The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — or SETI — goes beyond hunting for E.T. and habitable planets. Scientists in the field are using telescopes and satellites looking for signs of outright civilizational intelligence. One of the founding pioneers in this search is astronomer Jill Tarter. She is a co-founder of the SETI Institute and was an inspiration for Jodie Foster’s character in the movie Contact , based on the novel by Carl Sagan. To speak with Tarter is to begin to grasp the crea...
May 20, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 957
“Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world,” the extraordinary Joy Harjo has written, “nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.” She is a saxophone player and performer, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. She opens up with Krista about her life, dreaming as a way of relating to time and place, and the story matrix that connects us all. Joy Harjo — is a ...
May 13, 2021•51 min•Ep. 956
“Though we have instructions and a map buried in our hearts when we enter this world,” the extraordinary Joy Harjo has written, “nothing quite prepares us for the abrupt shift to the breathing realm.” She is a saxophone player and performer, a visual artist, a member of the Muscogee Creek Nation, and the 23rd Poet Laureate of the United States. She opens up with Krista about her life, dreaming as a way of relating to time and place, and the story matrix that connects us all. Joy Harjo — is a ...
May 13, 2021•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 955
The classic economic theory embedded in western democracies holds an assumption that human beings will almost always behave rationally in the end and make logical choices that will keep our society balanced on the whole. Daniel Kahneman is the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that this is simply not true. There’s something sobering — but also helpfully grounding — in speaking with this brilliant and humane scholar who explains why none of us is an equation that compu...
May 06, 2021•51 min•Ep. 954
The classic economic theory embedded in western democracies holds an assumption that human beings will almost always behave rationally in the end and make logical choices that will keep our society balanced on the whole. Daniel Kahneman is the psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for showing that this is simply not true. There’s something sobering — but also helpfully grounding — in speaking with this brilliant and humane scholar who explains why none of us is an equation that compu...
May 06, 2021•2 hr 37 min•Ep. 953
Krista’s been in a conversation with Tiffany Shlain for several years about her practice of “Tech Shabbat.” For more than a decade, she and her family have taken a rest from screens sundown Friday to sundown Saturday; her book 24/6 is a kind of manual to open the practice to everyone. After a year in which many of us have relied on our devices as our portals to reality — our sole connection to the people and places we love — Krista called Tiffany to talk about how this practice works. Might it b...
May 03, 2021•30 min•Ep. 952
Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing is filled with lyricism, rhythm, people and precision. In his essays and poetry, he introduces readers to a soundscape of Black performance and Black joy: we hear hip-hop and jazz, we hear Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Little Richard. Music and performance of every kind are the source of his fascination, focus and wisdom: what makes people cry, or feel safe, or brave; held in struggle, joy, or love. Hanif is interviewed by our colleague, Pádraig Ó Tuama, a poet hims...
Apr 29, 2021•51 min•Ep. 951
Hanif Abdurraqib’s writing is filled with lyricism, rhythm, people and precision. In his essays and poetry, he introduces readers to a soundscape of Black performance and Black joy: we hear hip-hop and jazz, we hear Nina Simone, Aretha Franklin and Little Richard. Music and performance of every kind are the source of his fascination, focus and wisdom: what makes people cry, or feel safe, or brave; held in struggle, joy, or love. Hanif is interviewed by our colleague, Pádraig Ó Tuama, a poet hims...
Apr 29, 2021•1 hr 26 min•Ep. 950
Layli Long Soldier is a writer, a mother, a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She has a way of opening up this part of her life, and of American life, to inspire self-searching and tenderness. Her award-winning first book of poetry, WHEREAS , is a response to the U.S. government’s official apology to Native peoples in 2009, which was done so quietly, with no ceremony, that it was practically a secret. Layli Long Soldier offers entry points for us all — to e...
Apr 22, 2021•51 min•Ep. 949
Layli Long Soldier is a writer, a mother, a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation. She has a way of opening up this part of her life, and of American life, to inspire self-searching and tenderness. Her award-winning first book of poetry, WHEREAS , is a response to the U.S. government’s official apology to Native peoples in 2009, which was done so quietly, with no ceremony, that it was practically a secret. Layli Long Soldier offers entry points for us all — to e...
