Wonder Cabinet

Ghosts from the past stalk Europe again today in the wake of Russian tanks and missiles. To find a path forward, we might need to look back.

Original Air Date: March 05, 2022

Guests: 

Catherine Grace Katz — Margaret MacMillan — Rebecca Solnit

Interviews In This Hour: 

The legacy of Yalta through the eyes of the women who were there — Why humanity wages war — Tending a war-time garden: What Orwell’s fascination with roses tells us about the human need for beauty in the darkest hours

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How can someone be a monster — a brutal dictator, a mass murderer, a serial killer — and up close seem like a decent, caring person? In this hour, we tackle a complicated question: what happens when our moral categories fail and we find ourselves feeling empathy for monsters? Is that wrong? And what does it say about us?

Original Air Date: January 20, 2018

Guests: 

Will Bardenwepper — Adam Rogerson — Paul Beatty — Åsne Seierstad — Chuck Klosterman — Joshua Landy — Michael Tisserand

Interviews In This Hour: 

The American Guards Who Kept Saddam Hussein Safe Until His Execution — Paul Beatty on 'The Nazi and the Barber' — What Can Americans Learn from a Norwegian Massacre? — Your Archenemy Turned Out To Be a Hero. Now What? — Can Literature Make You More Empathetic? — Michael Tisserand on 'My Friend Dahmer'

Further Reading:

"Making Peace With Monsters" podcast extra about the making of the film version of "My Friend Dahmer" 

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The bond we share with dogs runs deep. The satisfaction of gentle head scratches or a round of playing fetch is simple and pure, but in other ways, the connection we have is truly unknowable. How do dogs make our lives better? How do they think? And how do we give them the lives they deserve?

Original Air Date: February 05, 2022

Guests: 

Blair Braverman — Quince Mountain — Donna Haraway — Sarah Miller

Interviews In This Hour: 

Adventure, goofiness and trail snacks: Stories from the dog musher's journal — Getting inside the mind of a dog — Nothing makes losing a dog easy. But a bridge dog can help. — Joy and peace, high up on Dog Mountain

Further Reading:

Pet Loss Resource Center: Resources for animal loss and grief

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We all tell stories about our lives: funny stories, happy stories, sad stories. But are they true stories? In an age of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” we’re all thinking harder about why truth matters – not just in politics, but in our personal lives. A biographer, a poet, a memoirist and a filmmaker describe the moral struggle and personal cost involved in telling not just the truth, but the whole truth.

Original Air Date: November 10, 2018

Guests: 

Caroline Fraser — Terese Marie Mailhot — Karl Ove Knausgård — Errol Morris

Interviews In This Hour: 

Little Lie in the Big Woods — When It's Real, The Stakes Are Higher — 'This Novel Has Hurt Everyone Around Me': A Frank Conversation with Karl Ove Knausgaard — Errol Morris: Thomas Kuhn Threw an Ashtray at Me

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We all need a good fantasy world to retreat to sometimes – whether it's Hogwarts or Middle Earth, Westeros or Wakanda. But magical thinking can be dangerous too. And escapism isn't always innocent. So where do you draw the line between fantasy and reality?

Original Air Date: September 17, 2022

Guests: 

Sarah Rachul — Marianne Eloise — Kurt Andersen — Neil Gaiman

Interviews In This Hour: 

Why not escape into fantasy? A tale of Disney adults — The magical thinkers, the dreamers, and the hucksters of America's fantasyland — Neil Gaiman on where dreams — and nightmares — come from

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How do you tell the story of your life? Do you focus on meaning, accomplishment and hope — or on failure and loss? Psychologists say telling a good life story can make you happier. But do we also create an inauthentic version of ourselves if we turn everything into a narrative? We explore the idea of life stories, and hear why poet and singer Patti Smith chose to "write about nothing" when writing about her own life.

