To The Best Of Our Knowledge

It's easy to take seeds for granted, to assume that there will always be more corn or wheat or rice to plant. But as monocropping and agribusiness continue to dominate modern farming, are we losing genetic diversity, cultural history, and the nutritional value of our food? We speak to farmers, botanists and indigenous people about how they are reclaiming our seeds.

Original Air Date: September 14, 2019

Guests:

Bob Quinn — Robin Wall Kimmerer — Seth Jovaag — Cary Fowler

Interviews In This Hour:

Where Did We Go Wrong With Wheat? — The Wisdom of the Corn Mother — The Seeds Of Tomorrow: Defending Indigenous Mexican Corn That Could Be Our Future — Saving Seeds For Future Generations — Ancient Grains, Native Corn, And The Doomsday Seed Vault: How Growing Food Might Survive Disaster

Colonization in Africa was much more than a land grab. It was a project to replace — and even erase — local cultures. To label them inferior. Music, arts, literature and of course language. In other words, it permeated everything. So how do you undo that? How do you unlearn what you’ve been forced to learn?

Original Air Date: March 20, 2021

Guests:

Adom Getachew — Simon Gikandi — Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Interviews In This Hour:

Reckon with the Past To Decolonize the Future — Reclaiming the Hidden History of Blackness — Never Write In The Language of the Colonizer

DNA tests are uncovering family histories. In some cases they're also revealing mixed bloodlines and the buried history of slavery. For African Americans, this can be emotionally-charged. What do you do when you find out one of your direct ancestors was a slave owner? And does it open the door to new conversations about racial justice and social healing?

Original Air Date: March 10, 2018

Guests:

Alex Gee — Erin Hoag — Annette Gordon-Reed — Anita Foeman

Interviews In This Hour:

How Do You Know Ruben Gee? — Searching for America's Racial History in a Graveyard — Uncovering America's Buried History: The Story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings — Changing Our Conversation About Race Using Genetic Testing

Further Reading:

"Black Like Me" podcast

Music crosses boundaries between traditional and modern, local and global, personal and political. Take jazz — a musical form born out of forced migration and enslavement. We typically think it originated in New Orleans and then spread around the world. But today, we examine an alternate history of jazz — one that starts in Africa, then crisscrosses the planet, following the movements of people and empires — from colonial powers to grassroots revolutionaries to contemporary artists throughout the diaspora.

This history of jazz is like the music itself: fluid and improvisatory.  

In this hour, produced in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) — a global consortium of 270 humanities centers and institutes — we hear how both African and African-American music have shaped the sound of the world today.

Original Air Date: July 04, 2020

Guests:

Meklit Hadero — Valmont Layne — Gwen Ansell — Ron Radano

Interviews In This Hour:

How Meklit Hadero Reimagined Ethiopian Jazz — So You Say You Want A Revolution — Reclaiming the Hidden History of South African Jazz — 'We Are All African When We Listen'

Further Reading:

CHCI Ideas from Africa Hub

Scientists and explorers have found a whole new world, ripe for discovery, under our feet. The earth's underground is teeming with life, from fungal networks to the deep microbiome miles below the planet's crust. It's an exciting place, and it's changing what we know about the planet and ourselves.

Original Air Date: November 02, 2019

Guests:

Robert Macfarlane — Jill Heinerth — Ben Holtzman — Werner Herzog — Christine Desdemaines-Hugon

Interviews In This Hour:

Why We Descend Into Darkness — A Cave Diver's Treks Through The Veins Of The Earth — How To Listen To An Earthquake — Why Werner Herzog Is Awe-Struck — Finding Our Ancestors in Ancient Cave Art

If you had to travel 500 miles across country, on foot, with no map, no GPS, without talking to anyone — to a destination you've never seen, could you do it? It sounds impossible, but millions of creatures spend their lives on the move, migrating from one part of the Earth to another with navigation skills we can only dream of. How do they do it — and what can we learn from them?

Original Air Date: July 25, 2020

Guests:

Moses Augustino Kumburu — David Wilcove — Stan Temple — David Barrie — Sonia Shah

Interviews In This Hour:

The Serengeti's Great Migration, Up Close — Why Do Animals Migrate? — Sandhill Cranes Make The Long Journey South — The Greatest Navigators on the Planet — The High Costs — And Potential Gains — Of Migration, Both Animal And Human

We take a look at the romantic tropes of modern love and how they’re changing. Do the old dreams of true love and happiness ever after fit our new lives and new identities?

