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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

A big cat biologist goes on a blind date. It doesn't go well.  Writer Ben Hoffman reads from a work in progress.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Tom Shippey, author of “Tolkien: Author of the Century,” talks with Steve Paulson about the great fantasy writer’s life, the origins of hobbits, and Tolkien’s motivation for writing fantasy.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Celebrated jazz pianist Vijay Iyer has a Ph.D in music cognition and a penchant for asking big questions - like, what is music? And what does it do for us? Steve Paulson caught up with Vijay backstage before a recent concert, where they talked about improvisation and the parallels between jazz and basketball.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

There may be as many opinions about selfies as there are Twitter handles. Are they self-empowerment, or narcissism? Are they just personal branding? Or can they be art? Writer and critic Sarah Nicole Prickett came in to give us a primer.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Sjon is the Icelandic trickster, drawing on Icelandic sagas and surrealism to write his mythic stories.  He tells Steve Paulson why we need to re-enchant the world.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Novelist Russell Banks tells Judith Strasser that the great American story is that of the African diaspora and the struggle of many races and cultures to live harmoniously together.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

In a small studio in Brooklyn, one artist is reimagining selfies. Erin Riley finds online self-portraits and transforms them into larger-than-life tapestries. The woven women don’t have faces… but they do have stories.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Many of history's greatest scientists, from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein, have devoted significant study to the behavior of light, and, as a result, most physicists thought there was little left to say on the subject. But in April 2016, Paul Eastham, a physicist at Trinity College in Dublin, published a new paper proving that a fundamental assumption scientists had made about light was wrong. 

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