Latest Stories

people on the horizon
Audio

Psychologist Laurie Santos created a college course to teach students how to use what scientific research has discovered about what makes us happy and why. It became the most popular class in the 300 year history of Yale.

Length: 
11:37
kisses
Audio

Kathryn Bond Stockton is an English professor and queer theorist and a self-professed lover of kissing. She wrote a whole book just to make out what kissing means in our lives.

Length: 
13:27
Ross Gay
Articles

In a dark world, poet Ross Gay recommends "stacking delights." Share what you love, he says — not what you hate.

Length: 
12:46
Audio

Ebony Thomas doesn't see Hermione from the Harry Potter series as Black. But a whole new generation of young Black girls do, and they're using fan fiction and online communities to re-imagine a witch they can identify with more deeply.

Length: 
11:05
Articles

Inspired by "Alice in Wonderland" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," L.L. McKinney's Nightmare-Verse fantasy series reimagines Alice is a young Black girl from Atlanta. She told Steve Paulson that this Alice’s superpower is self confidence.

Length: 
13:51
Lots of choices
Audio

153 flavors of ice cream. An acre of cold cereals. Why do supermarkets have so many choices? Or do they? Where we might see hundreds of flavors, varieties and brands of food, food journalist Simran Sethi sees a scary kind of sameness.

Length: 
13:18
Egypt
Audio

Archeologist Eric Cline says a "perfect storm" of calamities led to the collapse of the Late Bronze Age. He points out that we face many of the same challenges today.

Length: 
9:52
Girls in pink, boys in blue
Articles

Historian Jo Paoletti speaks with Shannon about gender's ever-changing relationship with fashion.

Length: 
9:01
agnés b
Audio

The most iconic designers have always done more than invent new looks — they help re-imagine our lives, our world. As Steve Paulson discovered when he met designer agnés b.

Length: 
9:33
broken columns
Audio

Renowned classicist Mary Beard says we have lots to learn from Ancient Rome, including insights into how empires rise and fall.

Length: 
12:53
Carolyn Smith
Articles

Could you trade the convenience of instant-purchase online clothing stores for a wardrobe you made yourself? Carolyn Smith went for an even bigger challenge: only wearing clothing she made by hand for a full year.

Length: 
6:16
Avery Trufelman
Articles

Avery Trufelman hosts "Articles of Interest," a six-part podcast from "99 Percent Invisible" about some iconic items of clothing — from blue jeans to Hawaiian shirts to pockets. Anne wanted to know how that work connects to what she wears every day.

Length: 
10:35
The many Angelo styles
Photo Gallery

Choosing what to put on your body is more than just taking something off a hanger and praying it fits. When you get dressed in the morning, you’re constructing an identity. That’s complicated, as producer Angelo Bautista discovered.

Length: 
13:40
Articles

Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard has published six volumes of intensely personal descriptions of his daily life. But his “honesty” cost him some of his closest relationships, including his marriage.

Length: 
13:29
A Zoom holiday is just one option for re-thinking how you celebrate this year.
Articles

Priya Parker challenges us to question why we have certain traditions, and to be open to creating new ones that fit this unusual holiday time.

Length: 
14:54
Articles

Terese Marie Mailhot's brave and beautiful memoir about life on a Pacific Northwest reservation is making waves. She originally intended to tell her story as fiction, but ultimately made the difficult decision to write the whole, painful truth.
 

Length: 
13:36
The Illustrated London News's illustration of the Christmas Truce
Sonic Sidebar

In 1914, over the week leading up to Christmas day, the opposing troops sang carols to each other, played ball and exchanged gifts, in spite of their generals’ wishes. Historian Stanley Weintraub says that the Christmas Truce was a one-time-only event.

Length: 
7:31
Sondheim smoking
Audio

Stephen Sondheim is the reigning genius of musical theater, with credits ranging from "West Side Story" and "Gypsy" to "Sweeney Todd "and "Into the Woods." In this interview from 2013, Sondheim gives Steve Paulson a few pointers on how to write both music and lyrics.

an illustration of a knight in armor
Bookmarks

Every year, at holiday time, "H is for Hawk" author Helen Macdonald reads this tale of a boy who finds out he's one of the "old ones," part of a series from author Susan Cooper. She says it reconnects her with a sense of wonder inspired by what might lurk beneath the surface of the seen world.

Length: 
3:20
Thank you notes for the nurses and doctors in Wuhan, China.
Audio

In Japan, there is a name for extreme gratitude — Naikan. Gregg Krech is dedicated to the practice, and he thinks holidays should be less about running around making everything perfect and more about inner reflection.

Length: 
12:28
Clarice Jensen
Articles

After 30 years of playing it, cellist Clarice Jensen decided she wanted to open up what she could do with her cello. So she started plugging it into guitar pedals.

Length: 
10:11
A close up image of delicious-looking bread.
Audio

Brother Peter Reinhart has devoted his entire life to nurturing matters of the soul. His spiritual path has led him to the comforting ritual of baking bread.

Length: 
10:59
Nikka and Strings
Deep Tracks

When Nikka Costa was ten, she was a pop sensation in Europe. In her 20s, she was Britney Spear’s opening act. But she’s left pop music behind and now she’s performing songs by some of the musicians she’s known, including Prince and Frank Sinatra.

Length: 
13:12
Clockwise: Wheat in a field, flint corn, kamut grains, and the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
Articles

Most of us get our food from the grocery store, not the fields where it grows. But if you really want to understand where our food comes from — and the potential threats to the food supply — you have to think about seeds.

Aerial roots.
Articles

There is an unusual, giant corn in southern Mexico that gets its own nitrogen from the air — no manufacturing required.

Length: 
20:07
A tree recorded by David Haskell.
Photo Gallery

Biologist David Haskell has been listening to and recording the sounds of urban trees. Haskell can identify leaves by sound, and talks about listening as a way of doing science. He explains why nature/culture is a false dichotomy.

Length: 
10:43
headphones in the city
Articles

Composer, environmental philosopher and guest producer David Rothenberg teaches us how to deeply listen to urban spaces.

Underground
Articles

Robert Macfarlane spent a decade exploring caves, mines, catacombs and sewers, on a quest to discover the deep underground. He found a subterranean world of wonder and horror.

Length: 
17:35
Andreas Weber in the Grunewald Forest in Berlin, Germany.
Articles

Andreas Weber is a German biologist and philosopher with a highly unconventional way of describing the natural world, one in which "love" is a foundational principle of biology.

Length: 
16:57
The San Andreas Fault, on the Carrizo Plain.
Articles

Do you know what an earthquake sounds like? Geophysicist Ben Holtzman collects recordings from around the world — from the Fukushima disaster to the manmade earthquakes caused by fracking. We hear examples of these seismic rumbles.

Length: 
9:58

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