On Being with Krista Tippett

David Whyte is an Associate Fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. His books include "The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America," "River Flow: New & Selected Poems," and "Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment, and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words." This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "David Whyte — The Conversational Nature of Reality." Find more at onbeing.org.

When Tiffany Shlain thinks of her favorite quote from naturalist John Muir, she thinks of the internet: “When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it’s attached to everything else.” As a filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards — the “Oscars of the internet” — she is committed to reframing technology as an expression of the best of what humanity is capable, with all the complexity that entails. With her young family, she has helped popularize the practice of the “tech shabbat” — 24 unplugged hours each week. Her perspective on our technology-enhanced lives is ultimately a purposeful and enriching one: the internet is our global brain, towards which we can apply all the wisdom we are gaining about the brains in our heads and the character in our lives.

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Tiffany Shlain is the founder of the Webby Awards and a co-founder of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences. She has directed and co-written 28 films, some with accompanying books, including “The Science of Character,” “Brain Power: From Neurons to Networks,” and the feature-length documentary “Connected: An Autoblogography about Love, Death & Technology.” This interview is produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Tiffany Shlain — Growing Up the Internet.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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Nathan Schneider is a scholar-in-residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of “God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet” and “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.” He is a regular columnist for Vice magazine and America, the national Catholic weekly. He is currently co-editing a book on democratic business models for online platforms. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Nathan Schneider — The Wisdom of Millennials.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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There’s a kind of brilliance that flashes up in early adulthood: an ability to see the world whole. Nathan Schneider has been able to articulate and sustain that far-seeing eye of young adulthood. He’s also a gifted writer, chronicling the world he and his compatriots are helping to make — spiritual, technological, and communal. At the Chautauqua Institution, we explore the wisdom of a millennial generation public intellectual on the emerging fabric of human identity.

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The great cellist Yo-Yo Ma is a citizen artist and a forensic musicologist, decoding the work of musical creators across time and space. In his art, Yo-Yo Ma resists fixed boundaries, and would like to rename classical music just “music” — born in improvisation, and traversing territory as vast and fluid as the world we inhabit. In this generous and intimate conversation, he shares his philosophy of curiosity about life, and of performance as hospitality.

Yo-Yo Ma has won 17 Grammy Awards, and has received the National Medal of Arts, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2014 Fred Rogers Legacy Award. He's also the founder of the Silk Road Project. His new album with the Silk Road Ensemble, Sing Me Home, will be released in April 2016. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Yo-Yo Ma — Music Happens Between the Notes." Find more at onbeing.org.

Robin Wall Kimmerer is the State University of New York Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. She is founding director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment. Her books include "Gathering Moss: A Natural and Cultural History of Mosses" and "Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants." Find more at onbeing.org.

“Why is the world so beautiful?” This is a question Robin Wall Kimmerer pursues as a botanist and also as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. She writes, “Science polishes the gift of seeing, indigenous traditions work with gifts of listening and language.” An expert in moss — a bryologist — she describes mosses as the “coral reefs of the forest.” Her work opens a sense of wonder and humility for the intelligence in all kinds of life we are used to naming and imagining as “inanimate.” She says that as our knowledge about plant life unfolds, human vocabulary and imaginations must adapt.

Brain surgeon James Doty is on the cutting edge of our knowledge of the brain and the heart: how they talk to each other; what compassion means in the body and in action; and how we can reshape our lives and perhaps our species through the scientific and human understanding we are now gaining. The backstory of James Doty’s passions is told in his memoir, "Into the Magic Shop." In the summer of 1968, in the throes of a hardscrabble, perilous childhood, he wandered into a magic shop and met a woman named Ruth who taught him what she called “another kind of magic” that freed him from being a victim of the circumstances of his life, and that he now investigates through science.