Wonder Cabinet

How well do you sleep? Every night, millions of us turn out the lights hoping and praying for a good night’s sleep. And every night, millions of us lie awake in the dark. We explore what keeps us up, and what happens when we embrace the times when we just can't seem to rest.

Original Air Date: March 07, 2020

Guests:

Steve Paulson — Guy Leschziner — Daniel Pink — Marina Benjamin — Ada Calhoun

Interviews In This Hour:

A Shadow Self Emerges from the Darkness — Tales From The Wee Hours — Developing a 'Nocturnal Literacy' — Kicking Your Nap Up A Notch...With Coffee — The Things That Keep Gen X Women Up At Night

A new generation of Black farmers are working to reclaim land, hoping to grow justice along with vegetables and plants.

Original Air Date: August 22, 2020

Guests:

Leah Penniman — Savi Horne — Venice Williams — Marcia Chatelain

Interviews In This Hour:

How Black Farmers Lost 14 Million Acres of Farmland — And How They're Taking It Back — 'When You Hold Land You Have to Keep It' — My Garden Is An Outdoor Parish — Cooking Greens: A Delicious Family History Lesson — The First Job, The Polling Place, The Community Space: How McDonald's Became 'The Closest Thing To Home' For Black Communities

When treating mental illness, you know the drill. Take your meds. Call me in the morning. Let's check in on how you feel in a few months. Repeat.

But maybe there’s something else you can add to that toolkit.

We talk with a psychiatrist who prescribes exercise as medicine, a woman who treats her anxiety with horror films, and the scientists examining how depression can be treated with psychedelics.

Need to talk? Contact the National Alliance for Mental Illness at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264). If you or someone you know may be considering suicide, contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (En Español: 1-888-628-9454; Deaf and Hard of Hearing: 1-800-799-4889) or the Crisis Text Line by texting HOME to 741741.

Original Air Date: February 15, 2020

Guests:

Eliza Smith — Claudia Reardon — Shira Erlichman — Rosalind Watts — Charles Raison — Roland Griffiths — Robin Carhart-Harris

Interviews In This Hour:

Treating Anxiety With Horror Films — Do 10 Burpees And Call Me In The Morning — How Psychedelic Experiences Might Treat Depression — The Power in Naming an Illness

When things don't go the way they're supposed to — viruses, star systems, presidents, even fish — we're often desperate to explain the chaos. In this episode, we search for order in the universe.

Original Air Date: August 08, 2020

Guests:

Patrik Svensson — Lulu Miller — Alexander Boxer — Margaret Wertheim — S. James Gates Jr.

Interviews In This Hour:

The Weird World Of Eels — We Call Them Fish. Evolution Says They're Something Else. — The Original Algorithm Was Written In The Stars — Seeing The World With A Mathematician's Eyes

Further Reading:

Nautilus: Eels Don’t Have Sex Until the Last Year of Their Life—NYAS: The Mystery of Our Mathematical Universe

Bees stir each one of our senses — the zen-like hum, the sweet honey, the waxy smell of wildflowers mixed with hard work, the vibrant orange and black bodies attached to window-paned wings. 

Original Air Date: July 28, 2018

Guests: 

Heather Swan — Nicole Lindsey — Timothy Paule — Thor Hanson — Christof Koch — Tania Munz — Stephanie Elkins — Peter Sobol — Anne Strainchamps

Interviews In This Hour: 

Falling In Love With Bees — Listening To The Mood Of The Hive — 'Medicine' — Why We Ought to Live a 'Pro-Bee Lifestyle' — Rebuilding Detroit, Hive by Hive — 'Honeybee' — How Do We Wrap Our Minds Around Bee Consciousness? — Waggle Dancing with Karl von Frisch — 'To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee'

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