The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting the...
Dec 12, 2024•51 min•Ep 1139•Transcript available on Metacast She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and songs and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer-songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also reentering the p...
Nov 26, 2024•58 min•Ep 1138•Transcript available on Metacast The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these. We're listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in thi...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr 20 min•Ep 1137•Transcript available on Metacast An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “ The End of Poetry ” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “ To Be Made Whole .” Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, including The Carrying , which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things , which was a finalist f...
Jun 28, 2024•2 min•Ep 1136•Transcript available on Metacast We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expen...
Jun 27, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 1135•Transcript available on Metacast Today, a poem with a poignant question to live: “...and are we not of interest to each other?” Carry Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “ Ars Poetica #100: I Believe ” with you — and hear Elizabeth read more of her poetry in the On Being episode, “ Words That Shimmer .” Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, author, and educator. Since 2018, she has served as president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and is Chancellor Eme...
Jun 21, 2024•1 min•Ep 1134•Transcript available on Metacast We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. In his writing a...
Jun 20, 2024•59 min•Ep 1133•Transcript available on Metacast In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity's struggles. Ross Gay helps illuminate this paradox and turn it into a muscle. We are good at fighting, as he puts it, and not as good at holding in our imaginations what is to be adored a...
Jun 13, 2024•59 min•Ep 1132•Transcript available on Metacast In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner Azita Ardakani Walton. Together they trace precise guidance and applied wisdom from the natural world for the civilizational callings before us now. What does nature have to teach us about healing from trauma? And how might those of us aspiring to good and generative lives start to function like an ecosystem rather than a collection of separate, si...
Jun 06, 2024•1 hr 16 min•Ep 1131•Transcript available on Metacast In a time of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, Christine Runyan turns our attention to what often evades our awareness — the response of our nervous systems. As part of On Being’s 2021 Midwinter Gathering, she offered this brief, practical, gently guided practice as an invitation to befriend your beleaguered body, to “blanket it with a little bit of tenderness, a little bit of kindness.” Delve more deeply into Runyan’s wisdom in her On Being conversation with Krista, “ On Healing Our Distresse...
May 31, 2024•11 min•Ep 1130•Transcript available on Metacast 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...
May 30, 2024•1 hr 1 min•Ep 1129•Transcript available on Metacast We are overjoyed to share this heart-stirring performance with you, which transpired when we invited the ornithologist/poet/former On Being guest J. Drew Lanham to offer some poetry at a live On Being event in January 2024. We could not have imagined the lightning in a bottle that unfolded — a live adaptation of the title poem that appears in Drew's wonderful new book, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves . Be sure to listen to his full 2022 conversation (accompanied by poetry and birdsong) with...
May 24, 2024•14 min•Ep 1128•Transcript available on Metacast Here is a stunning sentence for you, written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this hour, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt: "Loneliness is the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy." This conversation is a kind of guide to generative shared deliberations we might be having with each other and ourselves in this intensely fraught global political moment: on the human underlay that gives democracy its vigor or threatens to undo it; on the differ...
May 23, 2024•1 hr 15 min•Ep 1127•Transcript available on Metacast A taste of a special mini-season of Poetry Unbound — bringing contemplative curiosity and the life-nurturing tether of poetry to the very present matter of conflict in our world. In this first offering, Pádraig introduces the intriguing idea of poems as teachers and ponders Wisława Szymborska’s “A Word on Statistics," translated by Joanna Trzeciak. This poem covers statistics of the most human kind — like the number of people in a group of 100 who think they know better, who can admire without e...
May 21, 2024•11 min•Ep 1126•Transcript available on Metacast There is an ecological transformation unfolding in the places we love and come from. On a front edge of this reality, which will affect us all, Colette Pichon Battle is a singular model of brilliance and graciousness of mind and spirit and action. And to be with her is to open to the way the stories we tell have blunted us to the courage we’re called to, and the joy we must nurture, as life force and fuel for the work ahead. As a young woman, she left her home state of Louisiana and land to whic...
May 16, 2024•1 hr 3 min•Ep 1125•Transcript available on Metacast In her writing, it is Kate DiCamillo's gift to make bearable the fact that joy and sorrow live so close, side by side, in life as it is (if not as we wish it to be). In this conversation, along with good measures of raucous laughter and a few tears, Kate summons us to hearts "capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and each other" — qualities these years in the life of the world call forth from all of us, young and old, with ever greater poignancy and vigor. Kate ...
May 09, 2024•54 min•Ep 1124•Transcript available on Metacast A special two-month season of On Being starts May 9. Freshly curated conversations from across the On Being archive. Big new conversations and extra offerings. To be present to the suffering and sorrow of this world from a place of love. To accompany each other in this — and accompany the young. To honor the fragility of being human. To keep our capacity for joy alive as a human birthright — and as fuel for resilience. To grasp the relationship between violence and power. To listen to our bodies...