Original Air Date: February 13, 2021

Guests:

Logan Ury — Angelo Bautista — Jane Ward — Angela Chen — Bara Jichova Tyson

Interviews In This Hour:

The New Coffee Date: COVID-19 Pushes The Dating World To Zoom — Are Straight People Okay? — Love Without Touch, Desire Without Sex — Monogamy is Overrated

Hope means believing there’s a future. But can hope co-exist with cataclysmic realities like climate change, or disruptive technological advances like artificial intelligence? What’s ahead for future generations?

Original Air Date: May 04, 2019

Guests:

Roy Scranton — Anne Lamott — Amy Webb — Victor LaValle — Robert Zubrin

Interviews In This Hour:

Can We Have Hope If The World Is 'Doomed'? — Hope Is Faith In Life Itself — 'Our Best Futures Never Come Fully Formed, Or Automatically' — Tales of Dragons That Fight Segregation, and AI That Fights Transphobia — How A Colony On Mars Would Change Everything On Earth

Further Reading:

Hope: A Three-Part Series

We’ve all been there, that place where we feel hope slipping away. Maybe we’ve even lost hope. This hour we talk with people who’ve turned that around and made hope real, whether it’s through political activism, faith, music, or reading a life-changing novel.

Original Air Date: April 27, 2019

Guests:

DeRay Mckesson — Lydia Hester — Serene Jones — Megan Stielstra — Common

Interviews In This Hour:

To Make Big Social Change, Start With The PB&J Sandwiches — Teens Don't Want Hope. They Want Action. — Hope, Where Faith Becomes Action — Megan Stielstra On 'The Chronology of Water' — Making Hope In Verse

Further Reading:

Hope: A Three-Part Series

Is hope something we’re innately born with, or something we can choose to have? We talk with people who tell us where they think hope lives in ourselves and our communities.

Original Air Date: April 20, 2019

Guests:

Andre Willis — Steven Pinker — Tali Sharot — Alice Walker — Chigozie Obioma — Claire Peaslee

Interviews In This Hour:

Defining A New Grammar Of Hope — The Science Of Looking On The Bright Side — A Naturalist's Hopeful Pilgrimage — Everything Is Actually Awesome — Why Nigerians Are So Much Happier Than Americans — Hope Rises. It Always Does.

Further Reading:

Hope - A Three-Part Series

We’re in the midst of the largest vaccine rollout of our lives. A turning point, we hope. But it’s complicated — medically, logistically, philosophically. Who will get it first? Will it work? And, as a new variant of the virus emerges, will we get it in time? We decided to take you behind the scenes, talking with people who volunteered for trials, and to those scientists and reporters who trace every part of our search for immunity.

Original Air Date: January 16, 2021

Guests:

Ilan Kedan — Christina Lombardi — Sarah Zhang — Eula Biss — Adam Kucharski

Interviews In This Hour:

Signing Up For The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial — Tracking The Where, Why And How Of COVID-19 Vaccines — The Ethics of Vaccines — The Contagion Detective

Not everyone has a nice, big yard to stretch out in while sheltering in place from COVID-19. But maybe you don't need one. People are using virtual spaces to live out the real experiences they miss — like coffee shops, road trips, even building your own house on a deserted island, or Walden Pond. In a world where we're mostly confined to our homes and Zoom screens, does the line between virtual and real-life space mean much anymore?

Original Air Date: May 16, 2020

Guests:

Mark Riechers — Tracy Fullerton — Simon Parkin — Jane McGonigal — Donald D. Hoffman — Suzanne O’Sullivan

Interviews In This Hour:

There's No Pandemic In Animal Crossing — I Went To The Woods To Level Up Deliberately — The Most Boring Video Game Ever Made — Want to be Happier? Turn Everyday Tasks Into a Game — How We Fool Ourselves With The Concept of 'Reality'

Further Reading:

NYAS: Reality Is Not As It Seems

In times of crisis, we need music. We look at how far people will go — even under quarantine, during a pandemic — to find ways to make music together.

