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

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'

Guests:
Meklit Hadero, Valmont Layne, Gwen Ansell, Ron Radano

Further Reading:
CHCI Ideas from Africa Hub

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It’s been five years since the start of the pandemic. Some 1.2 million Americans died of COVID. That’s a lot of grief. But our loss is much more than death. Many lost the friendship of the workplace. And for a subset of teenagers, there was the loss of two years of high school. And the list goes on. Many of us are still left unmoored. But maybe our collective grief can bring us together.

Original Air Date: March 08, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
What happens when a nation doesn't grieve? — What the Civil War can teach us about American grief — How a funeral singer helps us to mourn

Guests:
David Kessler, Drew Gilpin Faust, Lauren DePino

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Most Americans take their sovereignty for granted — the nation’s right to make its own laws and govern its own people. The same rights we recognize in other sovereign nations, with one glaring exception — the Native nations and tribes who were here first. For Native Americans, sovereignty is not some abstract idea. It’s an ongoing, daily struggle. 

Original Air Date: July 13, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
The battle over tribal rights in Bad River — Quannah ChasingHorse’s two worlds – Native activist and supermodel — Are Indian casinos the key to tribal sovereignty? — No more Native American 'trauma porn'

Guests:
Mary Mazzio, Quannah ChasingHorse, Steven Andrew Light, David Treuer

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When you look at your body in the mirror, do you love what you see? Do you pick out the things you don’t like? Maybe you’ve heard of body positivity. But what if we just felt neutral about our bodies? In this episode, we talk about our bodies — how we move through the world in these fleshy vessels, how it feels to exist in our bodies in a world that asks so much from them. How do we live full and embodied lives?

Original Air Date: September 30, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:
Finding Peace in Neutrality: Jessi Kneeland on Rethinking Body Positivity — The Body Speaks: Rae Johnson on Reconnecting with Ourselves to Transform Society — Multiple Identities, One Body: Sami Schalk Discusses Black Disability Politics

Guests:
Jessi Kneeland, Rae Johnson, Sami Schalk

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Some artists work with pen and ink, some use brushes and paint. And some make art out of time. Meet some contemporary artists who are finding new ways to bridge the distance between us and the furthest reaches of time.

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: February 15, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
Crafting cosmic art through deep time — What if clocks were synced to the flow of a river? — Capturing a symphony of time in a dawn chorus

Guests:
Katie Paterson, Jonathon Keats, Alex Braidwood

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Jim Thorpe was one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known — a legend in the NFL, MLB, NCAA, and in the Olympics. Today he is being celebrated by a new generation of Native Americans. 

Special thanks to Robert W. Wheeler and the Smithsonian for archival audio.

Original Air Date: January 14, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:
Was Jim Thorpe the greatest athlete who ever lived? — The white man's trophy — A hero who looks like me — Indigenous excellence: Hip hop and the legacy of Jim Thorpe

Guests:
Tall Paul, Suzan Shown Harjo, Patty Loew, David Maraniss

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Floods and fires have always been with us, but now we may have crossed over into a new stage of permacrisis. So what does resilience look like when you know this fire or flood won’t be the last one? What survival strategies do we need for this age of climate disaster? 

Original Air Date: February 01, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
Resilience or recklessness? The risks of rebuilding where disaster strikes — Can we still talk about 'natural disasters' in the age of climate change? — Why we need better stories to persevere in uncertain times

Guests:
Brian Stone, Lorraine Daston, Annalee Newitz

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Americans used to believe that news anchors were basically reporting the truth. But in recent years, trust in journalism has largely evaporated. And that’s not an accident as the news media have been weaponized. So what can journalists do to regain the public trust?

Original Air Date: June 15, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
Journalist Ezra Klein on podcasting, pundits and when to take yourself out of the news — Reclaiming journalism in a fast-changing media landscape — How a hyperlocal newsletter is redefining the ‘news’

Guests:
Ezra Klein, Deborah Blum, Rob Gurwitt

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Sometimes the world is just too much. Too much awful news, too many things to worry about, too much to do. When you can’t take another headline, can’t handle another email, when you know inside you need something deeper than a vacation—maybe it’s time for a retreat.

Original Air Date: January 18, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
Pico Iyer’s second home — A plant scientist explores her interior wilderness

Guests:
Pico Iyer, Monica Gagliano

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In the first episode of "Luminous," our series about the philosophy and the future of psychedelics, how can psilocybin ease our fears about dying? And how can psychedelics change the way we approach the end of life?

Original Air Date: April 08, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:
How a pioneering psychedelic researcher 'leaned in' to his terminal cancer diagnosis — Dying without fear: How psychedelics can ease the anxiety of terminal illness — The terror and the ecstasy of psychedelics

Guests:
Roland Griffiths, Lou Lukas, Anthony Bossis

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