Steve Paulson

Steve Paulson was born in Rome, Italy, where his father worked with the United Nations. His family eventually settled in Milwaukee, where Steve spent endless hours hanging out on tennis courts. In high school, he won Milwaukee’s City Championship, but dreams of a tennis career quickly faded.

Steve went on to study European literature at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, then freelanced for several Milwaukee newspapers. After earning a master’s degree in journalism at the University of Wisconsin, he stumbled into public radio. He worked as a reporter and talk show producer and host at Wisconsin Public Radio and then helped create To the Best of Our Knowledge in 1990. Over the years, he has also done cultural reporting for NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered and Weekend Edition.

One of the pleasures of working on To the Best of Our Knowledge is the chance to indulge certain intellectual passions - even ones that don’t seem terribly high-minded. “In the early 90s I went through my early Elvis phase. And I talked to lots of young scholars who were deconstructing pop culture,” Steve says. He then switched gears and got hooked on field biologists like Jane Goodall, George Schaller and Roger Payne.

In 2006 Steve’s interests took another turn when he became a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science & Religion. His in-depth study of the relationship between science and religion led to TTBOOK’s 5-hour series “Electrons to Enlightenment.” In addition to his radio work, Steve writes for Salon.com, which has run many of his interviews with leading figures in the science and religion debate, including E.O. Wilson, Francis Collins, Richard Dawkins, Karen Armstrong, Sam Harris, Elaine Pagels, Steven Pinker, Paul Davies and Stuart Kauffman. He’s now working on a book, which will be an edited collection of interviews about the relationship between religion and science.

In 2008 Steve traveled to Turkey with a dozen journalists as part of the International Reporting Project, where they talked with religious leaders, filmmakers, journalists, Kurdish activists, and politicians, including Prime Minister Erdogan In 2009 he joined another group of journalists to attend seminars on evolution and the brain in Cambridge, England.

“To the Best of Our Knowledge is a great radio show for people who are intellectually curious,” Steve says. “I feel very lucky to work on this program.”

paulson@wpr.org