On Being with Krista Tippett

When Tiffany Shlain thinks of her favorite quote from naturalist John Muir, she thinks of the internet: “When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it’s attached to everything else.” As a filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards — the “Oscars of the internet” — she is committed to reframing technology as an expression of the best of what humanity is capable, with all the complexity...

Nathan Schneider is a scholar-in-residence of media studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He is the author of “God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet” and “Thank You, Anarchy: Notes from the Occupy Apocalypse.” He is a regular columnist for Vice magazine and America, the national Catholic weekly. He is currently co-editing a book on democratic business model...

There’s a kind of brilliance that flashes up in early adulthood: an ability to see the world whole. Nathan Schneider has been able to articulate and sustain that far-seeing eye of young adulthood. He’s also a gifted writer, chronicling the world he and his compatriots are helping to make — spiritual, technological, and communal. At the Chautauqua Institution, we explore the wisdom of a millennial...

Jean Berko Gleason is Professor Emerita of psychology at Boston University. This interview was edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Jean Berko Gleason — Unfolding Language, Unfolding Life.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Jean Berko Gleason is a living legend in the field of psycholinguistics — how language emerges, and what it tells us about how we think and who we are. She has helped to illustrate the remarkable ordinary human capacity to begin to speak, and she’s continued to break new ground in exploring what this may teach us about adults as about the children we’re raising. We keep learning about the human gi...

B.J. Miller is executive director of the Zen Hospice Project, an Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an attending specialist for the Symptom Management Service of the UCSF Helen Diller Comprehensive Cancer Center. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “B.J. Miller — Reframing Our Relation...

“Let death be what takes us,” Dr. BJ Miller has written, “not a lack of imagination.” As a palliative care physician, he brings a design sensibility to the matter of living until we die. And he’s largely redesigned his sense of own physical presence after an accident at college left him without both of his legs and part of one arm. He offers a transformative reframing on our imperfect bodies, the...

Carrie Newcomer is a singer-songwriter. Her albums include “Betty’s Diner,” “The Gathering of Spirits,” and “A Permeable Life,” which has an accompanying book of poetry and essays. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Carrie Newcomer — A Conversation with Music.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Something of a celebrity in Quaker circles, Carrie Newcomer is best known for her story-songs that get at the raw and redemptive edges of human reality. This week, a musical conversation with the Indiana-based and born folk singer-songwriter who’s been called a “prairie mystic.” She writes and sings about the grittiness of hope and the ease of cynicism.

Paul Muldoon holds the Howard G.B. Clark chair in the Humanities at Princeton University. He has served as the poetry editor at the The New Yorker since 2007. He is the author of 12 major collections of poetry, including “Horse Latitudes,” “Hay,” and “One Thousand Things Worth Knowing.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Paul Muldoon — A Co...

The Irish poet and “New Yorker” poetry editor Paul Muldoon has won the Pulitzer Prize, written for other media from radio to song, and plays in a rock band. He visited us for a magical day at the On Being studios on Loring Park in Minneapolis, including a dinner salon and reading from his work.

Mark Hyman is the director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. He is also the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center. He’s a practicing family physician and a best-selling author. James Gordon is the founder and executive director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine and a clinical professor in the departments of Psychiatry and Family Medicine at Georgetown Me...

A transformation of medicine is underway, a transition from a science of treating disease to a science of health. Mark Hyman is a family physician and a pioneer in the new discipline of functional medicine. James Gordon is an expert in using mind-body medicine to heal depression, anxiety, and psychological trauma. Penny George became a philanthropist of integrative medicine after she experienced c...

Ann Hamilton is a visual artist and self-described maker. She is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Art at Ohio State University. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Ann Hamilton — Making, and the Spaces We Share.” Find more at onbeing.org.

The philosopher Simone Weil defined prayer as “absolutely unmixed attention.” The artist Ann Hamilton embodies this notion in her sweeping works of art that bring all the senses together. She uses her hands to create installations that are both visually astounding and surprisingly intimate, and meet a longing many of us share, as she puts it, to be “alone together.”

Adam Grant is a professor of psychology at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is the youngest tenured and highest rated professor. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times. He has consulted for numerous organizations, including Google, the United Nations, and the U.S. Army. He became known to many through his popular book, “Give and Take: A Revoluti...

The organizational psychologist Adam Grant, who many know from his New York Times columns, describes three orientations of which we are all capable: the givers, the takers, and the matchers. These influence whether organizations are joyful or toxic for human beings. His studies are dispelling a conventional wisdom that selfish takers are the most likely to succeed professionally. And he is wise ab...

Nancy Cantor is a social psychologist and the chancellor of Rutgers University–Newark, one of the most diverse institutions in the U.S. She is widely recognized for helping forge a new understanding of the role of universities in society that re-emphasizes their public mission. Christopher Howard is the first African-American president of Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia, an historically white a...

When we talk about the relationship between colleges and the world, we tend to focus on economics. But what is the place of institutions of higher education in the communities they inhabit? How can and should they nurture students as citizens and leaders for the emerging 21st century world? Two visionary college presidents of two very different institutions take up these questions with Krista at t...

Louis Newman is an Associate Dean of Carleton College and John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies. He is the author of several books on Jewish ethics and theology, including “Repentance: The Meaning and Practice of Teshuvah.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Louis Newman — The Refreshing Practice of Repentance.” Fin...

The High Holy Days create an annual ritual of repentance, both individual and collective. Louis Newman, who has explored repentance as an ethicist and a person in recovery, opens this up as a refreshing practice for every life, even beyond the lifetime of those to whom we would make amends.

Grace Lee Boggs was a philosopher and a civil rights leader and a founder of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center. She authored the book “Living for Change: An Autobiography.” This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Grace Lee Boggs — A Century in the World.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Chinese-American philosopher and civil rights legend Grace Lee Boggs turned 100 this summer. She has been at the heart and soul of a largely hidden story inside Detroit’s evolution from economic collapse to rebirth. We traveled in 2011 to meet her and her community of joyful, passionate people reimagining work, food, and the very meaning of humanity. They have lessons for us all.

Rex Jung is an Assistant Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. He’s a Distinguished Senior Advisor to the Positive Neuroscience Project, based at the University of Pennsylvania. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode “Rex Jung — Creativity and the Everyday Brain.” Find more at onbeing.org.

Few features of humanity are more fascinating than creativity; and few fields are more dynamic now than neuroscience. Rex Jung is a neuropsychologist who puts the two together. He’s working on a cutting edge of science, exploring the differences and interplay between intelligence and creativity. He and his colleagues unsettle long-held beliefs about who is creative and who is not. And they’re seei...