Lightning hitting your house or a storm flooding your basement used to be an “act of God.” But can you call a flood or wildfire a “natural” disaster if climate change is the cause and humans failed to prevent the calamity? More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Politics and History
Writer Annalee Newitz has spent a lot of time walking around ancient lost cities and imagining future human civilizations on other planets. Newitz is a hard-headed, realistic optimist who believes the one technology that can save us is stories.More
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
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
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
The Frans Hals Museum in the Netherlands holds an exquisite collection of 16th and 17th century Dutch art — and the largest collection of paintings by artist Frans Hals himself. Steve Paulson takes us along on a tour of Hals’ work, and talks with Steven Nadler, a philosopher who has written a new book about Hals.More
In her latest novel, Irish novelist Maggie O’Farrell takes us into the world of Renaissance Italy, where she unravels the tale of a young woman, Lucrezia de’ Medici. Shannon Henry Kleiber talked with O’Farrell about what we can learn about history and ourselves through the many layers of portraits.More
Peter Brathwaite has now researched and re-imagined more than a hundred paintings of Black subjects. What began as a game is now a book and a museum exhibition called “Rediscovering Black Portraiture.”More
Honey Rose is part of the next generation of witches. They perform traditional magic on TikTok, do tarot readings via email, and seek to control social media algorithms with spells. Producer Angelo Bautista wanted to learn more.More
Archaeologist Chris Gosden has written a global history of magic, from the Ice Age to the internet. He told Steve Paulson he’s come to believe our own culture would be healthier and happier if we took magic more seriously.More
In 17th century Germany, the mother of famed astronomer Johannes Kepler, Katharina Kepler, was accused of being a witch. Centuries later, author Rivka Galchen has taken her story and spun it into fiction in her book "Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch."More
Five years after opening its doors, the pastor of Atlanta’s Cornerstone Church, Reverend John Onwuchekwa, led the entire congregation of more than 400 people to officially leave the Southern Baptist Convention. His reason for leaving was tied to their long history of oppression and racism toward Black people. More
Beth Allison Barr is a Southern Baptist from Texas who was raised evangelical, married a pastor and had two children. She’s also a feminist professor of medieval history at Baylor University, and the author of a book that isn’t winning her many friends in the evangelical world: “The Making of Biblical Womanhood: How the Subjugation of Women Became Gospel Truth.”More
Donald Trump won 84% of the white evangelical vote in 2020. To shore up that base, he’s now moving beyond conservative Christian values, to Christian nationalism. That nationalism, journalist Jeff Sharlet argues, represents a real and present threat of "simmering violence."More
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.More
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.”More
Daniel Bergner felt frustrated and helpless back when one of his closest family members — his brother — was diagnosed as having bipolar disorder. So Bergner decided to report out other possibilities for his brother’s healing.More
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.
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