Wonder Cabinet

We get the message before we’re out of training pants – when the going gets tough, look on the bright side, make lemonade out of lemons and just do it. We’re going to consider the exact opposite – the wisdom of giving up and letting go. Because sometimes, the strongest and most courageous thing you can do is walk away. 

Original Air Date: April 27, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
The boundary-breaking power of fasting — How do we know when to call it quits? — Escaping the tyranny of certainty

Guests:
John Oakes, Adam Phillips, Maggie Jackson

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Can we scale up human flourishing? We know meditation can reduce stress and ease symptoms of depression, but the benefits don’t have to stop there. Some scientists believe just a few minutes of mindfulness practice every day could make entire cities healthier and happier. 

Original Air Date: August 30, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
Can we boost happiness on a city-wide scale? — How music becomes our collective medicine — Healing trauma takes time. Can we speed up psychotherapy?

Guests:
Richard Davidson, Dalal Abu Amneh, Diana Fosha

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Every click on your computer, every swipe on your smartphone, leaves a data trail. Information about who you are, what you do, who you love, the state of your mind and body… so much data about you, expanding day by day in the digital clouds. The question is—do you care? Would owning your data, or having more digital privacy, make life better? And what happens to all that data when you die?

Original Air Date: November 22, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
A former child test subject seeks the data that shaped her life — In an age of surveillance, do you still care about your privacy? — When you die, what will happen to your data?

Guests:
Susannah Breslin, Lowry Pressly, Carl Öhman

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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

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

Guests:
Blair Braverman, Quince Mountain, Donna Haraway, Sarah Miller

Further Reading:
Pet Loss Resource Center: Resources for animal loss and grief

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What makes food "authentic"? Do we need to feel close to where it's made? Know the complete history of where it comes from? Be able to diagram the chemistry of how it dances along our taste buds? How can we quantify the romance between eaters and the food they love?

In this hour, we talk about what it means to truly love what you eat and drink — and we ask why it matters.

Original Air Date: June 30, 2018

Interviews In This Hour:
The Frightening Sameness Beneath Hundreds of Flavors — A Little Grammy, A Little Bubbe: A Writer Embodies Family History Through Food — Anyone Can Cook—With the Right Elements — Does 'Selling Out' Make a Difference You Can Taste? — Two Dishes, Two Tastings: A Dinner Party with Simran, Michael, Samin and Josh

Guests:
Simran Sethi, Samin Nosrat, Michael Twitty, Josh Noel

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Sometime in the last couple of years, America’s collective morning routine shifted. We used to start the day with coffee. Now it’s coffee and Wordle. Or Spelling Bee. Or both, plus the crossword. We’re living in a golden age of word games – which is fun, and one way to get just a tiny bit of relief when the world feels out of control. 

Original Air Date: November 09, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
Getting into the puzzle mindset — Welcome to my crossworld

Guests:
A. J. Jacobs, Anna Shechtman

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One of the toughest things about trying to understand climate change – arguably the most important story of our time — is wrapping our minds around it. To even imagine something so enormous, so life-changing, we need a story. Some characters, a metaphor, and even some lessons learned. For that, we turn to the novelists and journalists telling the story of climate change – as we – and our children – live it.

Original Air Date: August 14, 2021

Interviews In This Hour:
The Climate Change Stories We Need To Hear — The Climate Crisis Gets Biblical — Lidia Yuknavitch’s Dream World: How Dreams Shaped Her Dazzling Speculative Novel — A Climate Dystopia Of Cold, Concrete, Wind and a Wall

Guests:
Alice Bell, Lydia Millet, Lidia Yuknavitch, John Lanchester

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When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time – because in our culture, time is money. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper rhythms of time that sustain life. What would it be like to live more in tune with nature’s clocks?

Deep Time is a series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature. We'll explore life beyond the clock, develop habits of "timefulness" and learn how to live with greater awareness of the many types of time in our lives.

Original Air Date: June 03, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:
How time came to rule our lives — and how we might free ourselves — The past and future of keeping time

Guests:
Jenny Odell, David Rooney

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Life is the sum total of the time between birth and death. But have you ever really wondered, what is life? It’s mysterious - and even science doesn’t quite have an answer. But there’s a new biology of life that’s overturning decades of assumptions. We report from a gathering of biologists, geologists and artists at the Island of Knowledge in Tuscany.

Original Air Date: July 12, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
Why we need a new theory of life — Beyond the genome: A new science of life — How humans can learn to be animal

Guests:
Marcelo Gleiser, Bob Hazen, Phil Ball, Melanie Challenger

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What would it be like to live in a world where magic is still alive? Not weird, not woo-woo, just ordinary. 400 years ago, consulting a magician in downtown London was as unremarkable as calling a plumber today. Even now, there are places where magic never died – like Iceland, where 54 percent of the population believes in elves, or thinks they might exist. 

Original Air Date: October 12, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
Why do Icelanders believe in elves? — Deborah Harkness uncovers the real history of witches — Practical magic and the 'cunning folk' of Tudor England

Guests:
Nancy Marie Brown, Deborah Harkness, Tabitha Stanmore

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