Latest Stories

Audio

“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
Audio

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. 

Length: 
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.

Length: 
5:38
Nancy Fraser
Audio

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.

Length: 
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.

Length: 
18:50
19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels scroll on their smartphones
Audio

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."

Length: 
15:36
Jim Thorpe and his fellow players in a snowstorm
Audio

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.

Length: 
15:37
Drawings of Jim Thorpe
Audio

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.

Length: 
13:11
Jim Thorpe on the football field, the Olympic track, and the baseball diamond.
Audio

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.

Length: 
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
Audio

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
Photo of Rob Gurwitt standing in front of a Vermont landscape
Audio

What do you consider the “news”? Journalist Robert Gurwitt thinks it’s everything from school board meetings to nature photos to local bear sightings. He writes the daily newsletter Daybreak, which serves the Upper Valley in Vermont and New Hampshire.

Length: 
13:50
man in color and shape
Audio

Tool-making? Agriculture? Language? French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene believes there’s an even more basic cognitive skill that gave humans an evolutionary jump start — geometry.

Length: 
15:00
Jordan Ellenberg, geometer
Articles

Math superstar Jordan Ellenberg reveals the geometrical underpinnings of pretty much everything — from pandemics to voting districts to the 14th dimension. If geometry is indeed "the cilantro of math," Ellenberg could convert even the most die-hard hater to the joy of shapes.

Length: 
34:00
A hummingbird drinks nectar
Audio

Christopher Benfey tells Anne Strainchamps why there was a hummingbird craze in 19th century Massachsetts, how artists and poets used them as symbols, and why they seem like winged jewels.

Length: 
11:39
A great horned owl
Articles

Jennifer Ackerman writes in her new book "What an Owl Knows: The New Science of the World’s Most Enigmatic Birds" about how owls are cryptic, hard to find, and difficult to understand. Speaking to Shannon Henry Kleiber, she said that’s part of the attraction.

Length: 
17:45
sliced mango
Articles

Aimee Nezhukumatathil takes us through the layers of food emotion and nostalgia, encouraging us to slow down and experience taste and all the wonder it brings with it.

stacked up biscuits
Audio

Growing up in Appalachia, Crystal Wilkinson learned that food was about community and family. Now she is passing her stories and recipes down to her own children and grandchildren in her new book, "Praisesong for the Kitchen Ghosts.”

Jumbo's Good Food, c. 2001
Audio

When Joe Hardtke was a kid in the 1980s, Jumbo's Drive-In in Kewaunee, Wisconsin was the place all the farm kids hung out. 40 years later, people still talk about their fries. Joe went back to his hometown to investigate what made those fries so perfect — crispy and filled with flavor — and how the story of Jumbo’s is a reflection on how we all see our hometowns. 

cookie dough
Articles

Three authors share recipes that anchor them back to history, both shared and personal.

Bradley Lomax and Judith Heumann
Audio

Sami Schalk is the author of “Black Disability Politics,” a history of disability rights and Black activism. She says understanding Black disability politics is essential to building an accessible future.

Length: 
15:41
Brian Muraresku
Articles

Scholar Brian Muraresku makes the controversial argument that the famous Eleusinian Mysteries were fueled by a psychedelic beer.

Length: 
49:43
feet
Audio

Rae Johnson is a somatic movement therapist and the author of “Embodied Activism.” They say the process of making change is more sustainable when you listen to your body. 

Length: 
13:38
Audio

As Steve says in this 2005 profile, part of the magic of Nobel Prize-winning short story author Alice Munro was the way she condensed the essence of a life into a short space. Munro passed away on May 13, 2024. She was 92.

Articles

Jessi Kneeland, a fitness trainer turned body neutrality coach, suggests that aiming for a neutral stance toward one's body — rather than unconditional love — might be more realistic and attainable for many of us.

Length: 
19:53
Eula Biss
Bookmarks

"On Immunity: An Inoculation" author Eula Biss recommends a memoir in which author Maggie Nelson asks questions that bend conventions about gender, sexuality, motherhood, family and identity itself.

Length: 
3:53
Left to right: Rylea Nevaeh Whittet as Maddy and Margaret Qualley as Alex in episode 101 of "Maid."
Articles

Stephanie Land’s 2019 book "Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay and a Mother’s Will to Survive" detailed her personal experience struggling with precarious work as a housecleaner while raising a young child.

Length: 
19:18

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