Roger Payne revolutionized the science of whale biology by discovering the songs of humpback whales. In this 1995 interview, Payne (who died in 2023) described the thrill of touching a whale, and why he fears for the future of whales.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
Time may be a fundamental quality of the universe, but physicists still can't explain what time is. That hasn't stopped theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser from devoting much of his life to studying the origins of time and the formation of the cosmos.More
Physicist Carlo Rovelli travels to the core of a black hole, where the arrow of time reverses and a white hole is born. More
David Kessler is a world-renowned grief expert. He argues that as a nation, Americans are dealing with a lot of unacknowledged post-pandemic grief.More
Drew Gilpin Faust, historian and author of “The Republic of Suffering,” draws compelling parallels between the grief experienced after the American Civil War and the mourning process following the COVID-19 pandemic.More
Lauren DePino started singing at funerals as a child. As a professional funeral singer, she thinks of her work as a form of alchemy — a way to transmute grief into something bigger.More
“Bad River” is Mary Mazzio’s documentary about a small tribe, the Bad River band of Lake Superior Chippewa, and their legal battle to get rid of an oil pipeline. She examines the conflicting ideas we have about how to live on the land and even whether it can be owned.More
Rae Johnson is a somatic movement therapist and the author of “Embodied Activism.” They say the process of making change is more sustainable when you listen to your body. More
Sami Schalk is the author of “Black Disability Politics,” a history of disability rights and Black activism. She says understanding Black disability politics is essential to building an accessible future.More
Artist Katie Paterson works with melting glaciers, fossilized insects and the dust from meteorites to help us expand our time horizons. Her art bridges cosmic and human timescales, revealing the beauty in vast temporal expanses.More
Philosopher and conceptual artist Jonathon Keats engineers monumental-scale clocks that run on “river time” or “arboreal time” to un-standardize our atomic time. He says we need to make time more pluralistic, to envision a kind of chrono-diversity.More
Acoustic ecologist and sound artist Alex Braidwood has recorded many dawn choruses, from first-light to full sunrise, in his Iowa backyard and all over the world. On his album, “Serotinous Repose,” he turns the dawn chorus into music.More
During his traditional Sac and Fox funeral in Oklahoma, Jim Thorpe's body was stolen and sold to a small Pennsylvania town. His body is still there as a trophy and tourist trap. Native American activist Suzan Shown Harjo tells the story.More
Jim Thorpe was stripped of the Olympic gold medals awarded to him in 1912, but activists finally got them back in 2022. Today, Thorpe's legacy is about more than medals or even correcting historic wrongs — young Native Americans are looking to him for inspiration.More
Drawn from conversations with hip-hop artist Tall Paul, journalist Patty Loew and biographer David Maraniss, we hear stories from the NFL, from baseball, and, of course, from what made Thorpe a legend —the 1912 Olympic Games.More
People in these disaster zones now face an agonizing choice: rebuild or relocate? Urban planner Brian Stone says we need radical new thinking for our cities to survive.More
Lightning hitting your house or a storm flooding your basement used to be an “act of God.” But can you call a flood or wildfire a “natural” disaster if climate change is the cause and humans failed to prevent the calamity? More
Writer Annalee Newitz has spent a lot of time walking around ancient lost cities and imagining future human civilizations on other planets. Newitz is a hard-headed, realistic optimist who believes the one technology that can save us is stories.More