To The Best Of Our Knowledge

By Wisconsin Public Radio

Society & Culture Philosophy

What's To The Best Of Our Knowledge about?

”To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a Peabody award-winning national public radio show that explores big ideas and beautiful questions. Deep interviews with philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, historians, and others help listeners find new sources of meaning, purpose, and wonder in daily life. Whether it’s about bees, poetry, skin, or psychedelics, every episode is an intimate, sound-rich journey into open-minded, open-hearted conversations. Warm and engaging, TTBOOK helps listeners feel less alone and more connected – to our common humanity and to the world we share.

For more from the TTBOOK team, visit us at ttbook.org.

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Shapeshifting

11.25.2023

There are old folktales and legends of people who can become animals. Animals who can become people. And there’s a lesson for our own time in those shapeshifting stories — a recognition that the membrane between what's human and more-than-human ...

To The Best Of Our Knowledge episodes:

11.25.2023 Shapeshifting There are old folktales and legends of people who can become animals. Animals who can become people. And there’s a lesson for our own time in those shapeshifting stories — a recognition that the membrane between what's human and more-than-human ...
11.18.2023 Deep Time: The Cosmos and Us Our lives are so rushed, so busy. Always on the clock. Counting the hours, minutes, seconds. Have you ever stopped to wonder: what are you counting? What is this thing, that’s all around us, invisible, inescapable, always running out? What ...
11.11.2023 Whose Land Is It? Ever want to quit your job, leave the rat race behind, and head back to the land? Buy an old farmhouse or build a solar-powered home and live self-sufficiently on a few acres of your very own? Generations before you ...
11.04.2023 Against Capitalism Radical politics and radical movements are on the rise everywhere. Against racial violence, and climate change; against gender inequality, corporate greed, low wages, oil pipelines, opioids. Maybe at heart they all have a common cause. Maybe they're all — in ...
10.28.2023 Building Twisted Worlds We've always told ghost stories, huddling around campfires, scaring ourselves silly. Today there’s a new venue for spooky stories – YouTube, where creators are turning cobwebby VHS video tapes and other relics of the early internet into a new genre ...
10.21.2023 Luminous: Can Psychedelics Be Decolonized? It’s easy to get caught up in the hype about how psychedelics might revolutionize the treatment of mental illness. But there are also lots of ethical concerns. And probably none are so troubling as the charges of exploitation and cultural ...
10.14.2023 The Spirit of Jim Thorpe Jim Thorpe was one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known — a legend in the NFL, MLB, NCAA, and in the Olympics. Today he is being celebrated by a new generation of Native Americans. Rapper Tall Paul’s ...
10.07.2023 Astonishing African Futures Wakanda is a very American version of an idealized African future. So how do African science fiction writers tell stories about their own imagined future? In this hour, produced in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), ...
09.30.2023 Being Body Conscious When you look at your body in the mirror, do you love what you see? Do you pick out the things you don’t like? Maybe you’ve heard of body positivity. But what if we just felt neutral about our bodies? ...
09.23.2023 Reframing the Portrait Before family photos, or school pictures or Instagram, there were hand-drawn and painted portraits. Throughout the ages, portrait artists have captured expressions and personalities on canvas or paper, and those who view the picture interpret this “likeness” in their own ...
09.16.2023 Rethinking David Foster Wallace Fifteen years ago, David Foster Wallace died by his own hand. He was a celebrated writer, but he now faces renewed criticism over his treatment of women, in his life and his books. After years of adulation, Wallace has become ...
09.09.2023 Going for Broke: Can Work Be Love? How we live is indelibly intertwined with the care and empathy we give to each other. What if we put care into helping Americans find homes and build dwellings, into keeping their bodies and minds sound, and finding meaningful and ...
09.02.2023 Going for Broke: Making Up Our Minds How we live is indelibly intertwined with the care and empathy we give to each other. What if we put care into helping Americans find homes and build dwellings, into keeping their bodies and minds sound, and finding meaningful and ...
