Arts and Culture

During their visit to Addis Ababa, Anne and Steve caught a show put on by a household name in Ethiopia — the boundary-crossing, border-hopping jazz virtuoso Meklit Hadero.More

listening

Valmont Layne grew up under apartheid in South Africa. Music, along with protest movements, radicalized him. He tells Anne and Steve that South African jazz became a musical current that’s traveled across oceans, spreading ideas about freedom.More

trumpet

Political repression and censorship forced a generation of Black jazz musicians out of South Africa and into clubs in Europe and the US. But jazz critic Gwen Ansell says some musicians remained, and they left a legacy of unforgettable music.More

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.More

feet

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. More

Bradley Lomax and Judith Heumann

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.More

Artist Katie Paterson works with melting glaciers, fossilized insects and the dust from meteorites to help us expand our time horizons. Her art bridges cosmic and human timescales, revealing the beauty in vast temporal expanses.More

Philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats engineers monumental-scale clocks that run on “river time” or “arboreal time” to un-standardize our atomic time. He says we need to make time more pluralistic, to envision a kind of chrono-diversity.More

Acoustic ecologist and sound artist Alex Braidwood has recorded many dawn choruses, from first-light to full sunrise, in his Iowa backyard and all over the world. On his album, “Serotinous Repose,” he turns the dawn chorus into music.More

yellow plains against a blue sky

From an early age, Ukrainian-American poet Ilya Kaminsky developed a deep personal understanding of the political power of poetry and language. He explains why poetry is such a powerful tool in crisis.More

Bernadine Evaristo

Bernardine Evaristo became the first Black woman to win the Booker Prize in 2019 for her novel “Girl, Woman, Other.” Evaristo talked with Shannon Henry Kleiber about how her childhood and her writing energize her advocacy supporting artists and writers of color.More

Kipling with illustrations from his home.

If you want to cancel a famous writer because of his retrograde politics, Rudyard Kipling — author of "The White Man's Burden" — is an obvious choice. So should we still read Kipling? We ask novelist Salman Rushdie and literary scholar Chris Benfey.More

Deb Blum

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.More

Photo of Rob Gurwitt standing in front of a Vermont landscape

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.More

Steve Paulson conducting an interview with Ezra Klein from the New York Times

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.More

stacked up biscuits

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.”More

Kenan Kitchen

Religious groups have long had rules and traditions that become part of the fabric of a lifetime. Master food preserver Christina Ward set out to find those histories in her book "Holy Food: How Cults, Communes, and Religious Movements Influenced What We Eat."More

sliced mango

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.More

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