Original Air Date: October 23, 2016

Guests:

Timothy Wilson — Charles Monroe-Kane — Galen Strawson — Alissa Quart — Patti Smith

Interviews In This Hour:

How to Edit Your Life Story — The Terminal Bar: A Tale of Smuggling Money to Post-Communist Prague — The Problem with Life Stories — Alissa Quart On 'Days of Abandonment' and 'Sleepless Nights' — Patti Smith's Mind Train

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2019 was an important year throughout the African diaspora — the 400th year since enslaved Africans first arrived in the United States. In Ghana — once the center of the European slave trade — 2019 was declared "the year of return" and the start of a campaign to encourage descendants of enslaved Africans to re-connect with the land of their ancestors. Thousands of African-Americans made the trip to Ghana — and many have decided to stay. They're fed up with police brutality and systemic racism in the US, ready to build new lives in Africa — and their number is growing.

Original Air Date: September 03, 2022

Guests:

Robert Hanserd — Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman — Prince Marfo — Ato Quayson — Emmanuel Kofi Apraku Bempong

Interviews In This Hour:

Three Americans share how Ghana became their new home — The land of your ancestors — Should Africans move to America? — A Black friendship

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Using a complex network of chemical signals, trees talk to each other and form alliances with fellow trees, even other species. In fact, whole forests exist as a kind of superorganism. And some trees are incredibly old. Did you know a single bristlecone pine can live up to 6,000 years? And the root mass of aspens might live 100,000 years? We explore the science and history of trees and talk with Richard Powers about his epic novel "The Overstory."

Original Air Date: April 28, 2018

Guests: 

Mark Hirsch — Richard Powers — Suzanne Simard — Amos Clifford — Daegan Miller

Interviews In This Hour: 

A Year In The Life Of A Tree — Listening to the Mother Trees — Richard Powers on Writing the Inner Life of Trees — Bathing in the Beauty of the Trees — General Sherman, Karl Marx, and Other Aliases of Earth's Largest Tree

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There's a certain a kind of visual encounter that can be life changing: A cross-species gaze. The experience of looking directly into the eyes of an animal in the wild, and seeing it look back. It happens more often than you’d think and it can be so profound, there’s a name for it: eye-to-eye epiphany. So what happens when someone with feathers or fur and claws looks back? How does it change people, and what can it teach us?

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: February 08, 2020

Guests: 

Gavin Van Horn — Jenny Kendler — Ivan Schwab — Jane Goodall — Alan Lightman

Interviews In This Hour: 

In The Eye Of The Osprey: A Physicist's Wild Epiphany — 100 Bird Eyes Are Watching You — The Look That Changed Primatology — Watching the Fierce Green Fire Die: Animal Gazes That Shaped Conservation Movements — The 600 Million Year History Of The Eye — 'We Are The Feast' — A Feminist Philosopher's Life-Changing Encounter With A Crocodile — How Do You Practice Kinship? A Brief Meditation — Sharing Eye-To-Eye Epiphanies With The Animal World 

Further Reading:

"The Disruptive Eye" by Gavin Van Horn—"6 a.m. on LaSalle Street" by Katherine Cummings—"Salmon Speak ~ Why Not Earth?" by Bron Taylor—"The Eyes of an Owl" by Greg Ripley—"From Bestiary" by Elise Paschen

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Around the world, authoritarian leaders are on the rise – from Russia and Hungary to the U.S. They're working from a common playbook: They use violent rhetoric. They attack the media. They see their political rivals as existential enemies to the nation. We examine the return of the Strongman — and how to save democracy.

The conversation with Daniel Ziblatt in this episode was recorded at the La Follette Forum on American Power, Prosperity and Democracy, held at the University of Wisconsin-Madison by the La Follette School of Public Affairs.

Original Air Date: August 13, 2022

Guests: 

Edgar Feuchtwanger — Iliaria Maria Sala — Daniel Ziblatt — Arno Michaelis — Pardeep Singh Kaleka

Interviews In This Hour: 

The Nazi Next Door — Facing History and Hate Through Museums — Killing democracy? There's a playbook for that. — Understanding The Man Who Hated You

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