Kevin Kling is a performer and an advisory council member of Interact. His plays include “21A” and “Lloyd’s Prayer.” His books include “The Dog Says How.” The new PBS documentary about his life and work is called “Kevin Kling: Lost and Found.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Kevin Kling — The Losses and Laughter We Grow Into.” Find more at onbeing.org.

David Isay is the founder of StoryCorps and winner of the MacArthur Genius Grant and 2015 TED Prize. His new StoryCorps book is “Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work”. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “David Isay — Listening as an Act of Love. Find more at http://onbeing.org/program/david-isay-listening-as-an-act-of-love/6268

“The soul is contained in the human voice,” says David Isay, founder of StoryCorps. He sees the StoryCorps booth — a setting where two people ask the questions they’ve always wanted to ask each other — as a sacred space. He shares his wisdom about listening as an act of love, and how eliciting and capturing our stories is a way of insisting that every life matters.

This episode, a “theft of the dial.” Writer and traveler Pico Iyer turns the tables on our host Krista Tippett by asking her the questions. Her latest book, “Becoming Wise,” chronicles what she’s learned through her conversations with the most extraordinary voices across time and generations, across disciplines and denominations. An illuminating conversation on the mystery and art of living.

Krista Tippett is a journalist and host of On Being. She is the New York Times bestselling author of “Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living” and “Einstein’s God: Conversations About Science and the Human Spirit.” She won a Peabody Award and received the National Humanities Medal for “thoughtfully delving into the mysteries of human existence.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Krista Tippett — An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living.” Find more at onbeing.org.

The civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander is one of the people who is waking us up to history we don’t remember, and structures most of us can’t fathom intending to create. She calls the punitive culture that has emerged the “new Jim Crow,” and is making it visible in the name of a fierce hope and belief in our collective capacity to engender the transformation to which this moment is calling.

Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at the Moritz College of Law and the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, and has served as the director of the Racial Justice Project at the ACLU of Northern California. Her book is “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Michelle Alexander — Who We Want to Become: Beyond the New Jim Crow.” Find more at onbeing.org.