social change. For Chang, a journalist and culture critic who’s written extensively about the political influence of hip-hop, artists play a pivotal role in helping society imagine new realities.

Christian Picciolini recounts his experience leaving the white supremacist hate group.
Articles

Charles Monroe-Kane talks with Christian Picciolini about his campaign to de-program white supremacists, including Richard Spencer, the most prominent face of American white supremacy today.

A screenshot from "One Hour, One Life"
Video

In "One Hour, One Life," you start as a naked newborn. The only way you can survive even the first three minutes is if another player — a stranger — adopts you. It’s a surprisingly powerful experience – but that’s what Jason Rohrer is famous for designing.

Pop culture's constant barrage of ironic detachment
Articles

In 2012, Princeton University professor Christy Wampole wrote a New York Times column that every hipster everywhere instantly hated it — but it struck a chord with people who had grown tired of pop culture dominated by self-awareness and snark.

A US passport.
Dangerous Ideas

Countries around the world pour money into policing their borders — with walls real or virtual — while a global black market smuggles people across them for money. Artist Molly Crabapple imagines another way.

Length: 
4:30
Mariela Shaker
Interactive

In 2013, violinist Mariela Shaker escaped the Syrian Civil War and relocated to the US, moving from Aleppo, a city of 2 million, to a small Illinois town of less than 10,000.

Length: 
6:17
EU flags
Articles

Financial Times columnist Wolfgang Munchau on the political realities of mass migration in Europe, and what it might mean for the future of the European Union.

Length: 
12:33
A globe with political boundaries
Articles

"To The Best Of Our Knowledge" talked to artist Molly Crabapple, economist Bryan Caplan and global strategist Parag Khanna about the differing ways they came to the same conclusion: that borders have become an outdated concept.

Length: 
10:57
lemon and kale
Articles

After listening to the food mavens and masters in our show on chasing "authentic" food, you might be mentally gathering tips on how to better enjoy food in your own home. So let's gather some tips for better eating in one place.

Teens on stage
Video

Charles Monroe-Kane recently sat down to talk with the founder of the "Louder Than A Bomb" youth poetry — poet Kevin Coval — as well as two high school poets — Luis Carranza and Kee Stein — to hear more about how poetry is empowering teens.

Length: 
12:48
Teen brain
Articles

If teens have trouble remembering where they put their homework, how are they going to marshal a legislative agenda? On the other hand, maybe teens have mental advantages adults don’t. Steve Paulson asked neuroscientist Frances Jensen to weigh in.

Length: 
11:09
A serious backbar
Articles

Prohibition gave us speakeasies, jazz clubs and bathtub gin. But a new revisionist history uncovers a more disturbing legacy: campaigns against immigrants, the War on Drugs, and the rise of America's "incarceration nation," says historian Lisa McGirr.

Length: 
10:08
A push of the clock
Articles

Dan Pink has written several books about motivation, work and behavior. His most recent, called “When,” is all about timing. He says people facing an ending seems to push people in new directions.

Length: 
12:01
Tie
Articles

Anthropologist Ilana Gershon argues that if you want to have a successful career in the US today, you have to be a job quitter.

Length: 
9:46
Starling
Articles

Elena Passarello’s latest book, “Animals Strike Curious Poses,” is a journey through stories of the wild ones: the mammoths, spiders, birds and primates that have left their marks on our society. To the Best of Our Knowledge host Anne Strainchamps talked with Passarello about the “animal gaze” and the legacy of Mozart’s starling, among other animal tales.

Length: 
16:18
broken heart
Articles

Every week, Cheryl Strayed and Steve Almond host the popular "Dear Sugars" podcast, where they read listener letters and give relationship advice. Sometimes, they have to parse the questions people think they're asking from the ones simmering beneath the surface.

Length: 
11:06
A flower at the end of life
Dangerous Ideas

Author and professor Simon Critchley offers a dangerous idea that concerns time. And death.

Length: 
3:24
Choose something from 2018 and leave it behind.
Dangerous Ideas

Anne shares a yearly ritual for leaving behind something you regret, and moving into the new year a little bit lighter. 

Length: 
1:11
David Giffels and his dad
Deep Tracks

A few years ago, David Giffels took on an unusual woodworking project — he started building his own coffin. With his 80-year-old father. But after losing his mother and best friend suddenly, his woodworking project took on a whole new meaning.
 

Length: 
11:33
Goshawk in flight
Articles

Shattered by her father's sudden death, writer Helen Macdonald began dreaming of wild hawks.  In an effort to move beyond her grief, she bought and trained a wild goshawk — one of the world's fiercest birds of prey.   But between the bird and her grief, she became, in her words "more hawk than human."

deray on Twitter
Sonic Sidebar

Maybe you can do without social media, if your life is already pretty comfortable. But you know what? Some people can't wait for something better to come along. They need social media today. Like organizer DeRay Mckesson.

Length: 
03:57
Trees
Audio

Botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger tells Anne that the lives of trees and human beings are inter-related all the way down to the molecular level.

Tommy Caldwell and Alex Honnold
Video

Mountain climber Tommy Caldwell takes us inside Alex Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan.

Length: 
2:57
Ways to help Jay
Audio

In 2015, Jay Costello was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a treatable but incurable blood cancer. His family couldn't handle it alone, so his daughter Megan started asking for help online, fundraising via a GoFundMe page. 

Length: 
07:11
Kambui Olujimi: The Drop, from the series InDecisive Moments, 2017. Glass, approx. 30 x 20 x 20 inches. Courtesy the artist.
Photo Gallery

It’s hard to wrap your head around climate change. How do you really take in the concept of planetary change over decades or even centuries? Visual artist Kambui Olujimi explores different ideas about time in his one-man show “Zulu Time.”

Length: 
7:08
earth
Dangerous Ideas

Historian Iain McCalman’s Dangerous Idea? The Anthropocene — the idea that humans have fundamentally changed our global climate. It’s scary, but we’re also seeing people come together in unprecedented ways to solve planetary problems.

Length: 
2:32
Resevoir
Articles

We've heard plenty about micro-dosing with LSD — in articles, books, even on this show. But psychiatrist Anna Fels has a new micro-dosing proposal. Not with a drug – with lithium.
 

Mind/body
Articles

Remember debating the mind-body duality in college? You probably argued the meaning of Descartes’ adage “I think, therefore I am” in your dorm. Maybe you even delved into the idea of what is consciousness. But for Lauren Slater, author of “Prozac Diary,” the mind-body argument isn’t just a debate or an intellectual pursuit.

Doors across borders.
Articles

The Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid sets his newest novel, "Exit West," in a world of permanent mass migration, in a city ripped apart by civil war. He told Steve Paulson he modeled it on his own city — Lahore, Pakistan.

Length: 
16:13

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