Apr 22, 2021•2 hr•Ep. 948
Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, we return again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up his intelligence on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towar...
Apr 15, 2021•51 min•Ep. 947
Across the past year, and now as the murder trial of Derek Chauvin unfolds with Minneapolis in fresh pain and turmoil, we return again to the grounding insights of Resmaa Menakem. He is a Minneapolis-based therapist and trauma specialist who activates the wisdom of elders, and very new science, about how all of us carry in our bodies the history and traumas behind everything we collapse into the word “race.” We offer up his intelligence on changing ourselves at a cellular level — practices towar...
Apr 15, 2021•2 hr 43 min•Ep. 946
“Remember,” Bryan Doerries likes to say in both physical and virtual gatherings, “you are not alone in this room — and you are not alone across time.” With his public health project, Theater of War, he is activating an old alchemy for our young century. Ancient stories, and texts that have stood the test of time, can be portals to honest and dignified grappling with present wounds and longings and callings that we aren’t able to muster in our official places now. It’s an embodiment of the good G...
Apr 08, 2021•51 min•Ep. 945
“Remember,” Bryan Doerries likes to say in both physical and virtual gatherings, “you are not alone in this room — and you are not alone across time.” With his public health project, Theater of War, he is activating an old alchemy for our young century. Ancient stories, and texts that have stood the test of time, can be portals to honest and dignified grappling with present wounds and longings and callings that we aren’t able to muster in our official places now. It’s an embodiment of the good G...
Apr 08, 2021•2 hr 58 min•Ep. 944
The glory that coexists in human life right alongside our weird propensity to choose what is not good for us; the difference between a place of sheer loss and a sacred space for mourning; grace as something muscular amidst the muck and mess of reality. These are some of the places of musing, sweeping perspective, and raw wisdom a conversation with Serene Jones takes us. And after hearing this, you’ll never think in the same way again about Woody Guthrie, or John Calvin, or what a Christian upbri...
Apr 01, 2021•51 min•Ep. 943
The glory that coexists in human life right alongside our weird propensity to choose what is not good for us; the difference between a place of sheer loss and a sacred space for mourning; grace as something muscular amidst the muck and mess of reality. These are some of the places of musing, sweeping perspective, and raw wisdom a conversation with Serene Jones takes us. And after hearing this, you’ll never think in the same way again about Woody Guthrie, or John Calvin, or what a Christian upbri...
Apr 01, 2021•1 hr 16 min•Ep. 942
To reassert the liveliness of ordinary things, precisely in the face of what is hardest and most broken in life and society — this has been Michael Longley’s gift as one of Northern Ireland’s foremost living poets. He is known, in part, as a poet of “the Troubles” — the violent 30-year conflict between Protestants and Catholics, English and Irish. And he is a gentle voice for all of us now, wise and winsome about the everyday, never-finished work of social healing. Michael Longley has written mo...
Mar 25, 2021•51 min•Ep. 941
To reassert the liveliness of ordinary things, precisely in the face of what is hardest and most broken in life and society — this has been Michael Longley’s gift as one of Northern Ireland’s foremost living poets. He is known, in part, as a poet of “the Troubles” — the violent 30-year conflict between Protestants and Catholics, English and Irish. And he is a gentle voice for all of us now, wise and winsome about the everyday, never-finished work of social healing. Michael Longley has written mo...
Mar 25, 2021•1 hr 22 min•Ep. 940
The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with Christine Runyan, which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitf...
Mar 18, 2021•2 hr 38 min•Ep. 938
It’s pretty intriguing to follow poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s idea that most of us actually “think in poems” whether we know it or not. Rarely, as she points out, do you hear anyone say they feel worse after writing things down. That, she says, can be a tool to survive in hard times like these, to anchor our days - and to get into a conversation and community with all of the selves that live on in each of us at any given moment - “your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self-that-m...
Mar 04, 2021•51 min•Ep. 935
It’s pretty intriguing to follow poet Naomi Shihab Nye’s idea that most of us actually “think in poems” whether we know it or not. Rarely, as she points out, do you hear anyone say they feel worse after writing things down. That, she says, can be a tool to survive in hard times like these, to anchor our days - and to get into a conversation and community with all of the selves that live on in each of us at any given moment - “your child self, your older self, your confused self, your self-that-m...