Original Air Date: April 25, 2020

Guests:

Lisa Bielawa — Varttina — Bobby McFerrin — Moken — Vijay Iyer — Brandy Clark — Nicole Paris — Edward Cage

Interviews In This Hour:

Putting The Mood Of COVID-19 To Music — The Haunting Finnish Acapella of Värttinä — The 50 Voices of Bobby McFerrin — A Bold and Beautiful Voice from Cameroon — Vijay Iyer on Jazz, Improvisation and the Origins of Music — Country Singer Brandy Clark on a Big Day in a Small Town — Beatboxing With My Dad

We’ve all been changed by the experience of living through a pandemic. We figured out how to sanitize groceries, mute ourselves on Zoom and keep from killing our roommates. But we’re also tackling bigger, existential questions — how can we, individually and collectively, find meaning in the experience of this pandemic?

Original Air Date: May 23, 2020

Guests:

David Kessler — Tyrone Muhammad — Nikki Giovanni — John Kaag — Alice Kaplan

Interviews In This Hour:

Grief Is A Natural Response To The Pandemic. Here’s Why You Should Let Yourself Feel It. — 'You Smell Death': Being A Mortician In A Community Ravaged By COVID-19 — Nikki Giovanni Reads a Poem of Remembrance — Does Philosophy Still Matter In The Age Of Coronavirus? — Why Camus' 'The Stranger' Is Still a Dangerous Novel

Over the past decade, plant scientists have quietly transformed the way we think of trees, forests and plants. They discovered that trees communicate through vast underground networks, that plants learn and remember. If plants are intelligent beings, how should we relate to them? Do they have a place in our moral universe? Should they have rights?

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

Original Air Date: December 19, 2020

Guests:

Robin Wall Kimmerer — Matt Hall — Monica Gagliano — Brooke Hecht

Interviews In This Hour:

We've Forgotten How To Listen To Plants — We Share This World With Plants. What Do We Owe Them? — Guided by Plant Voices — The Botanical Medicine Cabinet

We all miss touching things — groceries, door knobs, hands, faces. And most of all, skin. The living tissue that simultaneously protects us from the world, and lets us feel it. In this episode, the politics, biology, and inner life of your skin.

Original Air Date: April 18, 2020

Guests:

Angelo Bautista — Tiffany Field — Alissa Waters — Nina Jablonski

Interviews In This Hour:

My Problem With Skincare — Even During Quarantine, You Need A 'Daily Dose Of Touch' — Reclaiming Scars As Works Of Art — The Science Of Skin Color

Before the time of commercial flights and road trips, we traveled to far off places without taking a single step. All you had to do was open a book. From Africa to England, to a kamikaze cockpit, and to realms of fantasy. Books aren’t just books. They’re passports to anywhere.

Original Air Date: March 14, 2020

Guests:

Philip Pullman — Ruth Ozeki — Robert Macfarlane — Petina Gappah

Interviews In This Hour:

Philip Pullman on 'The Pocket Atlas of the World' — 'His Dark Materials' Author Philip Pullman On The Consciousness Of All Things — A Diary Becomes A Time Capsule — Ruth Ozeki on 'Kamikaze Diaries' — Petina Gappah on 'Persuasion' — The Empire Writes Back: Author Discusses Explorer David Livingstone's Complicated Legacy — Robert Macfarlane on 'The Living Mountain'

We’re in the holiday season of the worst pandemic of our lives. Canceling our gatherings is the safe thing to do. But, how can we still — creatively and safely — connect with the people we love? Maybe there are some opportunities for us this year, too.

Original Air Date: November 28, 2020

Guests:

Priya Parker — Stanley Weintraub — Peter Reinhart — Helen Macdonald — Gregg Krech

Interviews In This Hour:

A Pandemic Holiday Season Offers Opportunities For Community, Too — Stanley Weintraub on the World War I Christmas Truce — Peter Reinhart on the Spiritual Importance of Bread — Helen Macdonald On 'The Dark Is Rising' — How to Cultivate Gratitude

Why do people turn to poetry during troubled times? We saw it after 9/11 and we're seeing it now as the coronavirus travels around the world. When the world seems broken, poetry is often the one kind of language that helps.

Original Air Date: April 04, 2020

Guests:

Kitty O'Meara — Jericho Brown — Edward Hirsch — Alice Walker — Ken Nordine — Li-Young Lee — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Interviews In This Hour:

A Viral Poem For A Virus Time — Can A Poem Be A Prayer? — Poetry In A Time Of Grief And Loss — Hope Rises. It Always Does. — Li-Young Lee's Love Poetry — Ken Nordine's 'Yellow' — Words Can Change Your Life

Rustling of leaves, sploshing of water, birds calling, bees buzzing. Wherever you live — city or country, East coast, West coast, or in between — we share common, contemplative experiences on our walks outside. In this hour, we assemble a sonic guide to finding solace in nature.

