Latest Stories

an online number going up
Audio

When producer Angelo Bautista was growing up, he dreamed of being in the internet. Not on the internet, but inside of it. Now, he's torn about social media. He's still addicted to scrolling, but posting about his own life — that's another story. But if nobody sees you on the internet, do you exist? 

Length: 
6:30
Audio

Journalist Sebastian Junger had nearly died when reporting from war zones around the world, but nothing prepared him for the ruptured aneurysm that almost killed him. He's now trying to explain a mysterious encounter he had with his dead father.

Length: 
19:59
Steve Paulson conducting an onstage interview with Dr. Sam Parnia.
Audio

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. 

Length: 
27:16
Boots at right angles.
Articles

Kaia Sand is a journalist whose day job is executive director of the community newspaper Street Roots in Portland, Oregon. She’s also a poet and she uses both lenses – journalism and poetry – to write about the people she knows and things she sees firsthand in her city. 

Length: 
10:16
Articles

We asked Arab-American poet Philip Metres to write an original poem in the style he’s known for — documentary poetry — a genre that blends techniques from journalism and poetry to offer a fresh way of hearing today’s news.

Length: 
23:04
fireflies
Articles

As a documentary poet, Camille Dungy writes not just about headline-making news, but about news on a more intimate scale — about motherhood, marriage, and her garden. It’s an approach she says was very much inspired by the "godmother" of documentary poetry, Muriel Rukeyeser. 

Length: 
16:13
Google maps versus paper maps
Audio

The debate among cartographers today is about which is better — a paper map, or a digital one? Cartographer Mamata Akella argues that there are merits and downsides to both.

Length: 
10:03
phantom islands
Interactive

Uzbekistani electronic musician Andrew Pekler is fascinated by "phantom islands" — islands that 15th and 16th century explorers made up to please wealthy patrons of their expeditions. So, he built an digital map of them, and added a soundtrack.

Length: 
10:25
Articles

Samoan journalist Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson was born and raised on the island of Savai'i. Rising sea levels washed away the small barrier islands that protected her home, eventually, forcing people to move — just one example of climate change disappearing islands in the South Pacific.

Length: 
19:22
"Junebug"
Photo Gallery

Nathaniel Mary Quinn was abandoned as a child. Today, he’s a celebrated painter, exhibiting around the world. He tells Charles his remarkable story about talent and perseverance in the face of enormous odds.

Length: 
15:05
The many Alma Mahlers
Articles

Alma Mahler inspired symphonies, poems and paintings. She was lover and muse to some of the most celebrated artists of the early 20th century. Novelist Mary Sharratt thinks she would have been a great artist in her own right – if she hadn’t been born a woman. 

Length: 
10:02
The creative mind
Articles

Novelist Siri Hustvedt knows how the creative process feels. Neuroscientist Heather Berlin knows what it looks like in the brain. Together with Steve, they explore the emerging science of creativity.

Length: 
11:00
Audio

Roger Payne revolutionized the science of whale biology by discovering the songs of humpback whales. In this 1995 interview, Payne (who died in 2023) described the thrill of touching a whale, and why he fears for the future of whales.

Length: 
11:20
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Marine biologist Shane Gero has spent decades listening to whale conversations. Through Project CETI, he’s found recent success using technologies like artificial intelligence to better understand what whales are saying. 

Length: 
17:07
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Scientists at Project CETI exploring the sounds of whales have found a “sperm whale phonetic alphabet.” Carl Zimmer, author and science writer for The New York Times, puts the latest whale communications research and news into perspective.

Length: 
18:18
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A Maori conservationist in New Zealand, Mere Takoko is arguing for granting personhood for whales, who she says are her Indigenous Polynesian ancestors.

Length: 
13:38
a worker walks a maze
Audio

Sitting together to reflect on Barbara's years of work to shine a light on the experiences of middle and lower class Americans, her friend and colleague Alissa Quart recorded this interview with her in 2021. Ehrenreich died in September of 2022.

Length: 
09:56
A family
Articles

While caring for other human beings may be the most important work of all, it sure isn’t reflected in the pay scale. That train of thought led Angela Garbes to her book, “Essential Labor: Mothering As Social Change.”

Length: 
12:05
a poet reads from a telephone pole
Articles

Rodrigo Toscano is a serious poet. He’s also a longtime OSHA outreach trainer of workers and the national projects director of The Labor Institute, a non-profit focusing on the contracts and workplace safety of telecommunications workers.

Length: 
11:54
Two figures in the rain
Audio

Maia Szalavitz is an expert in addiction. She is also someone who has experienced it personally as a young woman. It was during that time that she came upon a concept that is only now changing how we think about recovery on a mass scale —harm reduction.
 

Length: 
11:13
rocks on a beach
Sonic Sidebar

Hunting for rocks at the beach seems like a harmless pastime, right? For Katie Prout, it’s been a coping mechanism, a sense of control. But when she decided it was time to get help with her mental health struggles, she was met with endless obstacles.

Length: 
08:06
A soldier
Audio

In 2006, Alex Miller was a US Navy IT specialist, tracking pirates off the coast of Somalia. Two years later, he didn't have a home.

Length: 
14:21
colorful row of houses
Audio

Justin Garrett Moore has been exploring the issue of "care architecture" for years. Moore is leading projects to address social justice and housing issues through empathy and respect for each others’ humanity.

Length: 
11:26
a row of housing in blue
Articles

David Harvey’s work over the years has looked at the economy in radical ways, linking how we earn and spend with, say, geography. Among his fresh frameworks is something called "spatial justice." Steve Paulson asked Harvey what he means by that.

Length: 
12:21
Audio

Biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber says life is all about eating and being eaten, which may sound gruesome, but to him, it’s a miraculous process. He’s the author of “Being Edible: Toward a Mystical Biology.”

Length: 
18:54
Audio

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.

Length: 
30:29
Audio

Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born.   

Length: 
12:08
Articles

Marjolijn van Heemstra is the poet laureate of Amsterdam. As her anxiety about climate change and other problems ratcheted up, she found solace in the larger cosmos and became a "dark sky" activist.

Length: 
12:33
Audio

Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.

Length: 
24:49
David Treuer
Audio

Ojibwe historian David Treuer thinks it’s time for a new kind of Native American narrative, with fewer stories of hardship and what he calls “trauma porn.” Treuer has written a sweeping counter-narrative of Native American history, “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee.”

Length: 
13:16

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