Kelly Corrigan Wonders

To understand the brain’s function and methods is to get some much needed distance from family dynamics so that we might understand them more fully. Lisa Feldman Barrett has been researching and writing about how emotions are made for many years. Kelly and Lisa met on the set of Tell Me More for PBS and they have been talking ever since, particularly about how neuroscience informs parenting. This...

Tim and Julie Vasquez submitted two lovely essays that Tim wrote when it was time to send their sons off to college. We loved both and today we’re airing the first one called, “The Drive to Oregon”. It’s a beautiful reminder to us all that although the destination is important, it’s the journey that really matters. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.auda...

Katy Milkman caught my ear when she said: unsolicited advice is demotivating. She’s at U Penn’s Wharton’s school and does a lot of research on behavior change, including with young adults. Her book is called How To Change and along with people like Angela Duckworth, The New York Times and Charles Duhigg, I highly recommend it. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: http...

How do toddlers become tweens who become teens who take themselves so seriously, they get right to work on the biggest, hairiest problem on planet earth? We start with Stanford student Sophia Kianni, known as the family megaphone, the one who started every argument, and then sit down with Colorado State’s 2019 Outstanding Professor of the Year, Dr. Emily Fischer. To stay up to date with non-partis...

Joy Netanya Thompson submitted this moving eulogy for her paternal grandmother Zelda, a Holocaust survivor who endured so much and yet threw her arms open to life. Zelda danced at every opportunity and basked in the presence of her grandchildren like they were sunshine. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your...

Thanks to the team at Reasons to be Cheerful, a feed and website started by my old friend from an interview I did for PBS, David Byrne, I have learned of a story that proves what I so desperately need to believe: one person can move an organization, a country, a continent. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about y...

Today’s show features two charming, unassuming, determined women. First, a humble teenager named Ardra Charath shares her ideas about what we can do to make sense of the extreme weather events she lived through in India and the Middle East. Then, atmospheric scientist Dr. Melissa Burt fills us in on the enthusiasm and forward motion she sees every day with her students. If you are finding yourself...

Catherine wrote this loving tribute to honor her mother Judith on the occasion of her 80th birthday. Judith is a mother of 4 and grandmother of 8 who has lived on 3 continents and loves nothing more than a house full of family. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.c...

Something I have long sensed to be true from personal experience and now know is the case, thanks to the work of Dr. Samantha Boardman, author of Everyday Vitality, and my neuroscientist friend Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adcho...

Emma Venarde is a college sophomore at Brown. Joellen Russell is a climate scientist in Arizona. They are leaders in a growing army of earnest, endearing women inspiring growth in understanding, behavior, policy and legislation to protect our planet. Here we talk about their best and worst moves on the road to change. Sign up for the free 2x monthly nonpartisan newsletter at ScienceMoms.com to sta...

High school junior Clare Murphy wrote this touching, personal and evocative essay for a school assignment. It conveys incredible warmth and deep affection for a very special lake house and also the large, loving family that inhabits it each summer. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit htt...

Based on a week’s worth of conversations with friends who are parenting hard and losing sleep because of it, I turned to my neuroscientist friend, Lisa Feldman Barrett, who gave me a validating thought. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do college freshman Malia Honda and deep sea oceanographer Claudia Benitez-Nelson have in common? They both believe that they can change the story of Planet Earth. Here’s a lively, endearing conversation between people who care and have successes to show us. To keep in touch on this issue, join Kelly and sign up for the free, occasional newsletter from Science Moms. To learn more about listen...

Today’s Thanks For Being Here is the first episode since we here at Kelly Corrigan Wonders made the decision to include many different types of special tributes besides eulogies. We believe sharing tributes of all kinds is the loveliest way to tap into our better selves and remember our highest values. This episode features a beautiful Bar Mitzvah blessing. It was written and submitted by Kelly’s...

If you’ve been listening to our recent climate series, “All Together Now”, you’ve heard from some pretty impressive teens. For those of us listening to their incredible achievements and lovingly wondering about the drive of our own kids, we offer a delightful and hilarious poem by Billy Collins, former Poet Laureate of the United States called, “To My Favorite 17 year-old High School Girl”. To lea...

Join us as we marvel at the work of a young activist who reminds us that the movement cannot be stopped. Rahul Durai, a junior in high school, is working hard and smart to help Indiana pass a piece of legislation that could turn the tide in coal country. Katharine Hayhoe (professor, evangelical, science mom and bestselling author) says he’s right on the money. To stay informed as we move forward,...

Once in a great while, maybe even just once in a lifetime, a person comes along who totally changes your perspective, teaches you what matters and gives you an example of what loving your fellow man is supposed to look like. Avery Anderson was that person. She affected people near and far and people around the world showed their love and support of her by wearing rubber bracelets in Avery’s favori...

Thanks to a brilliant TED talk by Baratunde Thurston, I’m thinking about how people tell the story of what’s happened. I also reached out to my neuroscientist friend Lisa Feldman Barrett to ask her about how the brain processes language. It all sounds very heady and it is, a little, but it’s also something worth thinking about since we live in language. To learn more about listener data and our pr...

Yllka Gashi is Kosovo’s answer to Jennifer Aniston. After years starring in the nation’s most adored sit-com, she left her war torn country to raise her daughter in the US. But a certain story stuck with her: a war widow who eked out a living selling honey from her husband’s beehives. 8 years in the making, HIVE won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance and was Kosovo’s official Oscar submission, makin...

12 year-old Jack was an artist, a brilliant reader, a mathematician, a serious student of the Bible and a lover of Legos, baseball and his family. Always conscious of doing the right thing, Jack was the kid you’d want your kids to hang around with to keep them on the straight and narrow. His school friends remember him as smart, kind, funny and the life of the party. Jack was able to take on the j...

Coming off a family wedding, I dug out a copy of The Middle Place to share a passage about learning that my fertility was a casualty of the cancer war and why I had become so convinced that I was meant to have “four by forty.” To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.co...

The worst thing that can happen to a mother happened to Cherylann Gengel. And it has changed every moment since. She is one of those high purpose people who makes you question your vocational certainty and wonder what might you be capable of. She is also a living reminder that loss is a territory with many eco-systems and singular viewpoints. If you feel so moved, her organization will put any gif...

Kirsten’s dad Tom was beloved by his kids and grandkids (one of whom couldn’t pronounce the letter “T”, resulting in the nickname Papa Fom). Tom was a man who loved the simple pleasures in life: playing and winning various games, flying balsa wood planes with his family, joking around, drawing and painting, eating candy, playing “house” and “school” with his grandkids or letting them climb all the...

Here’s a word that everyone is saying these days: mindfulness. I don’t totally know what it means, officially, but I have jerry-rigged a little process to help me mind the moment, to see the day for the small miracle that it is and enter it with intention — and it’s working for me. So, see what you think. And let me know if you have ideas or tweaks on Instagram. To learn more about listener data a...

As a 19 year old, Letitia Hanke took a job as a receptionist at the local roofing company. Within 10 years, she bought the business she has now been running (and growing) for 18 years. If you want to remember that anything is possible, this conversation will wake you up to the possibilities. Part 2 of the How’d You Do That? series. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit:...