Episode Archives

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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

For decades, men have written about their first sexual experiences, but there’s almost no literature like that for women.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, memoirist Mary Karr reflects on her first kiss and other rites of passage for girls.  Also, Jonathan Kozol describes...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

James Hood had a dream.  He wanted to go to college and get an education.  But there was a problem.  Hood was a black man in segregated Alabama in 1963.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, a variety of views and opinions from Black Americans on their expectations of freedom.  We’ll...Read more

dark man in mask

“Everyone is a moon, and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”
-- Mark TwainRead more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Posters at Starbucks ask customers to focus on the world water crisis. Church congregations ask the faithful to go on a "carbon diet." Slate magazine asks readers to take a "green challenge." We've got green cars, green clothing, green politics and even green weddings. In this hour of To the...Read more

a loner

If there's one sweeping societal change that we've failed to put our finger on, it may be this: more people than ever before in America are living alone.  And loving it.  And, far from being dysfunctional neurotics - people who live alone are happy, socially involved and solvent. In...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

It's the sesquicentennial of the Civil War -- it's been 150 years since that epic war began.   Americans will commemorate and remember it from different points of view. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Remembering the Civil War.   We'll talk about soldiers' experiences on the...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

If grocery shopping isn’t your thing, here’s a new way to put food on the table: try sticking your arm under a rock until a big ol’ catfish clamps onto to you.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, noodling for catfish and other southern pastimes.  Also, Texas singer Steve Earle’s...Read more

book pile

We're keepin it surreal this hour with a hallucinatory vortex chock full of innovative fiction.  Like Salvador Dali said -- "Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."   Join us as we expand your vision and melt your mind....Read more

language

If you think the influence of Shakespeare is confined to the page and the stage, think again. Take starlings, the aggressive European birds who’ve pushed a lot of Native American birds out of their nests. They were introduced by a Shakespeare fanatic, who loosed dozens of them in Central Park....Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, a visit with former Israeli commando Uri Avnery, who went on to become an outspoken critic of Israeli policy. He's seen his office bombed. He's been beaten and once barely survived an assassination attempt. Today Avnery is calling for a separate...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

We explore music and memory in this hour -- Kurt Cobain's lasting impact 20 years after his death; insidious and infectious earworms; and the retro worldly music of Pink Martini.Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Who's calling your shots? Who's in charge of your thinking, your perceptions? Maybe it's simple. Your mind is the boss, then your brain runs your body. Everything's fine. Until it's not and you find yourself confronting depression or autism or a head injury that leaves you with brain damage....Read more

voter sticker from Arizona

With the elections approaching, candidates and campaigns are working hard to get out the vote. But what would it take to get people politically involved all year round? This hour we explore a few ways, whether it's by using games to make the political process more fun, or mobilizing activists...Read more

a politically divided map

 Political animosity between the right and the left is off the charts.  Social scientists say we're living in one of the most polarized periods in history and that conservatives and liberals don't just disagree anymore. They hate everything about each other.  It's time to de-...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Noelle Howey got the shock of her life when she was 14.  She found out her dad liked to wear women’s clothes.  In fact, he really wanted to be a woman.  So he re-lived his teenage years ... as a girl, just as Noelle herself hit adolescence.  In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge stories...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Born 200 years ago, Charles Darwin was a revolutionary figure, and yet polls show that more than half of all Americans still don't accept his theory of evolution. So, is Darwinian evolution compatible with faith in God? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, what Darwin himself thought...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Remember what it was like to be a kid, playing outside with friends for hours at a time? Sure, it may just seem like fun and games, but it may also have been invaluable training for life as an adult.Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Remember the good old days? No? Well that's either because you haven't lived them yet, or you need to check the note you left on the bedside table. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, we're looking at age and memory with a Nobel Prize winner searching through the mechanics of the brain...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

In the recent election, the Tea Party emerged as a major force in American politics.  It's a striking story, when a few years before, the "New York Times" was speculating about the demise of the Republican party.  So, why the game change, after Barack Obama won the White House on a surge of...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

If you want to know the truth about J.D. Salinger, good luck.  To this day we know more about his fictional character Holden Caulfield than we do about the man who created him.  In this hour of the Peabody-Award winning program To the Best of Our Knowledge, literary life after Salinger’s...Read more

love neon sign

Red roses, chilled champagne, a candlelight dinner for two. Who cares?!?

This is the 21st century. We’ve got 30 million potential dates online. We’ve got every imaginable type of pornography at our fingertips. Odds are each of us could hook up with someone new tonight.

...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness.  Think of your three best friends.  If they're okay, then it's you."...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Picking up a bottle of wine for dinner used to be simple. It pretty much depended on how much you wanted to spend, since everything came from France. Not anymore! We'll look at what happened to the wine world in 1976, when wine from the Napa Valley won a blind tasting and turned the industry...Read more

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Batman, Superman, the Green Lantern we all had our superheroes as kids. Maybe we still do today? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, SUPERHEROES. We'll celebrate Wonder Woman's 70th birthday with a look at her controversial new costume. We'll also explore the actual physics of...Read more

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