Original Air Date: May 09, 2020

Guests:

William Helmreich — David Rothenberg — Laura Dassow Walls — Robert Moor — Nate Staniforth — Andreas Weber

Interviews In This Hour:

The Great Urban Nature Explorer — Why The Walden Pond Experiment In Self-Reliance Is More Relevant Than Ever — The Wisdom of Trails — Lose Yourself In The Sky — Finding Love In The Ecosystem

What do you do when the headlines are freaking you out and the news is making you tense? A lot of people find sports takes their mind off things. It’s like this one worry-free, politics-free zone. Until it isn’t.

Original Air Date: November 07, 2020

Guests:

Kurt Streeter — David Shields — Melissa Joulwan — Michael Powell

Interviews In This Hour:

A Year Of Reckoning And Loss In The World Of Sports — The Power of Silence: How Marshawn Lynch Subverted the NFL's Rules — How One Woman Found Her Groove in Roller Derby — The Magic of 'Rez Ball'

Be still. Prepare the altar. Gather around in a circle. Light the fire. And join us for rituals that will put fear in your heart. Because what if experiencing your fears — the dread, the horror of it all — is good for you?

Original Air Date: October 26, 2019

Guests:

Amy Stewart — Kathryn Harkup — Gemma Files — Dan Chaon — Blanche Barton

Interviews In This Hour:

A Garden of Deadly Delights — How To Get Away With Murder According to Agatha Christie — Listener Ghost Story: 'Reset' — The Case for Embracing Horror — Haunting Your Own Life — Listener Ghost Story: 'You Are What You Eat' — The Not-So-Subtle Subversiveness Of Satan Worship — Listener Ghost Story: 'The Lake' — Listener Ghost Story: 'Presidential Phantasm'

Why don’t we all just take moment to acknowledge that we are collectively exhausted? The pandemic, the protests, the President’s Twitter feed — everything is exhausting. But maybe it doesn’t have to be?

Original Air Date: October 24, 2020

Guests:

Katrina Onstad — Emma Seppala — Richard Polt — Filip Bromberg — Lars Svendsen — Anne Helen Petersen

Interviews In This Hour:

Can We Not? How The Pandemic Has Made Burnout Worse Than Ever — Sunday Night Blues, Monday Morning (Short) Fuse — Setting Too High A Bar For Success Is Running Us Ragged — To Waste Time Is To Deepen Life — Why Swedes Are Trading Jobs For Meaning — Have You Considered Doing Nothing?

Americans are getting ready to vote. But this election is different from other years. What's really on the ballot?

Original Air Date: October 17, 2020

Guests:

Kim Wehle — Carol Anderson — Jeremi Suri — Eric Liu

Interviews In This Hour:

A Choice Between 'We The People' And 'Something Darker' — Just 48 Years Of Free and Fair Elections — Where Are We On The Roller Coaster Of History? — How To Make Elections Fun Again

New experiences actually rewire the brain. So after all we’ve been through this year, you have to wonder — are we different? We consider the "COVID brain" from the perspective of both neuroscience and the arts. Also, we go to Cavendish, Vermont to hear the remarkable story of Phineas Gage, the railroad worker whose traumatic brain injury changed the history of neuroscience.

Original Air Date: October 10, 2020

Guests:

Margo Caulfield — David Eagleman — llan Stavans

Interviews In This Hour:

How Phineas Gage's Freak Accident Changed Brain Science — 'COVID Brain' and the New Frontiers of Neuroplasticity — The Pandemic and the Poets

There's a certain a kind of visual encounter that can be life changing: A cross-species gaze. The experience of looking directly into the eyes of an animal in the wild, and seeing it look back. It happens more often than you’d think and it can be so profound, there’s a name for it: eye-to-eye epiphany. So what happens when someone with feathers or fur and claws looks back? How does it change people, and what can it teach us?

