On Being with Krista Tippett

Writer and photographer Teju Cole says he is “intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all.” He attends to the border, overlap and interplay of things — from Brahms and Baldwin to daily technologies like Google. To delve into his mind and his multiple arts is to meet this world with creative raw materials for enduring truth and quiet hope. Teju Cole is a photog...

Writer and photographer Teju Cole says he is “intrigued by the continuity of places, by the singing line that connects them all.” He attends to the border, overlap and interplay of things — from Brahms and Baldwin to daily technologies like Google. To delve into his mind and his multiple arts is to meet this world with creative raw materials for enduring truth and quiet hope. Teju Cole is a photog...

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is one of the central people who’s helped us begin to see inside our brains. His work has illuminated the rich interplay between things we saw as separate not that long ago: body, mind, spirit, emotion, behavior and genetics. He is applying what he’s learning about imparting qualities of character — like kindness and practical love — in lives and in classrooms. This...

Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is one of the central people who’s helped us begin to see inside our brains. His work has illuminated the rich interplay between things we saw as separate not that long ago: body, mind, spirit, emotion, behavior and genetics. He is applying what he’s learning about imparting qualities of character — like kindness and practical love — in lives and in classrooms. This...

She has called Brain Pickings, her invention and labor of love, a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” What Maria Popova really delivers, to hundreds of thousands of people each day, is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort, presented in new-fashioned digital ways. She cross-pollinates — between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the intellectual and the experiential. We explor...

She has called Brain Pickings, her invention and labor of love, a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” What Maria Popova really delivers, to hundreds of thousands of people each day, is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort, presented in new-fashioned digital ways. She cross-pollinates — between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the intellectual and the experiential. We explor...

The poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine says every conversation about race doesn’t need to be about racism. But she says all of us — and especially white people — need to find a way to talk about it, even when it gets uncomfortable. Her bestselling book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” catalogued the painful daily experiences of lived racism for people of color. Claudia models how it’s po...

The poet, essayist, and playwright Claudia Rankine says every conversation about race doesn’t need to be about racism. But she says all of us — and especially white people — need to find a way to talk about it, even when it gets uncomfortable. Her bestselling book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” catalogued the painful daily experiences of lived racism for people of color. Claudia models how it’s po...

Writer and illustrator Maira Kalman is well known for her books for children and adults, her love of dogs, and her “New Yorker” covers. Her words and pictures bring life’s intrinsic quirkiness and whimsy into relief right alongside life’s intrinsic seriousness. As a storyteller, she is contemplative and inspired by the stuff of daily life — from fluffy white meringues to well-worn chairs. “There’s...

To be in conversation with Maira Kalman is like wandering into one of her cartoons in The New Yorker. Millions have been prompted to smile and think by her illustrated revision of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style” or a “New York Times” blog or her lovely books and her drawings about dogs. Her words and pictures bring life’s whimsy and quirkiness into relief right alongside its intrinsic serio...

The great scholar and preacher. “The task is reframing so that we can re-experience the social realities that are right in front of us, from a different angle.” Prophets are also always poets. “A society finally cannot live without the quality of mercy.” Walter Brueggemann is one of the world’s great teachers about the prophets who both anchor the Hebrew Bible and have transcended it across histor...

The feminist journalist and the psychotherapist. “It’s partners and lovers and spouses…fathers and brothers and sons and friends.” The difference between apology and forgiveness. “Men are used to trying to fix things.” Trauma, and also healing. What we are naming with the impetus of #MeToo is, at best, an opening to a long-term cultural reckoning to grow up humanity; to make our society more whole...

The feminist journalist and the psychotherapist. “It’s partners and lovers and spouses…fathers and brothers and sons and friends.” The difference between apology and forgiveness. “Men are used to trying to fix things.” Trauma, and also healing. What we are naming with the impetus of #MeToo is, at best, an opening to a long-term cultural reckoning to grow up humanity; to make our society more whole...

A question from Kevin: “I have been hearing a lot of deconstruction of the word ‘civility.’ The debate around this word has become, like so many other things, binary. ‘Civility’ is either a tool of oppressors to silence those on the margins, or it is something that is necessary for every single conversation and dialogue. I’d love to hear something about this word — what it actually means, in what...

Absorption as a definition of happiness. “To bring that calm into the motion, the commotion of the world.” Traveling not in order to move around but in order to be moved. His friend Leonard Cohen. Stillness & silence as a recharging station for the soul. Pico Iyer is one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the “inner world” — in himself and in the 21st century world at large. The j...

Absorption as a definition of happiness. “To bring that calm into the motion, the commotion of the world.” Traveling not in order to move around but in order to be moved. His friend Leonard Cohen. Stillness & silence as a recharging station for the soul. Pico Iyer is one of our most eloquent explorers of what he calls the “inner world” — in himself and in the 21st century world at large. The j...

We Americans revere the creation of wealth. Anand Giridharadas wants us to examine this and how it shapes our life together. This is a challenging conversation but a generative one: about the implicit moral equations behind a notion like “win-win”— and the moral compromises in a cultural consensus we’ve reached, without reflecting on it, about what and who can save us. Anand Giridharadas is a jour...

We Americans revere the creation of wealth. Anand Giridharadas wants us to examine this and how it shapes our life together. This is a challenging conversation but a generative one: about the implicit moral equations behind a notion like “win-win” — and the moral compromises in a cultural consensus we’ve reached, without reflecting on it, about what and who can save us. Anand Giridharadas is a jou...

A brain surgeon. “The brain is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The science of compassion. The baggage of evolution. The two way street of “neural innovation that comes from the brain stem into the heart.” Brain surgeon James Doty is on the cutting edge of our knowledge of the brain and the heart: how they talk to each other; what compassion means in the body and in action; and...

A brain surgeon. “The brain is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.” The science of compassion. The baggage of evolution. The two way street of “neural innovation that comes from the brain stem into the heart.” Brain surgeon James Doty is on the cutting edge of our knowledge of the brain and the heart: how they talk to each other; what compassion means in the body and in action; and...

The U.S. Poet Laureate. “There’s this whole other narrative unfolding.” How history “which once felt so remote, feels closer and active and unresolved.” Listening for the spaces that are under-imagined. “Little leaps of imagination” that can restore us. Tracy K. Smith has a deep interest in “the kind of silence that yields clarity” and “the way our voices sound when we dip below the decibel level...

The U.S. Poet Laureate. “There’s this whole other narrative unfolding.” How history “which once felt so remote, feels closer and active and unresolved.” Listening for the spaces that are under-imagined. “Little leaps of imagination” that can restore us. Tracy K. Smith has a deep interest in “the kind of silence that yields clarity” and “the way our voices sound when we dip below the decibel level...

Co-creator of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. “There is a calming, quieting, centering practice that leads to insight in every tradition.” Contemplative practice and social change. Mindful emailing. Creative, relational, ritual, cyclical. Mirabai Bush works at an emerging 21st century intersection of industry, social healing, and diverse contemplative practices. Raised Catholic with...

Co-creator of the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society. “There is a calming, quieting, centering practice that leads to insight in every tradition.” Contemplative practice and social change. Mindful emailing. Creative, relational, ritual, cyclical. Mirabai Bush works at an emerging 21st century intersection of industry, social healing, and diverse contemplative practices. Raised Catholic with...

“The sense of having walked from far inside yourself / out into the revelation, to have risked yourself / for something that seemed to stand both inside you / and far beyond you, that called you back” David Whyte sent us out into the world at the end of the first On Being Gathering — a four-day coming-together of the On Being community for reflection, conversation, and companionship — at the 1440...