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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
Audio

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

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13:38
a worker walks a maze
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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.”

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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.

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11:54
Two figures in the rain
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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.

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08:06
A soldier
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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.

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14:21
colorful row of houses
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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
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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
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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.

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30:29
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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.

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12:33
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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.

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24:49
David Treuer
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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.”

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13:16
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“Bad River” is Mary Mazzio’s documentary about a small tribe, the Bad River band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and their legal battle to get rid of an oil pipeline. She examines the conflicting ideas we have about how to live on the land and even whether it can be owned.

Length: 
14:26
Quannah Rose Chasinghorse-Potts in a black jacket riding a white horse in a desert landscape.
Articles

Quannah ChasingHorse is both a Native American activist and a supermodel in the fashion industry. In her early twenties, she represents the next generation of activists working to protect Native land rights.

Length: 
10:48
Maria Sabina
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The story of Mazotec healer Maria Sabina is a notorious example of how psychedelic enthusiasts have exploited the knowledge of Indigenous cultures they don’t really understand.

Length: 
18:54
Rachel Fernandez
Articles

Sutton King wants to change the culture around psychedelic medicines by confronting historical wrongs and getting Indigenous people into key decision-making roles in the psychedelic industry. 

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13:13
A mushroom
Articles

Pharmaceutical companies have a long history of hunting for medicinal drugs, often in Indigenous cultures. Historian Lucas Richert tells the story of how one company went bioprospecting for peyote.

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5:38
Nancy Fraser
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Hinge points are moments of crisis where a new system can be made. Philosopher Nancy Fraser believes the particular crises we face today are so severe they actually present an opportunity.

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16:32
Nancy Fraser
Articles

Over four decades, philosopher Nancy Fraser has worked to expose the deep roots that connect all the crises of our time: racial violence, environmental devastation, the impoverishment of families, challenges to democracy. Think of each as the toxic byproducts of capitalism.

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18:50
19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels scroll on their smartphones
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China Mieville is a writer best known for speculative fiction, but he's also written a lot about Marxism, most recently in a history of the Communist Manifesto called “A Spectre, Haunting."

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15:36
Jim Thorpe and his fellow players in a snowstorm
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Jim Thorpe was stripped of the Olympic gold medals awarded to him in 1912, but activists finally got them back in 2022. Today, Thorpe's legacy is about more than medals or even correcting historic wrongs — young Native Americans are looking to him for inspiration.

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15:37
Drawings of Jim Thorpe
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During his traditional Sac and Fox funeral in Oklahoma, Jim Thorpe's body was stolen and sold to a small Pennsylvania town. His body is still there as a trophy and tourist trap. Native American activist Suzan Shown Harjo tells the story.

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13:11
Jim Thorpe on the football field, the Olympic track, and the baseball diamond.
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Drawn from conversations with hip-hop artist Tall Paul, journalist Patty Loew and biographer David Maraniss, we hear stories from the NFL, from baseball, and, of course, from what made Thorpe a legend —the 1912 Olympic Games.

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22:13
Jim Thorpe (left) and Tall Paul (right) on the cover of Tall Paul's latest album.
Articles

Tall Paul is an Anishinaabe and Oneida rapper enrolled on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota. His new album is called "The Story of Jim Thorpe." Charles Monroe-Kane spoke with him about Thorpe’s legacy, sports and hip-hop.

Deb Blum
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Science journalist Deborah Blum thinks both reporters and news consumers have a responsibility to try to understand the truth. That includes being willing to pay attention to the uncomfortable, complicated news that we might not want to hear.

Length: 
15:07
Steve Paulson conducting an interview with Ezra Klein from the New York Times
Articles

New York Times podcaster Ezra Klein has strong views about what he does as a journalist. “I’m not objective,” he says. “I don’t believe anybody’s objective. What I am is transparent.” He takes Steve Paulson behind the scenes of his popular podcast.

Length: 
19:12

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