How far would you go for something to eat? Paris? Mom’s house? The drive-through at Mickey D’s? I bet you wouldn’t swim thousands of miles, from Mexico to the Arctic, just to scarf up mud from the bottom of the ocean. Whales do, and they’ve been doing it every year for eons. In this hour...Read more
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Episode Archives
Chefs and writers explore the language of food on the plate and on the page. We meet novelists who cook, chefs who write, and a poet of pies. It's an hour of deliciousness in words and food.Read more
Does anyone still hitchhike? Cult film director John Waters does. At the age of 66, he hitchhiked 2,800 miles, from Baltimore to San Francisco. He tells us about the people who picked him up, along with some who didn't. And did the America Interstate System pave the way...Read more
Have you ever thought about money? Now, of course you have. Talking about money permeates our existence. But what if there wasn’t any money? What would you do?
It turns out that television may not be quite the "boob tube" and "the idiot box" that we thought it was. It seems that watching TV can actually make you smarter... by posing new cognitive challenges for your brain to solve. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we'll explore the...Read more
David Graeber was an iconoclastic anthropologist and influential radical thinker, one who popularized the rallying cry "We are the 99%." He died on Sept. 2 in Venice, Italy at age 59. Read more
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies." -- Alexis de TocquevilleRead more
Who are you?
A man? A woman?
Are you a success? A failure?
A parent? An athlete? A wallflower?
A Christian? A Buddhist? A baker?
If we are only a collection of stories about ourselves... what's the truth of who "we" are?
Looking for UNCUT...Read more
Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus. At least that’s the view of foreign policy analyst Robert Kagan. He says Europeans no longer believe in military power, quite unlike America’s leaders. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, the growing split between Europe and...Read more
Imagine Superman, demented with age, on a final mission to save the world. Or Conan the Barbarian, civilized and living in L.A. boarding the bus with a good book. It’s all there in the poetry of Charles Harper Webb. Words fly this hour on To the Best of Our Knowledge as we take in performance...Read more
Ronald Reagan had it. Jonathan Swift, Iris Murdoch, and, most likely, Ralph Waldo Emerson had it too. Alzheimer’s disease is on the rise, and scientists predict that up to one hundred million people will develop it in the next fifty years. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, the...Read more
Two people, a house, a pitchfork, and a barn. It's hard to find a better-known American painting than Grant Wood's masterpiece "American Gothic." But just who are those grim people, and why do they have such a hold on the American psyche? Here's the history of an American classic. Also, a...Read more
Future Perfect: Dreamers, Schemers & Visionaries
Part Four
The happiness industry is booming. And with good reason - everyone wants to be happy. Today, science can light the way. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge,...Read more
It's the liberal's apocalypse. Consider empty big-box stories, deserted highways, worthless pieces of paper we used to call money. The economy collapses. There's widespread violence and social unrest. The only people with a fighting chance ride out the storm in life-boat communities with access...Read more
Ben Franklin, Henry Ford, Abigail Adams, Elvis Presley. Know what they have in common? They're all on Daniel Wolff's list of great Americans. Wolff explains the unique ways those people learned what they had to know. We'll also take a hard look at IQ and its relationship to race and class, and...Read more
Kayfabe is an old carny term for fakery. Now it’s the code of honor for professional wrestling. Kayfabe means you never, EVER admit to ANYONE under ANY circumstances that pro wrestling’s fake. In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge - the spectacle of professional wrestling. We’ll talk real...Read more
We explore the frontiers of brain science, from the neurobiology of emotions to recent discoveries about autism. Renowned neuroscientists Richard Davidson and V.S. Ramachandran reveal new insights into the brain, and we'll hear the story of one marriage saved by a diagnosis of Asperger Syndrome...Read more
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but you still need a word to describe that glorious smell. We'll try out new words from the online world with a New York Times language blogger - words like YakkaWow and suicide cuisine. Also, the rise of a new world language called Globish....Read more
America is famously a nation of immigrants, a melting pot of cultures. And yet, few subjects will be debated as passionately this year as immigration reform. What are we really talking about, when we argue about immigration? And, what's it like to be 'fresh off the boat" in a country that...Read more
Can science conquer death? It may seem like an absurd question, but some people think it's possible. In this hour of To The Best Of Our Knowledge, we'll meet Aubrey de Grey, a maverick English scientist who's identified seven major kinds of molecular and cellular damage. He thinks we can prevent...Read more
It seems everyone has something to say about motherhood. A lot of people have advice. Others just have... issues. In this hour of To The Best of Our Knowledge -- the tricky topic of motherhood. Linda Gray Sexton remembers her mother, the troubled poet Anne...Read more
Global pandemics, alien invasions, the Second Coming....why do we love imagining the end of the world? We examine apocalyptic thinking – from vampire movies to the Book of Revelation.Read more
Malcolm Gladwell knows how to succeed in show business without really trying -- write a story for The New Yorker about a psychiatrist who studies serial killers. Then a playwright will take some of the words from your article and use them in a Broadway play. Next time on To the Best of Our...Read more
Start telling love stories and chances are, you’ll find yourself telling tales of transgression. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Joyce Carol Oates talks about the harm done by family secrets. P.D. James muses on why women are so good at crime fiction. A...Read more