May 02, 2024•3 min•Ep 1123•Transcript available on Metacast Here are some experiences to which Nick Cave gives voice and song: the "universal condition" of yearning, and of loss; a "spirituality of rigor"; and the transcendent and moral dimensions of what music is about. This Australian musician, writer, and actor first made a name in the wild world of ’80s post-punk and later with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He also underwent public struggles with addiction and rehab. Since the accidental death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, and a few years lat...
Nov 22, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 1122•Transcript available on Metacast A little musing on this season, the spectacular finale headed your way — and ways to stay connected in the time ahead. Subscribe to the The Pause Find our Starting Points Peruse our Libraries And on YouTube , grab a Poem to Carry in Your Pocket...
Nov 21, 2023•2 min•Ep 1121•Transcript available on Metacast Our built world is designed around something called "normal," and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting for better or worse — and always, always changing. This is a fact so ordinary — and yet not something most of us routinely pause to know and to ponder and work with. But Sara Hendren has made it her passion, bringing to it her varied vocations and gifts: being a painter and loving how art reveals truth not by way of simplicity, but by juxtaposition; teaching...
Nov 16, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 1120•Transcript available on Metacast The ecological crisis we are standing before is at once civilizational and personal — intimately close to each of us in the places we love and inhabit, and unfolding at a species level. And as much as anyone alive on the planet now, Christiana Figueres has felt the overwhelm of this and stepped into service. She gives voice so eloquently to the grief that we feel and must allow to bind us to each other — and what she sees as a spiritual evolution the natural world is calling us to. If you have w...
Nov 09, 2023•1 hr 20 min•Ep 1119•Transcript available on Metacast This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it. Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed , but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-worl...
Nov 02, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep 1118•Transcript available on Metacast Clint Smith reads his poem, “Dance Party.” This poem is featured in Clint’s On Being conversation with Krista, “What We Know in the ‘Marrow of Our Bones.’” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic . His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America , won the National Book Critics Circle Award for ...
Nov 02, 2023•2 min•Ep 1117•Transcript available on Metacast Clint Smith reads his poem, “Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep.” This poem is featured in Clint’s On Being conversation with Krista, “What We Know in the ‘Marrow of Our Bones.’” Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry . Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic . His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across ...
Nov 02, 2023•2 min•Ep 1116•Transcript available on Metacast This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom — in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it. Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed , but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-worl...
Nov 02, 2023•2 hr 49 min•Ep 1115•Transcript available on Metacast From Krista: I loved being interviewed by Dan Harris as much as I've ever enjoyed being on the other side of the microphone (as the saying goes). He drew things out of me I didn't know I had to say. And I'm so impressed with him as a human being, and what he's created with Ten Percent Happier. I hope you might enjoy this! Listen to Ten Percent Happier in all the podcast places: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast ______ The host of On Being shares lessons learned from 20 years of interviews, incl...
Oct 31, 2023•1 hr 6 min•Ep 1114•Transcript available on Metacast You may not know Latanya Sweeney's name, but as much as any other single person — and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance — she has led on the frontier of our gradual understanding of how far from anonymous you and I are in almost any database we inhabit, and how far from neutral all the algorithms by which we increasingly navigate our lives. In this conversation with Krista, she brings a helpful big-picture view to our lives with technology, seeing how far we've come — and not — sin...
Oct 26, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Ep 1113•Transcript available on Metacast You may not know Latanya Sweeney's name, but as much as any other single person — and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance — she has led on the frontier of our gradual understanding of how far from anonymous you and I are in almost any database we inhabit, and how far from neutral all the algorithms by which we increasingly navigate our lives. In this conversation with Krista, she brings a helpful big-picture view to our lives with technology, seeing how far we've come — and not — sin...
Oct 26, 2023•1 hr 25 min•Ep 1112•Transcript available on Metacast A wondrous, buried treasure from the 20-year On Being archive, with renowned yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. Be prepared, as you listen to what follows, to take in subtleties and gracefulness you've never before pondered — or tried to feel in yourself — in the interplay between your mind and your body. Matthew has an immensely energetic physical presence. He has been paralyzed from the chest down since a car accident in 1978. But he likes to say that his experience is only more extreme, not so dif...
Oct 19, 2023•57 min•Ep 1111•Transcript available on Metacast Baratunde Thurston is a comedian, writer, and media entrepreneur. He has eyes open to the contradictions, strangeness, and beauty of being human. He looks for learning happening even amidst our hardest cultural tangles. And he intertwines all of this, innovatively and searchingly, with his lifelong joy in the natural world. The kaleidoscopic view of life and love and the world that is Baratunde's builds and builds in this conversation Krista had with him around the edges of the 2023 Aspen Ideas ...
Oct 12, 2023•1 hr 10 min•Ep 1110•Transcript available on Metacast 
