Wonder Cabinet

After a pandemic year of social isolation, we knew loneliness would be a problem. But public health officials have been warning for years that in countries all over the world, rates of loneliness are skyrocketing. How did loneliness become a condition of modern life?

Original Air Date: April 10, 2021

Guests:

Jason Rohrer — Samantha Rose Hill — Claudia Rankine

Interviews In This Hour:

My Friend Samantha (The A.I.) — How Loneliness Can Lead to Totalitarianism — Being Black and Alone in America

Millions of people are caring for someone with severe memory loss, trying to find ways to connect. One of the best ways anyone has found is music. We examine the unexpected power of song to supercharge the human mind.

Original Air Date: August 17, 2019

Guests:

Shannon Henry Kleiber — Oliver Sacks — Francine Toder — Anne Basting

Interviews In This Hour:

The Power Of Music And Memory: 'Music Was Waking Up Something Within Each Of Them' — The Deep Connections Our Brains Make To Music — It's Never Too Late To Learn To Play — MacArthur Fellow Anne Basting On Asking People With Dementia 'Beautiful Questions'

It's easy to take seeds for granted, to assume that there will always be more corn or wheat or rice to plant. But as monocropping and agribusiness continue to dominate modern farming, are we losing genetic diversity, cultural history, and the nutritional value of our food? We speak to farmers, botanists and indigenous people about how they are reclaiming our seeds.

Original Air Date: September 14, 2019

Guests:

Bob Quinn — Robin Wall Kimmerer — Seth Jovaag — Cary Fowler

Interviews In This Hour:

Where Did We Go Wrong With Wheat? — The Wisdom of the Corn Mother — The Seeds Of Tomorrow: Defending Indigenous Mexican Corn That Could Be Our Future — Saving Seeds For Future Generations — Ancient Grains, Native Corn, And The Doomsday Seed Vault: How Growing Food Might Survive Disaster

Colonization in Africa was much more than a land grab. It was a project to replace — and even erase — local cultures. To label them inferior. Music, arts, literature and of course language. In other words, it permeated everything. So how do you undo that? How do you unlearn what you’ve been forced to learn?

Original Air Date: March 20, 2021

Guests:

Adom Getachew — Simon Gikandi — Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Interviews In This Hour:

Reckon with the Past To Decolonize the Future — Reclaiming the Hidden History of Blackness — Never Write In The Language of the Colonizer

DNA tests are uncovering family histories. In some cases they're also revealing mixed bloodlines and the buried history of slavery. For African Americans, this can be emotionally-charged. What do you do when you find out one of your direct ancestors was a slave owner? And does it open the door to new conversations about racial justice and social healing?

Original Air Date: March 10, 2018

Guests:

Alex Gee — Erin Hoag — Annette Gordon-Reed — Anita Foeman

Interviews In This Hour:

How Do You Know Ruben Gee? — Searching for America's Racial History in a Graveyard — Uncovering America's Buried History: The Story of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings — Changing Our Conversation About Race Using Genetic Testing

Further Reading:

"Black Like Me" podcast

Music crosses boundaries between traditional and modern, local and global, personal and political. Take jazz — a musical form born out of forced migration and enslavement. We typically think it originated in New Orleans and then spread around the world. But today, we examine an alternate history of jazz — one that starts in Africa, then crisscrosses the planet, following the movements of people and empires — from colonial powers to grassroots revolutionaries to contemporary artists throughout the diaspora.

This history of jazz is like the music itself: fluid and improvisatory.  

In this hour, produced in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) — a global consortium of 270 humanities centers and institutes — we hear how both African and African-American music have shaped the sound of the world today.

Original Air Date: July 04, 2020

Guests:

Meklit Hadero — Valmont Layne — Gwen Ansell — Ron Radano

Interviews In This Hour:

How Meklit Hadero Reimagined Ethiopian Jazz — So You Say You Want A Revolution — Reclaiming the Hidden History of South African Jazz — 'We Are All African When We Listen'

Further Reading:

CHCI Ideas from Africa Hub

Scientists and explorers have found a whole new world, ripe for discovery, under our feet. The earth's underground is teeming with life, from fungal networks to the deep microbiome miles below the planet's crust. It's an exciting place, and it's changing what we know about the planet and ourselves.

Original Air Date: November 02, 2019

Guests:

Robert Macfarlane — Jill Heinerth — Ben Holtzman — Werner Herzog — Christine Desdemaines-Hugon

Interviews In This Hour:

Why We Descend Into Darkness — A Cave Diver's Treks Through The Veins Of The Earth — How To Listen To An Earthquake — Why Werner Herzog Is Awe-Struck — Finding Our Ancestors in Ancient Cave Art

If you had to travel 500 miles across country, on foot, with no map, no GPS, without talking to anyone — to a destination you've never seen, could you do it? It sounds impossible, but millions of creatures spend their lives on the move, migrating from one part of the Earth to another with navigation skills we can only dream of. How do they do it — and what can we learn from them?

Original Air Date: July 25, 2020

Guests:

Moses Augustino Kumburu — David Wilcove — Stan Temple — David Barrie — Sonia Shah

Interviews In This Hour:

The Serengeti's Great Migration, Up Close — Why Do Animals Migrate? — Sandhill Cranes Make The Long Journey South — The Greatest Navigators on the Planet — The High Costs — And Potential Gains — Of Migration, Both Animal And Human

We take a look at the romantic tropes of modern love and how they’re changing. Do the old dreams of true love and happiness ever after fit our new lives and new identities?

Original Air Date: February 13, 2021

Guests:

Logan Ury — Angelo Bautista — Jane Ward — Angela Chen — Bara Jichova Tyson

Interviews In This Hour:

The New Coffee Date: COVID-19 Pushes The Dating World To Zoom — Are Straight People Okay? — Love Without Touch, Desire Without Sex — Monogamy is Overrated

Hope means believing there’s a future. But can hope co-exist with cataclysmic realities like climate change, or disruptive technological advances like artificial intelligence? What’s ahead for future generations?

Original Air Date: May 04, 2019

Guests:

Roy Scranton — Anne Lamott — Amy Webb — Victor LaValle — Robert Zubrin

Interviews In This Hour:

Can We Have Hope If The World Is 'Doomed'? — Hope Is Faith In Life Itself — 'Our Best Futures Never Come Fully Formed, Or Automatically' — Tales of Dragons That Fight Segregation, and AI That Fights Transphobia — How A Colony On Mars Would Change Everything On Earth

Further Reading:

Hope: A Three-Part Series