Why do people turn to poetry during troubled times? We saw it after 9/11 and we're seeing it now as the coronavirus travels around the world. When the world seems broken, poetry is often the one kind of language that helps.

Original Air Date: April 04, 2020

Guests:

Kitty O'Meara — Jericho Brown — Edward Hirsch — Alice Walker — Ken Nordine — Li-Young Lee — Jimmy Santiago Baca

Interviews In This Hour:

A Viral Poem For A Virus Time — Can A Poem Be A Prayer? — Poetry In A Time Of Grief And Loss — Hope Rises. It Always Does. — Li-Young Lee's Love Poetry — Ken Nordine's 'Yellow' — Words Can Change Your Life

Poetry in a Troubled Time

”To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a Peabody award-winning national public radio show that explores big ideas and beautiful questions. Deep interviews with philosophers, writers, artists, scientists, historians, and others help listeners find new sources of meaning, purpose, and wonder in daily life. Whether it’s about bees, poetry, skin, or psychedelics, every episode is an intimate, sound-rich journey into open-minded, open-hearted conversations. Warm and engaging, TTBOOK helps listeners feel less alone and more connected – to our common humanity and to the world we share.

For more from the TTBOOK team, visit us at ttbook.org.

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Places & Travel

Are you ready to think in centuries instead of seconds? Eons instead of hours? It’s time to make thousand-year plans and appreciate how Earth keeps time. 

Original Air Date: August 19, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

Shifting your mind to 'geologic' time — Discovering the wonders of ancient cave art — Making art inspired by the ancestors

Guests:

Marcia Bjornerud, Stephen Alvarez, Dustin Illetewahke Mater

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Deep Time: How Earth Keeps Time

Can neuroscience explain what happens to the brain on psychedelics? And even if we map the brain while it’s tripping, does that tell us why these experiences can be so transformative? 

We’ll talk with some of the pioneers in psychedelic research — from Amanda Feilding’s boundary-busting work to Robin Carhart-Harris’ theory of the "entropic brain." Also, renowned neuroscientist Christof Koch goes down the rabbit hole on 5-MeO-DMT, also known as toad venom.  

Original Air Date: July 15, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

Exploring consciousness on toad venom — The godmother of the European psychedelic revival — How therapeutic psilocybin could help heal long-buried trauma — Magic mushrooms and the 'entropic brain'

Guests:

Christof Koch, Amanda Feilding, David Nutt, Robin Carhart-Harris

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Luminous: Your Brain on Shrooms

From our narrow vantage point on Earth, how can we see what's out there, beyond our skies? We look to how scientists and scholars have studied eclipses, dark matter, deep-space transmissions from intelligent life and more, all in the hopes of painting a clearer picture of a vast and invisible universe.

Original Air Date: August 19, 2017

Interviews In This Hour:

How Eclipse Chasing Inspires Generations of Scientists — How Do We Investigate The Invisible Parts of the Universe? — Search For Life In All The Wrong Places — What Can You Hear In Space? — The Universe Is Under No Obligation To Make Sense To Us

Guests:

David Baron, Priya Natarajan, Seth Shostak, Don Gurnett, Neil deGrasse Tyson

Further Reading:

NASA: 2024 Eclipse Explorer

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Total Eclipse and Other Wonders

AI can do amazing things – write your term papers, sequence your genes, maybe replace your therapist. But even super-intelligence has limits. So, does AI really have a mind — or a soul? We'll explore the frontiers of artificial intelligence — from robots painting masterpieces to software engineers trying to create god-like machines.

Original Air Date: March 30, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:

Stop worrying about deepfakes — Does AI have a soul? — Can robots paint a masterpiece?

Guests:

Walter Scheirer, Meghan O’Gieblyn, Sougwen 愫君 Chung

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Does AI dream?

We all feel better after a good cry. In fact, humans are the only animals who cry emotional tears. But what about people who don't cry? And have you ever wondered why a sad song or movie makes you cry?

Original Air Date: August 05, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

Hip-hop artist Dxtr Spits on teaching men to cry — The evolution and neuroscience of tears — What happens when an actor cries

Guests:

Dxtr Spits, Michael Trimble, Jen Plants

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Poetry in a Troubled Time

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