08.26.2023 Going for Broke: Change of Address How we live is indelibly intertwined with the care and empathy we give to each other. What if we put care into helping Americans find homes and build dwellings, into keeping their bodies and minds sound, and finding meaningful and ...
08.19.2023 Deep Time: How Earth Keeps Time Are you ready to think in centuries instead of seconds? Eons instead of hours? It’s time to make thousand-year plans and appreciate how Earth keeps time. For more from this series, visit ttbook.org/deeptime. Original Air Date: August 19, 2023 Interviews ...
08.12.2023 Forged By Hand In the 21st century, there are a lot of old crafts we think we don’t have much use for anymore. Blacksmithing. Wood turning. Spinning and basket-making. But here's the funny thing — as our world gets more and more virtual, ...
08.05.2023 Let's Celebrate Crying We all feel better after a good cry. In fact, humans are the only animals who cry emotional tears. But what about people who don't cry? And have you ever wondered why a sad song or movie makes you cry? ...
07.29.2023 Taking Pop Seriously Pop music is a gazillion-dollar industry that churns out hits and creates celebrities. It seems like the definition of ephemeral – today’s chart topper is gone tomorrow. But pop music is a powerful vehicle for bringing people together, and fans ...
07.22.2023 In Search of 'Real' Food What makes food "authentic"? Do we need to feel close to where it's made? Know the complete history of where it comes from? Be able to diagram the chemistry of how it dances along our taste buds? How can we ...
07.15.2023 Luminous: Your Brain on Shrooms Can neuroscience explain what happens to the brain on psychedelics? And even if we map the brain while it’s tripping, does that tell us why these experiences can be so transformative? We’ll talk with some of the pioneers in psychedelic ...
07.08.2023 You Had To Be There When was the last time you got up off your couch and actually went out to see a movie? Or a play or a concert? It’s fun to go see things in person, but at the end of a long ...
07.01.2023 On the Road Again Now that road trip season is upon us, we take a deep look at the open road. We’ll talk with interstate long-haulers, join an elephant named Solomon on his journey across 16th century Europe, and take the “blackest road trip ...
06.24.2023 Your Miraculous And Mysterious Body Sometimes, we take our body for granted. But even the everyday things it can do – keep our heart beating, fight off illness – are pretty extraordinary. Do you know what your body can do? We explore a kidney transplant, ...
06.17.2023 Avian Obsessions It’s summer, and you might be pulling out your binoculars, filling your bird feeders, and looking up as you hear a melodious song. But for many birdwatchers, it's not just a simple pastime. Identifying bird calls, tracking rare breeds through ...
06.10.2023 To All The Dogs We've Loved The bond we share with dogs runs deep. The satisfaction of gentle head scratches or a round of playing fetch is simple and pure, but in other ways, the connection we have is truly unknowable. How do dogs make our ...
06.03.2023 Deep Time: The Tyranny of Time When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time – because in our culture, time is money. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper ...
05.27.2023 Eye-To-Eye Animal Encounters 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 ...
05.20.2023 Why Do We Have So Much Stuff? 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 ...
05.13.2023 For The Love Of Moms We celebrate Mother's Day with a collection of stories from our archives, by and about moms. Stories about care and about courage — about the work of mothering. Original Air Date: May 13, 2023 Interviews In This Hour: The all-encompassing ...
05.06.2023 A Parenting Revolution The pandemic has made it clear that parents are walking a tightrope with no safety net. We talk to parents about how they want to change the system, what it's like to raise black boys in a time of racial ...
04.29.2023 Decolonizing the Mind 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. ...
04.22.2023 The World is a Laboratory In some of our favorite science interviews — discover the joy of studying fossils, the invention of a paper microscope, the science of flow states, pioneering field studies of great apes, and the astrophysics of making a hard-boiled egg. Original ...
04.15.2023 Losing Yourself in Fantasy We all need a good fantasy world to retreat to sometimes – whether it's Hogwarts or Middle Earth, Westeros or Wakanda. But magical thinking can be dangerous too. And escapism isn't always innocent. So where do you draw the line ...
