Becoming Wise

Imani Perry is a professor of African-American Studies at Princeton University. Her scholarly books include “Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop” and “More Beautiful and More Terrible: The Embrace and Transcendence of Racial Inequality in the United States.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Imani Perry — The Fabric of Our Identity.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Dan Barber is a celebrated young chef — but his passionate ethics and intellect have made him much more. He’s out to restore food to its rightful place vis-à-vis our bodies, our ecologies and our economies. And he would do this by resurrecting our natural insistence on flavor.

Dan Barber is chef and co-owner of Blue Hill and Blue Hill at Stone Barns. He’s received James Beard Awards for best chef in 2006 and 2009, and was named one of the world’s most influential people by Time. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Dan Barber — Driven By Flavor.” Find more at onbeing.org.

What Adele Diamond is learning about the brain challenges basic assumptions in modern education. Her work is scientifically illustrating the educational power of things like play, sports, music, memorization, and reflection. What nourishes the human spirit, the whole person, it turns out, also hones our minds.

Adele Diamond is a professor of developmental cognitive neuroscience at the University of British Columbia. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Adele Diamond — The Science of Attention.” Find more at onbeing.org.

He bestowed the title “Mahatma” on Gandhi. He debated the deepest nature of reality with Einstein. He was championed by Yeats and Pound to become the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913. Rabindranath Tagore was a polymath — a writer and a painter, a philosopher and a musician, and a social innovator — but much of his poetry and prose is virtually untranslatable (or inaccessibly translated) for modern minds. We pull back the “dusty veils” that have hidden his memory from history.

Anita Desai is an Indian novelist of Bengali descent. Her novels include “Clear Light of Day,” “The Village by the Sea,” and “Fasting, Feasting.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anita Desai and Andrew Robinson — The Modern Resonance of Rabindranath Tagore.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Andrew Robinson is a biographer and writer. He is the co-author of “The Myriad-Minded Man,” a biography of Rabindranath Tagore. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Anita Desai and Andrew Robinson — The Modern Resonance of Rabindranath Tagore.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Yoga has infiltrated law schools and strip malls, churches and hospitals. This 5,000-year-old spiritual technology is converging with 21st-century medical science and with many religious and philosophical perspectives. Seane Corn takes us inside the practicalities and power of yoga. She describes how it helps her face the darkness in herself and the world, and how she’s come to see yoga as a form of body prayer.

Seane Corn is the National Yoga Ambassador for YouthAIDS and cofounder of “Off the Mat, Into the World.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Seane Corn — Yoga, Meditation in Action.” Find more at onbeing.org.