Mar 04, 2021•2 hr 34 min•Ep. 934
So many of us have been getting through this year by watching movies at home by ourselves, or with friends on Zoom, inventing new ways to grieve and to hope, to keep ourselves laughing, all through the simple act of watching stories unfold on our screens. Movies have the power to unearth the many layers of our identities; to help us answer the question: Who am I? And that is what we trace, by way of a few beloved movies including The Color Purple , The Fly , and Blockers , in this episode. Danez...
Feb 25, 2021•51 min•Ep. 933
There is a question rolling around even in the most secular of corners: What do religious people and traditions have to teach as we do the work ahead of repairing, renewing, and remaking our societies, our life together? Krista’s conversation this week with Rabbi Ariel Burger, a student of the late, extraordinary Elie Wiesel, delves into theological and mystical depths that are so much richer and more creative than is often imagined even when that question is raised. Rabbi Ariel Burger is the au...
Feb 18, 2021•51 min•Ep. 932
There is a question rolling around even in the most secular of corners: What do religious people and traditions have to teach as we do the work ahead of repairing, renewing, and remaking our societies, our life together? Krista’s conversation this week with Rabbi Ariel Burger, a student of the late, extraordinary Elie Wiesel, delves into theological and mystical depths that are so much richer and more creative than is often imagined even when that question is raised. Rabbi Ariel Burger is the au...
Feb 18, 2021•2 hr 37 min•Ep. 931
As people, and as a culture, Alain de Botton says, we would be much saner and happier if we reexamined our very view of love. His New York Times essay, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” is one of their most-read articles in recent years, and this is one of the most popular episodes we’ve ever created. We offer up the anchoring truths he shares amidst a pandemic that has stretched all of our sanity — and tested the mettle of love in every relationship. Alain de Botton is the founder and chai...
Feb 11, 2021•51 min•Ep. 930
As people, and as a culture, Alain de Botton says, we would be much saner and happier if we reexamined our very view of love. His New York Times essay, “Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person,” is one of their most-read articles in recent years, and this is one of the most popular episodes we’ve ever created. We offer up the anchoring truths he shares amidst a pandemic that has stretched all of our sanity — and tested the mettle of love in every relationship. Alain de Botton is the founder and chai...
Feb 11, 2021•2 hr 33 min•Ep. 929
A companion conversation to Parker Palmer’s reflections in this week’s On Being , about the soul in depression. Krista catches up with her friend and teacher in 2021. Plus, Parker learns to use QuickTime. Parker J. Palmer is a teacher, author, and founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal . His many books include Healing the Heart of Democracy , Let Your Life Speak , and On the Brink of Everything . He’s also a contributor to the book, Anchored in the Current: Disco...
Feb 05, 2021•14 min•Ep. 928
We’re increasingly attentive to the many faces of depression and anxiety, and we’re fluent in the languages of psychology and medication. But depression is profound spiritual territory; and that is much harder to speak about. This is an On Being classic. Krista opens up about her own experience of depression and talks with Parker Palmer, Anita Barrows, and Andrew Solomon. We are putting this out on the air again because people tell us it has saved lives, and so many of us are struggling in whole...
Feb 04, 2021•51 min•Ep. 927
This is the unedited conversation Krista had with Parker Palmer in 2002, which is excerpted within our produced episode “ The Soul in Depression .” That episode also includes the voices of Andrew Solomon and Anita Barrows. Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. Parker J. Palmer is a teacher, author, and founder and senior partner emeritus of the Center for Courage & Renewal . His many books include Healing the Heart of Democracy , Let Your Life Speak , and On the Brink of Everything: ...
Feb 04, 2021•55 min•Ep. 926
This is the unedited conversation Krista had with Andrew Solomon in 2002, which is excerpted within our produced episode “ The Soul in Depression .” That episode also includes the voices of Anita Barrows and Parker Palmer. Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org. Andrew Solomon is a journalist and writer of epic books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression , and Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity ....
Feb 04, 2021•46 min•Ep. 924
