Just over 200 years ago, a group of renegade German writers and philosophers came together in a small town and forever changed who we think we are. Andrea Wulf tells this story in her book “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.” More
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Politics and History
When you look online, you might think the most important pursuit in life is self-creation — optimizing, curating, branding yourself. Social critic Tara Isabella Burton says our current obsession with personal identity has deeply religious roots, which then got co-opted by advertisers and the self-help movement.More
Albert Einstein shaped much of our understanding of the space-time continuum, but few know he had a deeply spiritual side. Einstein believed in both math and mysticism, and saw the human mind as a mirror of the infinite.More
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.More
The time a person spends carrying their child during a pregnancy is only a brief time compared to the time they'll spend being a mother, but as Amanda Henry shares in her story, that time goes differently for everyone, shaping who you are and what impact you'll go on to have on the world around you.More
Writer Ayelet Waldman recounts many stories about what she calls "the perils and joys of trying to be a decent mother in a world intent on making you feel like a bad one."More
Our walking journey in the footsteps of Dorothy Day begins in Union Square in New York City, where the first Catholic Worker newspaper was distributed in 1933, and continues to St. Francis Xavier Church, where a tapestry of Day looks over all who walk through the doors.More
Longtime Catholic Worker volunteer and resident Jane Sammon and former Maryhouse chaplain Fr. Geoffrey Gneuhs tell Shannon about Dorothy Day's life at Maryhouse, the Lower East Side community that feeds and houses the poor.More
At Manhattan University and on the Staten Island ferry, the “Dorothy Day,” theologian Kevin Ahern and George Horton and Carolyn Zablotny, who are all working toward Day’s canonization, talk with Shannon about the future of the Catholic Church and what it means to be a saint.More
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.More
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.More
Bill Limpisathian is a professor of cartography and specializes in a brand new field – map cognition, or how we use and see and think about maps in the brain. More
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.More
At the Galileo Museum in Florence, there’s a dazzling collection of old scientific instruments, including the telescope Galileo used to discover new moons. Cosmologist Marcelo Gleiser explains how Galileo revolutionized the scientific worldview.More
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
David Kessler is a world-renowned grief expert. He argues that as a nation, Americans are dealing with a lot of unacknowledged post-pandemic grief.More
Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and author of “The Republic of Suffering,” draws compelling parallels between the grief experienced after the American Civil War and the mourning process following the COVID-19 pandemic.More
Lauren DePino started singing at funerals as a child. As a professional funeral singer, she thinks of her work as a form of alchemy — a way to transmute grief into something bigger.More