On Being with Krista Tippett

Kevin Kling is part funny guy, part poet and playwright, part wise man. A treasured figure on the national storytelling circuit, his voice inhabits an unusual space — where a homegrown Minnesota wit meets Dante and Shakespeare. Born with a disabled left arm, he lost the use of his right one after a motorcycle accident nearly killed him. He shares his special angle on life’s humor and its ruptures — and why we turn loss into story.

“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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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Frank Wilczek is the Herman Feshbach professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His books include "The Lightness of Being: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces," and "A Beautiful Question: Finding Nature’s Deep Design." This interview is edited and produced with music in the On Being episode "Frank Wilczek — Why Is the World So Beautiful?" Find more at onbeing.org.

Nobel physicist Frank Wilczek sees beauty as a compass for truth, discovery, and meaning. His book, "A Beautiful Question," is a long meditation on the question: “Does the world embody beautiful ideas?” He’s the unusual scientist willing to analogize his discoveries about the deep structure of reality with deep meaning in the human everyday.

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.

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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.

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“Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet / confinement of your aloneness / to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.”

David Whyte is a poet and philosopher who believes in the power of a “beautiful question” amidst the drama of work as well as the drama of life — amidst the ways the two overlap, whether we want them to or not. He shared a deep friendship with the late Irish philosopher John O’Donohue. They were, David Whyte says, like “two bookends.” More recently, he’s written about the consolation, nourishment, and underlying meaning of everyday words.