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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Simon Winchester talks with Jim Fleming about the short-sightedness of placing cities where the planet doesn't think they should be.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done.  But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

In the late 1970s, the men's liberation movement split into two camps. A pro-feminist faction, and the anti-feminist Men’s Rights Movement, which sees men as an oppressed group. Critics have accused them of creating a breeding ground for misogyny, internet trolling and violence against women. The father of the Men’s Rights Movement is Warren Farrell, author of the core text of the movement, “The Myth of Male Power.”

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Stephen Prothero tells Jim Fleming that Jesus has become an American icon like Mickey Mouse and that the commercial proliferation of Jesus kitsch indirectly spreads a religious message.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Journalist Thomas Ricks talks with Jim Fleming about how close the U.S. came to losing the war in Iraq on November 19, 2004 in a town called Haditha, 150 miles north of Baghdad.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Tariq Ali is a historian, activist and writer. He talks with Steve Paulson about the history of the Ottoman empire, and the Islamic clergy’s rejection of modernism.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Producer Cynthia Woodland invited Anthony Cooper and his sons (Akheem and Anthony Junior) into our studio, to talk about what it’s like, raising black teenagers in America. 

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