A Year Of Reckoning And Loss In The World Of Sports
Saturday, November 7, 2020, 7:45am
There's never been a year in sports quite like 2020. Sportswriter Kurt Streeter spoke to "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" executive producer Steve Paulson about how a pandemic and a presidential election have turned the entire world of sports upside-down.
Can We Not? How The Pandemic Has Made Burnout Worse Than Ever
Monday, October 26, 2020, 5:35am
At this moment in the pandemic, many of us are exhausted. Bone-tired, burned out, even if we won’t admit it. Work, home, school,and even the hours and days and months are blurred together. What should we do about it?
A Choice Between 'We The People' And 'Something Darker'
Sunday, October 18, 2020, 5:45am
Constitutional scholar Kim Wehle has never seen an election like this one. She told "To the Best of Our Knowledge" producer Shannon Henry Kleiber why she believes democracy itself is at stake.
How Phineas Gage's Freak Accident Changed Brain Science
Saturday, October 17, 2020, 10:15am
In 1848, Phineas Gage suffered a gruesome accident. BIasting through rock to build a new railroad in Vermont, an explosion sent a 3-foot, 13-pound iron rod straight through his skull. Remarkably, Gage lived, but brain science changed forever.
Where Are We On The Roller Coaster Of History?
Saturday, October 17, 2020, 7:55am
Historian Jeremi Suri places our present moment into a larger context — and uses the ups and downs of history to theorize what might lie ahead of us.
The Pandemic And The Poets
Saturday, October 10, 2020, 4:20pm
Mexican-American writer Ilan Stavans found "a powerful antidote" to the fear, isolation and confusion of the times in the poetry written by his peers during the pandemic. So he gathered the work of these writers and poets and artists together in an anthology, "And We Came Outside and Saw the Stars Again."
Isaac Newton's Secret Alchemy
Saturday, September 19, 2020, 9:20am
Isaac Newton wrote more than a million words on alchemy over his lifetime, conducting decades' worth of alchemical experiments. But he did it all in secret. For centuries after his death in 1727, few people knew the extent of Newton’s alchemical work.
A Museum Of The Mundane
Thursday, September 3, 2020, 1:40pm
"Museum of Everyday Life" founder and curator Clare Dolan calls it "an ongoing, revolutionary experiment" — a celebration of "the mysterious delight embedded in the banal but beloved objects we touch everyday.
We Call Them Fish. Evolution Says They're Something Else.
Saturday, August 8, 2020, 10:00am
Lulu Miller's book “Why Fish Don’t Exist” — which examines ichthyologist David Starr Jordan — is a meditation on the shadow side of scientific classification, and the dangers of trying too hard to impose order on chaos.
Tracking Our Inner GPS
Tuesday, July 21, 2020, 12:50pm
David Barrie is an award-winning author and a fellow of the Royal Institute of Navigation. His latest book, "Supernavigators," explores the remarkable ways animals and insects get around.
The Lost Years Of South African Jazz
Sunday, July 12, 2020, 4:00pm
The political repression and censorship of apartheid forced a generation of Black jazz musicians out of South Africa and into clubs in Europe and the U.S. Historian Gwen Ansell has been documenting that lost South African jazz scene since she first encountered it in the late 1960s.
Being A Mortician In A Community Ravaged By Coronavirus Pandemic
Friday, May 29, 2020, 6:00am
Tyrone Muhammad, also known as "Muhammad the Mortician," is the funeral director at Peace and Glory Home for Funerals in Newark, New Jersey. And he spent decades trying to stop the epidemic of gun violence in his community. But he told Charles Monroe-Kane of "To the Best of Our Knowledge" that nothing prepared him for the coronavirus pandemic.
To the Best of Our Knowledge
Saturday, May 23, 2020, 3:00pm
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?
