On Being

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.

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.

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.

Sculptural artist Dario Robleto is famous for spinning and shaping unconventional materials — from dinosaur fossils to pulverized vintage records, from swamp root to cramp bark. He joins words and objects in a way that distills meaning at once social, poetic, and scientific. He reveals how objects can become meditations on love, war, and healing.

Dario Robleto is a sculptural artist who lives and works in Houston, Texas. His most recent exhibit, “The Boundary of Life is Quietly Crossed,” is at the Menil Collection in Houston. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Dario Robleto — Sculptor of Memory." Find more at onbeing.org.

Steven Waldman is the author of "Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty." He is the founder and former editor of Beliefnet and now heads Daily Bridge Media. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Steven Waldman and Philip Hamburger — The Long Experiment of American Democracy." Find more at onbeing.org.