Our friends at the Center for Humans and Nature have some suggested follow-up reading, if you enjoy this episode:

"The Disruptive Eye" by Gavin Van Horn

"6 a.m. on LaSalle Street" by Katherine Cummings

"Salmon Speak ~ Why Not Earth?" by Bron Taylor

"The Eyes of an Owl" by Greg Ripley

"From Bestiary" by Elise Paschen

Original Air Date: February 08, 2020

Guests:

Gavin Van Horn — Jenny Kendler — Ivan Schwab — Jane Goodall — Alan Lightman

Interviews In This Hour:

In The Eye Of The Osprey: A Physicist's Wild Epiphany — 100 Bird Eyes Are Watching You — The Look That Changed Primatology — Watching the Fierce Green Fire Die: Animal Gazes That Shaped Conservation Movements — The 600 Million Year History Of The Eye — 'We Are The Feast' — A Feminist Philosopher's Life-Changing Encounter With A Crocodile — How Do You Practice Kinship? A Brief Meditation

Further Reading:

"The Disruptive Eye" by Gavin Van Horn—"6 a.m. on LaSalle Street" by Katherine Cummings—"Salmon Speak ~ Why Not Earth?" by Bron Taylor—"The Eyes of an Owl" by Greg Ripley—"From Bestiary" by Elise Paschen

Africans are moving into cities in unprecedented numbers. Lagos, Nigeria, is growing by 77 people an hour — it's on track to become a city of 100 million. In 30 years, the continent is projected to have 14 mega-cities of more than 10 million people. It's perhaps the largest urban migration in history.

These cities are not like Dubai, or Singapore, or Los Angeles. They’re uniquely African cities, and they’re forcing all of us to reconsider what makes a city modern. And how and why cities thrive.

To find out what's going on, we go to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to talk with entrepreneurs, writers, scholars and artists. In this hour, produced in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) — a global consortium of 270 humanities centers and institutes — we learn how the continent where the human species was born is building the cities of the future.

Original Air Date: December 14, 2019

Guests:

Dagmawi Woubshet — Julie Mehretu — Emily Callaci — James Ogude — Ato Qyayson — Teju Cole — Meskerem Assegued

Interviews In This Hour:

Rediscovering the Indigenous City of Addis Ababa — 'People As Infrastructure' — A Tour Of The Networked City — 'I Am Because We Are': The African Philosophy of Ubuntu — How Pan-African Dreams Turned Dystopic — Decoding Global Capitalism on One African Street — Life in the Diaspora: How Teju Cole Pivots Between Cultures — Can Artists Create the City of the Future?

Further Reading:

CHCI

Once upon a time, science and magic were two sides of the same coin. Today, we learn science in school and save magic for children’s books. What if it were different? What would it be like to see the world as an alchemist?

Original Air Date: September 19, 2020

Guests:

Sarah Durn — Pamela Smith — William Newman — Charles Monroe-Kane — Jason Pine

Interviews In This Hour:

Transmutation Of The Spirit — The Historical Lessons Embedded in Alchemical Recipes — Was Sir Isaac Newton 'The Last of the Magicians'? — The Buried Secrets of Czech Alchemy — Drug Store Alchemy in the Ozarks

Is there a book you can’t forget? A book that left a mark on you? On Bookmarks, our micropodcast, we share tiny stories from writers, about the books they love most. This week, we’ll preview Season One and celebrate books and reading with an eclectic cast of writers from around the country.

Original Air Date: November 16, 2019

Guests:

Chloe Benjamin — Anne Lamott — Rebecca Traister — Natalia Sylvester — Tommy Orange — Pamela Paul — Shannon Henry Kleiber — Jericho Brown — Susan Orlean

Interviews In This Hour:

Anne Lamott on 'Pippi Longstocking' — Powerful Book Encounters — Tommy Orange on 'A Confederacy Of Dunces' — Reading As Our First Window To The World — A Book Club On The Day Of The Book Choosing — Jericho Brown on 'The Witches Of Eastwick' — The Book Burning That Brought All Of Los Angeles Together

Further Reading:

"Bookmarks" Podcast from TTBOOK

If you wrote a list of all the things you own in your house, how long would it be? We surround ourselves with possessions, but at what point do they start to possess us?

Original Air Date: September 05, 2020

Guests:

Angelo Bautista — Eula Biss — Adam Minter — Giles Slade — Clare Dolan

Interviews In This Hour:

The Magnum Opus Of Pointless Stuff — 'A $400K Container For A Washing Machine': An Author Grapples With The Inherent Ickiness Of Homeownership — The Global Garage Sale — Why Stuff Doesn't Last Anymore — A Museum Of The Mundane