Audio

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Paul Martin says that people don’t get enough sleep these days and that our culture is wrong to diminish the importance and the pleasure of sleep.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Robert Glasper's new album Black Radio is a reference to the black box of recordings that survives a plane crash.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Richard Poplak tells Anne Strainchamps about the ill-fated attempt to adapt The Simpsons for the Arab world.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Harriet Tubman will soon be gracing our twenty dollar bill. Most of us know only one image of her. It's an iconic image taken later in her life in which her hair's covered in a dark cloth and she has a stern expression. But there are other images of Harriet Tubman as well, including a wood cut of her carrying a musket.

Law professor Nicholas Johnson says the image of Harriet Tubman carrying a rifle doesn’t fit with how most Americans view abolitionists and civil rights leaders. After all, weren’t they supposed to be peaceful? But as Johnson tells Steve Paulson, there's a rich tradition of Black Americans owning guns for self-defense.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Mark Spragg grew up at Holm Lodge, the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming. He talks about growing up on horseback in the American mountain West

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Michael Gurian is an educator and therapist and author of “The Wonder of Girls.”  He gives Jim Fleming some advice about helping girls master math.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

K.C. Cole is working on a book about her friend Frank Oppenheimer. Frank was barred from practicing physics during the McCarthy era, and was deeply troubled by the devastation of the bomb.

Pages

Subscribe to Audio