To The Best Of Our Knowledge
Wisconsin Public Radio
To The Best Of Our Knowledge is a nationally-syndicated, Peabody award-winning public radio show that dives headlong into the deeper end of ideas. We have conversations with novelists and poets, scientists and software engineers, journalists and historians, filmmakers and philosophers, artists and activists — people with big ideas and a passion to share them.
For more from the TTBOOK team, visit us at ttbook.org.
To The Best Of Our Knowledge is a nationally-syndicated, Peabody award-winning public radio show that dives headlong into the deeper end of ideas. We have conversations with novelists and poets, scientists and software engineers, journalists and historians, filmmakers and philosophers, artists and activists — people with big ideas and a passion to share them.
For more from the TTBOOK team, visit us at ttbook.org.
Location:
Madison, WI
Description:
To The Best Of Our Knowledge is a nationally-syndicated, Peabody award-winning public radio show that dives headlong into the deeper end of ideas. We have conversations with novelists and poets, scientists and software engineers, journalists and historians, filmmakers and philosophers, artists and activists — people with big ideas and a passion to share them. For more from the TTBOOK team, visit us at ttbook.org.
Twitter:
@TTBOOK
Language:
English
Contact:
6082625263
Website:
https://www.ttbook.org/
Email:
jim.fleming@wpr.org
Episodes
The Power of Pleasure and Joy
4/17/2021
What if the most unselfish thing you could do was to pursue pleasure? To look for delight? To feel joy? We make the case for the transformative power of joy, pleasure and delight.
Original Air Date: October 12, 2019
Guests:
Ross Gay — Kathryn Bond Stockton — Laurie Santos — Lynne Segal
Interviews In This Hour:
365 Days Of Delight: A Poet's Guide To Finding Joy — A Queer Theorist On Ecstatic Kissing — Laboratory of Joy: A Psychologist On The Science of Feeling Good — The Revolution Will...
Duration:00:51:35
Living With Loneliness
4/10/2021
After a pandemic year of social isolation, we knew loneliness would be a problem. But public health officials have been warning for years that in countries all over the world, rates of loneliness are skyrocketing. How did loneliness become a condition of modern life?
Original Air Date: April 10, 2021
Guests:
Jason Rohrer — Samantha Rose Hill — Claudia Rankine
Interviews In This Hour:
My Friend Samantha (The A.I.) — How Loneliness Can Lead to Totalitarianism — Being Black and Alone in...
Duration:00:53:52
Music On Your Mind
4/3/2021
Millions of people are caring for someone with severe memory loss, trying to find ways to connect. One of the best ways anyone has found is music. We examine the unexpected power of song to supercharge the human mind.
Original Air Date: August 17, 2019
Guests:
Shannon Henry Kleiber — Oliver Sacks — Francine Toder — Anne Basting
Interviews In This Hour:
The Power Of Music And Memory: 'Music Was Waking Up Something Within Each Of Them' — The Deep Connections Our Brains Make To Music —...
Duration:00:53:45
Who Owns Seeds?
3/27/2021
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...
Duration:00:53:46
Decolonizing the Mind
3/20/2021
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...
Duration:00:53:49
Discovering America's Black DNA
3/13/2021
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...
Duration:00:54:42
Jazz Migrations
3/6/2021
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...
Duration:00:51:37
Going Underground
2/27/2021
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...
Duration:00:51:48
Mysteries of Migration
2/20/2021
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...
Duration:00:51:53
Rewriting the Romance Script
2/13/2021
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
Duration:00:51:37
Hope: Are We Really Doomed?
2/6/2021
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' —...
Duration:00:51:42
Hope: How Do You Make It?
1/30/2021
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...
Duration:00:51:44
Hope: Where Does It Come From?
1/23/2021
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...
Duration:00:51:44
The Vaccine Trackers
1/16/2021
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 —...
Duration:00:51:41
Our Virtual Reality
1/9/2021
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 —...
Duration:00:51:46
Deep Tracks: Live In Studio
1/2/2021
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...
Duration:00:51:52
Finding Meaning in Desperate Times
12/26/2020
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...
Duration:00:51:47
Plants As Persons
12/19/2020
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...
Duration:00:52:30
Living In Skin
12/12/2020
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...
Duration:00:51:54
Traveling By Book
12/5/2020
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...
Duration:00:52:27