To The Best Of Our Knowledge

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

We’ve all been there, that place where we feel hope slipping away. Maybe we’ve even lost hope. This hour we talk with people who’ve turned that around and made hope real, whether it’s through political activism, faith, music, or reading a life-changing novel. Original Air Date: April 27, 2019 Guests: DeRay Mckesson — Lydia Hester — Serene Jones — Megan Stielstra — Common Interviews In This Hour: To Make Big Social Change, Start With The PB&J Sandwiches — Teens Don't Want Hope. They Want Action. — Hope, Where Faith Becomes Action — Megan Stielstra On 'The Chronology of Water' — Making Hope In Verse Further Reading: Hope: A Three-Part Series

Is hope something we’re innately born with, or something we can choose to have? We talk with people who tell us where they think hope lives in ourselves and our communities. Original Air Date: April 20, 2019 Guests: Andre Willis — Steven Pinker — Tali Sharot — Alice Walker — Chigozie Obioma — Claire Peaslee Interviews In This Hour: Defining A New Grammar Of Hope — The Science Of Looking On The Bright Side — A Naturalist's Hopeful Pilgrimage — Everything Is Actually Awesome — Why Nigerians Are So Much Happier Than Americans — Hope Rises. It Always Does. Further Reading: Hope - A Three-Part Series

We’re in the midst of the largest vaccine rollout of our lives. A turning point, we hope. But it’s complicated — medically, logistically, philosophically. Who will get it first? Will it work? And, as a new variant of the virus emerges, will we get it in time? We decided to take you behind the scenes, talking with people who volunteered for trials, and to those scientists and reporters who trace every part of our search for immunity. Original Air Date: January 16, 2021 Guests: Ilan Kedan — Christina Lombardi — Sarah Zhang — Eula Biss — Adam Kucharski Interviews In This Hour: Signing Up For The COVID-19 Vaccine Trial — Tracking The Where, Why And How Of COVID-19 Vaccines — The Ethics of Vaccines — The Contagion Detective

Not everyone has a nice, big yard to stretch out in while sheltering in place from COVID-19. But maybe you don't need one. People are using virtual spaces to live out the real experiences they miss — like coffee shops, road trips, even building your own house on a deserted island, or Walden Pond. In a world where we're mostly confined to our homes and Zoom screens, does the line between virtual and real-life space mean much anymore? Original Air Date: May 16, 2020 Guests: Mark Riechers — Tracy Fullerton — Simon Parkin — Jane McGonigal — Donald D. Hoffman — Suzanne O’Sullivan Interviews In This Hour: There's No Pandemic In Animal Crossing — I Went To The Woods To Level Up Deliberately — The Most Boring Video Game Ever Made — Want to be Happier? Turn Everyday Tasks Into a Game — How We Fool Ourselves With The Concept of 'Reality' Further Reading: NYAS: Reality Is Not As It Seems

In times of crisis, we need music. We look at how far people will go — even under quarantine, during a pandemic — to find ways to make music together. Original Air Date: April 25, 2020 Guests: Lisa Bielawa — Varttina — Bobby McFerrin — Moken — Vijay Iyer — Brandy Clark — Nicole Paris — Edward Cage Interviews In This Hour: Putting The Mood Of COVID-19 To Music — The Haunting Finnish Acapella of Värttinä — The 50 Voices of Bobby McFerrin — A Bold and Beautiful Voice from Cameroon — Vijay Iyer on Jazz, Improvisation and the Origins of Music — Country Singer Brandy Clark on a Big Day in a Small Town — Beatboxing With My Dad

We’ve all been changed by the experience of living through a pandemic. We figured out how to sanitize groceries, mute ourselves on Zoom and keep from killing our roommates. But we’re also tackling bigger, existential questions — how can we, individually and collectively, find meaning in the experience of this pandemic? Original Air Date: May 23, 2020 Guests: David Kessler — Tyrone Muhammad — Nikki Giovanni — John Kaag — Alice Kaplan Interviews In This Hour: Grief Is A Natural Response To The Pandemic. Here’s Why You Should Let Yourself Feel It. — 'You Smell Death': Being A Mortician In A Community Ravaged By COVID-19 — Nikki Giovanni Reads a Poem of Remembrance — Does Philosophy Still Matter In The Age Of Coronavirus? — Why Camus' 'The Stranger' Is Still a Dangerous Novel

Over the past decade, plant scientists have quietly transformed the way we think of trees, forests and plants. They discovered that trees communicate through vast underground networks, that plants learn and remember. If plants are intelligent beings, how should we relate to them? Do they have a place in our moral universe? Should they have rights? 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. Original Air Date: December 19, 2020 Guests: Robin Wall Kimmerer — Matt Hall — Monica Gagliano — Brooke Hecht Interviews In This Hour: We've Forgotten How To Listen To Plants — We Share This World With Plants. What Do We Owe Them? — Guided by Plant Voices — The Botanical Medicine Cabinet