Comfort food’s selling like hotcakes. People haven’t forgotten the importance of good nutrition, but these days we crave things that’ll make us feel better. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, seeking solace in a scary world. Diane Ackerman talks about her garden, and...Read more
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Episode Archives
Most of us probably have heard of someone else who shares our name, and there are probably others, but unlike British comedian Dave Gorman, we haven’t traveled 24 thousand miles and spent thousands of dollars to meet all of them. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, magnificent...Read more
Original Air Date:
November 25, 2001
You think Greta Garbo was good at ducking the paparazzi? She could have learned a thing or two from the giant squid. No one has ever seen one alive. Zoologist Clyde Roper should know, he’s spent most of his life in pursuit of this low profile ocean monster. In this hour...Read more
Original Air Date:
November 25, 2001
Maybe home is where you live, raise your family and mow the grass. Or it's where you grew up. Or where the whole clan gathers for major holidays. Wherever home is, it's never mattered more. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, stories of home, from the Texas hill country to the ‘hood....Read more
Original Air Date:
November 04, 2001
We’ve got a million expressions for death: kicking the bucket, checking out, buying the farm - but what do we do when words aren’t enough? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, artisans are finding new passages through grief, from graffiti memorials to handcrafted coffins. ...Read more
Original Air Date:
October 28, 2001
Sometimes you can’t separate beauty from brutality in the African bush. Safari guide Mark Ross is still figuring it out. In 1999, Ross and a group of tourists were kidnaped by Rwandan rebels. What happened that day changed the rest of his life. Next time on To the Best of Our...Read more
Original Air Date:
September 16, 2001
Organic food is now a booming billion dollar industry. And today’s top chefs are its biggest cheerleaders. They say locally-grown, organic food will help save the planet. But not everyone agrees. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, an argument for why celebrity...Read more
Original Air Date:
September 02, 2001
Have you ever had one of those moments when you know you really should think about a different line of work? For Daniel Pink, it was a scorching hot June day in Washington, D.C. when he almost threw up on Al Gore. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Daniel Pink’s career as...Read more
Original Air Date:
September 02, 2001
A couple of years ago writer Michael Pollan was curious about the world of illegal, underground marijuana gardens. What he found surprised him. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, Mary Jane goes high tech. A look at drug cultures past and present, a visit to a rave,...Read more
Original Air Date:
August 26, 2001
Suppose you grew up with one of the world’s great scientists. How would that shape your view of the world? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, an intimate look at the great conservationist Aldo Leopold: we’ll talk with three of his children. Also, comic novelist David...Read more
Original Air Date:
August 19, 2001
With hundreds of millions of people moving into cities, we're wondering what shapes urban cultures. In this hour, Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk talks about how Istanbul shaped his writing. One historian argues that early liberal philosophies from Amsterdam shaped the United States. And we check in...Read more
Eighty per cent of Americans say they believe in heaven. But when they're asked to describe it, many are at a loss for words. Do they think that there's another universe in the sky or do they believe that heaven is something more abstract and metaphorical? We'll explore our enduring fascination...Read more
Imagine a world where flying robots watch over our borders, assist with search and rescue missions, and survey roads and pipelines. Sounds like science fiction, but in many parts of the country it's a reality. This week, we explore the rise of drones, both as a military tool and a disruptive...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
James Tiptree Jr. wrote some of the most critically-acclaimed science fiction stories in the 1960's and 1970's....classics like "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" and "The Women Men Don't See." But James Tiptree was actually the pseudonym of a 61-year-old woman, Alice B. Sheldon. In this hour of...Read more
Remember those great cars from the Fifties? The Redscare Phantom Witchhunter and the Bongo Beatnik Ferlinghetti TurboHipster? If you don’t recall them rolling off Detroit’s assembly lines, there’s a perfectly good reason. They never existed, except in the imagination of writer and illustrator...Read more
Everybody gets excited about whatever's new, but what about what's really, really old? In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we commemorate geologic time. We'll meet the scientists who found the oldest object on Earth - a three point four billion year old zircon! And the Jazz...Read more
As artists and scientists explore the edges of our senses, what we touch, taste, see, smell, and hear is changing.
In this hour we hear from a psychiatrist who’s using touch to help people recover from trauma, investigate a mysterious sensory experience that gives some people euphoric...Read more
Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh made his name when he broke the story of the My Lai Massacre. Looking back you have to wonder: why did Lt. William Calley tell Hersh he’d killed hundreds of Vietnamese civilians? On this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge Hersh says “because I asked him...Read more
Ok, take a breath. Close your eyes. Recall the home of your childhood. Can you smell the cookies in the kitchen? Can you open a drawer in your bedroom? Do you see the sunlight through a window? Every building has a story. . . And not only a story, every building has a sound.Read more
Is there such a thing as true, original creativity? Or "Are we just seeing further by standing on the shoulders of giants?", to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we'll explore the question of where good ideas come from. Steven Johnson will tell us about...Read more
The sky is black. The wind’s picking up. The hurricane is coming. Nothing you can do about it. But wait! Scientists from Dyn-o-Storm fly into the hurricane. They release a chemical that stops the hurricane dead in its tracks. Next time on To the Best of Our Knowledge, should we? Just...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