04.08.2023 Luminous: What Can Psychedelics Teach Us About Dying? In the first episode of "Luminous," our series about the philosophy and the future of psychedelics, how can psilocybin ease our fears about dying? And how can psychedelics change the way we approach the end of life? Original Air Date: ...
04.01.2023 Year of Return 2019 was an important year throughout the African diaspora — the 400th year since enslaved Africans first arrived in the United States. In Ghana — once the center of the European slave trade — 2019 was declared "the year of ...
03.25.2023 Out of the Anxiety Box You're not even out of bed and you're already worrying. So let's talk about it: How anxious we are, how we got that way, and what to do about it. Original Air Date: March 25, 2023 Interviews In This Hour: ...
03.18.2023 Cultivating Wonder Do you ever feel like there’s something missing in your life? You don’t know exactly what it is. And there’s never enough time to really think about it. You might get a glimpse of it if you slow down, or ...
03.11.2023 Journeys Through Gender Sharing of personal pronouns has become standard practice on resumes, business cards, email signatures and more. And that’s just one sign of an increasingly widespread shift in how we think about gender. So what’s next? And what would it take ...
03.04.2023 As Read By The Author As audio producers, one of the most fun things we get to do is bring the soundscape of a novel to life — cue the monsters, the storms, the footsteps of a creature emerging slowly from the ocean. So that’s ...
02.25.2023 How Should We Tell Our History? America is in the midst of a new debate over how we tell our history. You can see it everywhere – in arguments over critical race theory and AP history classes, in museums and state capitals, in the news and ...
02.18.2023 Walk With Me We all know we should walk more. The evidence just keeps accumulating – walking makes us healthier, happier, smarter, more relaxed, more resilient – not to mention longer-lived. But even with the best of intentions, sometimes we all need a ...
02.11.2023 Against Capitalism Radical politics and radical movements are on the rise everywhere. Against racial violence, and climate change; against gender inequality, corporate greed, low wages, oil pipelines, opioids. Maybe at heart they all have a common cause. Maybe they're all — in ...
02.04.2023 Shapeshifting There are old folktales and legends of people who can become animals. Animals who can become people. And there’s a lesson for our own time in those shapeshifting stories — a recognition that the membrane between what's human and more-than-human ...
01.28.2023 How To Be An Ethical Traveler Before the pandemic upended all world travel, we aired a show about what it means to be an ethical traveler. Between masks and vaccinations, COVID-19 has added even more to the ethical baggage we carry with us when we travel. ...
01.21.2023 You're Not Ok. That's Ok. At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, producer Charles Monroe-Kane made 300 yard signs that read "You're not ok. That's ok." He put them on his porch. Soon they were gone. Original Air Date: June 18, 2022 Interviews In This ...
01.14.2023 The Spirit of Jim Thorpe Jim Thorpe was one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known — a legend in the NFL, MLB, NCAA, and in the Olympics. Today he is being celebrated by a new generation of Native Americans. Rapper Tall Paul’s ...
01.07.2023 The Hidden Geometry of Everything The human brain is naturally mathematical. But there’s one particular kind of math people have surprisingly strong feelings about — geometry. It's the secret sauce of mathematics — different from everything else, and applicable to everything from gerrymandering to human ...
12.31.2022 Time Beyond The Clock Clocks and calendars chop time into increments – minutes, hours, days, years. It’s efficient, and it helps us get to meetings on time. But when we invented artificial time, we gave up natural time, and a deep sense of connection ...
12.24.2022 When Mountains Are Gods If you look at a mountain, you might see a skiing destination, a climbing challenge, or even a source of timber to be logged or ore to be mined. But there was a time when mountains were sacred. In some ...
12.17.2022 Writing As A Political Act In peaceful times, and in moments of violence, writers have used their art as protest, remembrance, and sometimes, political acts. We talk with poets and novelists about how they deeply notice the historical time we live in — through their ...

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