On Being with Krista Tippett

Few features of humanity are more fascinating than creativity; and few fields are more dynamic now than neuroscience. Rex Jung is a neuropsychologist who puts the two together. He’s working on a cutting edge of science, exploring the differences and interplay between intelligence and creativity. He and his colleagues unsettle long-held beliefs about who is creative and who is not. And they’re seeing practical, often common-sense connections between creativity and family life, aging, and purpose.

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Rex Jung is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He’s a Distinguished Senior Advisor to the Positive Neuroscience Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rex Jung — Creativity and the Everyday Brain.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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We were made and set here, the writer Annie Dillard once wrote, “to give voice to our astonishments.” Katy Payne is a renowned acoustic biologist with a Quaker sensibility. And she’s found her astonishment in listening to two of the world’s most exotic creatures. She has decoded the language of elephants and was among the first scientists to discover that whales are composers of song.

Katy Payne is a visiting fellow with the Bioacoustics Research Program at Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology. She was part of the research team that produced the original recording “Songs of the Humpback Whale.” Her book is “Silent Thunder: In the Presence of Elephants.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Katy Payne — In the Presence of Elephants and Whales.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Poetry is something many of us seem to be hungry for these days. We’re hungry for fresh ways to tell hard truths and redemptive stories, for language that would elevate and embolden rather than demean and alienate. Elizabeth Alexander shares her sense of what poetry works in us — and in our children — and why it may become more relevant, not less so, in hard and complicated times.

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Elizabeth Alexander is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University. She’s the author of a new memoir, “The Light of the World.” She’s also the author of several books of essays and poetry including “Crave Radiance.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Elizabeth Alexander — Words That Shimmer.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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Rami Nashashibi uses graffiti, calligraphy, and hip-hop in his work as a healing force on the South Side of Chicago. A Palestinian-American, he started his activism with at-risk urban Muslim families, especially youth, while he was still a college student. Now he’s the leader of a globally-emulated project converging religious virtues, the arts, and social action. And he is a fascinating face of a Muslim-American dream flourishing against the odds in post-9/11 America.

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Rami Nashashibi is founder and executive director of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN). He is a visiting assistant professor of Sociology of Religion and Muslim Studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rami Nashashibi — A New Coming Together.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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“Race is a little bit like gravity,” john powell says: experienced by all, understood by the few. He is an esteemed legal scholar and thinker who counsels all kinds of people and projects on the front lines of our present racial anguish and longings. Race is relational, he reminds us. It’s as much about whiteness as about color. And it largely plays out, as we’re learning through new science, in our unconscious minds. john powell is steeped in this new learning and offers it to us, as a form of everyday power, to animate our belonging to others that is already real. But we must claim it.

john a. powell is the director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at the University of California at Berkeley. He previously directed the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University and the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota. He is the author of "Racing to Justice: Transforming our Concepts of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society." This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "john a. powell — Opening the Question of Race to the Question of Belonging." Find more at onbeing.org.