This Movie Changed Me

Louis Newman is an Associate Dean of Carleton College and John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies. He is the author of several books on Jewish ethics and theology, including “Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Louis Newman — The Refreshing Practice of Repentance.” Find more at onbeing.org.

“I grew up a witness,” Mike Rose writes, “to the intelligence of the waitress in motion, the reflective welder, the strategy of the guy on the assembly line. This then is something I know: the thought it takes to do physical work.” In all our debates about standardized testing and the information economy, the value of learning to work and the future of liberal arts education, we may risk too narrow a view of the way the physical, the human, and the intellectual blend in all kinds of learning and in all work that matters. Mike Rose’s expansive wisdom could enlarge our civic imagination on big subjects at the heart of who we are — schooling, social class, and the deepest meaning of vocation.

Mike Rose is a research professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He’s the author of several books, including “The Mind at Work: Valuing the Intelligence of the American Worker,” “Why School?: Reclaiming Education for All of Us,” and more recently “Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Mike Rose — The Intelligence in All Kinds of Work, and the Human Core of All Education That Matters.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Chinese-American philosopher and civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs turned 100 this summer. She has been at the heart and soul of a largely hidden story inside Detroit’s evolution from economic collapse to rebirth. We traveled in 2011 to meet her and her community of joyful, passionate people reimagining work, food, and the very meaning of humanity. They have lessons for us all.

Grace Lee Boggs was a philosopher and a civil rights leader and a founder of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center. She authored the book “Living for Change: An Autobiography.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Grace Lee Boggs — A Century in the World.” Find more at onbeing.org.

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.

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.

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.