America is in trouble. The decline of the dollar, climate change and the ugly math of Social Security and national debt are just a handful of the challenges facing the next generation. And who's to blame for the current mess? Baby Boomers - according to a growing movement, pitting one generation...Read more
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Episode Archives
If you think about it, every day we receive countless services from complete strangers — the newspaper delivered to your door, the trash picked up at the crack of dawn, the fresh fruit for sale at the supermarket. There's a whole army of invisible workers powering our economy who we rarely get...Read more
She's a little bit country. She's a little bit rock and roll. Carlene Carter grew up surrounded by music. She's the daughter of June Carter and the stepdaughter of Johnny Cash. And Carlene followed in their footsteps, with a few twists and turns along the way. In this hour of the Peabody Award-...Read more
Scientists have proven what pet owners already knew - cuddling with your dog or cat is good for you – and for your pet. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, keeping animals well, and how they return the favor. From gorilla conservation and eco-tourism to the dilemmas posed...Read more
Alex Rider, Nancy Drew, The Cat in the Hat, and Harold and the Purple Crayon – for millions of children of all ages, they're some of the most imaginative and mysterious stories around. But as it turns out, the authors sometimes have their own, personal mysteries to share. In this hour of To the...Read more
Think you know your history? Then, of course, you remember Martin Luther King's famous "If I Had A Hammer" speech. And you know that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife...and she was at rest on Mount Arafat. And you don't need me to remind you that Marie Curie won the Noel Prize for inventing the...Read more
Forget the deerstalker cap and the calabash pipe. The real Sherlock Holmes is much hipper than that. One scholar suggests that with his violin, creative spirit, cocaine and costumes, Holmes was the rock star of his day. We'll investigate the elementary Sherlock Holmes, from the new annotated...Read more
Are you an experimental innovator who works by trial and error and is most creative later in life, like Cezanne? Or are you a conceptual young genius like Picasso? We'll explore a theory that those are the two life cycles of artistic creativity.Read more
What’s the face of the future? Not flying cars and life on Mars… What’s the future of our faces? With new facial transplantation surgeries and the latest news about the NSA collecting images for facial recognition anaylsis, we're wondering about what we see in the mirror every day.
Also...Read more
Suppose neuroscientists map the billions of neural circuits in the human brain....are we any closer to cracking the great existential mysteries - like meaning,...Read more
Ben Kilham has some unusual playmates - black balls of fur who scratch, wrestle and climb all over him. They are orphaned bear cubs. And Kilham is their surrogate mom. He’s raised two dozen bear cubs and then released them into the wild. Next time on To the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll trek...Read more
Siberia is the name for a place we tend to think of as a metaphor as much as a destination on the map. Writer Ian Frazier indulged what he calls his dread Russia love with travels through Siberia, tracing the path of prisoners on their way to lonely exile and through mosquito-ridden swamps at...Read more
Mary Ann Caws is an internationally respected scholar of surrealism. She has translated many of the movements major texts and is the editor of “Surrealism (Themes and Movements).” Caws talks with Anne Strainchamps about the history of the surrealist movement. Also, we hear actor Steve O’Connell...Read more
Are humans innately good? Do we have a generosity gene? Is there an inherent desire to help our fellow human beings? Or, are we natural born sinners who have to fight, tooth and nail, to conquer our inherent tendencies towards selfishness, destruction and war. In this hour of To the Best of Our...Read more
Phil Harvey gives away tens of millions of dollars every year to fight AIDS and promote family planning in such places as India, Brazil, Vietnam and Ethiopia. Where does the money come from? Harvey runs the largest mail-order erotica business in the world. In this hour of To the Best of Our...Read more
Crime may not pay but writing crime fiction does. Just ask the Swedish writer, Henning Mankell. Or those who write "Tartan Noir"...Scottish detective fiction. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll explore Northern Europe's fictional crime wave. Also, Roger Ebert on film noir.Read more
A police officer's shooting of a young, unarmed Afrian American man here in Madison joins a long list of national tragedies. So we devote this hour to conversations about race and justice.Read more
Violence may be a national scourge, but an awful lot of people devour shoot-‘em-up movies and video games. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, the seduction of violence. Why, for instance, four and five-year-old children love fantasy games where they kill each other. Also, the...Read more
Behold the spectacle of epic proportions! The abundant feast laid out! Tribes decked in battle attire!
Yes, friends. It's Super Bowl weekend, and have we got a show for you...Read more
Samuel Adams couldn’t ride a horse to save his life, and had a tendency to drool. As if that’s not bad enough, John Adams was a roly-poly fellow who spent his free time fantasizing about becoming the next American King. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, a revisionist’s take on the...Read more
To Daniel Libeskind, buildings are much more than concrete boxes. They’re expressions of hope, joy, freedom, and memory. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, architect Daniel Libeskind talks about his master design for the World Trade Center site.Read more
Cross-dressing terrorist angels. LA Gangbangers covered in Virgin Mary tattoos to protect them from bullets. Prophets in g-strings and pasties. Next time on To the Best of Our Knowledge we’re going to look for god in some unlikely places - in the middle of a math equation, and in the lyrics...Read more
Failure is a four letter word in America. Most of us do everything we can to avoid it. But what if we've got the wrong idea about failure - and it's all a matter of learning the right way to do it? This hour, one psychologist's take on how to embrace the fall. And comedian...Read more