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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

National Book Award winner Andrea Barrett writes some of the most beautiful fiction we know about scientists.  The stories in her new collection, "Archangel" explore the history of knowledge through five linked characters.  After reading it, we're awfully glad she gave up biology to write fiction.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Neuroscientist David Eagleman is the author of "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives." He tells...

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

According to historian Thomas Laqueur, neither sanitation nor the soul fully explain the rang of rituals we've developed for caring for dead bodies. For him, there is a deeper anthropological truth at work: caring for the dead marks the human transition from nature into culture.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Rapper Baba Brinkman tells Anne Strainchamps that Geoffrey Chaucer’s work has a lot in common with the language of hip hop music.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

One of the enduring ideas – and an everyday saying – is that it’s possible to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” Of course, it’s physically impossible, but producer Sara Nics thought there had to be a way to do it with some engineering know-how and well-built boots.

 

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

I dunno, but it seems kind of extreme, not to mention risky, to bio-engineer a mass mosquito die-off.  So Steve Paulson tracked down the world’s greatest living entomologist to see what he has to say.  E. O Wilson is sometimes called “the ant man” – that’s the insect he studied most – but he’s best known as the evolutionary biologist and a champion of biodiversity.  He’s 86 years old now, and has just finished what is probably his last book – called “Half Earth”.  It’s a passionate plea to save humanity by dedicating half the planet to nature.  You’d assume that Wilson would be happy to let mosquitos live in that half… but that’s not what he told Steve.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Caitlin Matthews is a Celtic scholar and storyteller. She talks with Anne Strainchamps about the various myths of a lost paradise and how we can find it within ourselves.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Journalist Christopher Noxon explains what happened when he formed a personal posse of life coaches in Los Angeles.

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