Wonder Cabinet

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up in London with a Russian Sufi mystic living downstairs, seekers showing up at all hours and meditation happening constantly.  Then his family moved to a  coastal redwood forest in Northern California, where he learned to surf and fell in love with wilderness.   Today, Emmanuel is the founder, executive editor and podcast host of Emergence Magazine – for nearly a decade...

What happens when a physicist experiences a moment of transcendence that science cannot explain? Alan Lightman has spent much of his life exploring the mysteries of the universe—from black holes and the nature of time to the fundamental laws that govern reality. A physicist, novelist and longtime professor at MIT, he's fascinated by the transformative power of awe and wonder. In this live conversa...

We all know our attention is being competed for — but historian of science D. Graham Burnett calls it something more alarming: a "civilizational biohack." In this episode, we talk with Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and co-founder of " The Friends of Attention ," about the movement to liberate our minds from the 17-trillion-dollar attention economy. He draws on surprising sources — the...

What happens when one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has a mystical experience that upends his understanding of reality? In the 1990s, Christof Koch helped launch the modern science of consciousness, searching for the neural basis of subjective experience. A committed materialist, Koch believed brain science would explain how conscious experience is generated.   Then several profound psych...

Sharon Blackie is one of our foremost fairy tale interpreters.  In her new book, “ Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now, ” she reclaims the subversive fairy tale heroines of the past.  Not passive, well-behaved princesses — think Tatterhood instead of Cinderella, the Fox Wife instead of Sleeping Beauty — figures from centuries-old European folk tales that were whispered over hearths and spinni...

Can capitalism save the world it's destroying? Rebecca Henderson thinks so. An economist at Harvard Business School and author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire , she has advised some of the world's biggest corporations and argues that capitalism itself — and what drives corporations — urgently needs to change. She's clear-eyed about capitalism's failures — the inequality, the exploitat...

T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it: the vertigo of deep time. Millions of years of life and death, compressed into bone and stone. Two hundred years ago, Americans began unearthing myst...

What if nature isn’t just alive—but divine? Pantheism, once branded heresy, is finding new adherents among those who don’t consider themselves religious but still sense something sacred and wondrous in the living world. Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of philosophy and religion, traces the long, contested history of wonder—from medieval mystics to modern seekers. She reflects on the Overview Effec...

Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth. For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance. In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum Chenmo—the “Mother of All Buddhas.” As the daughter and granddaughter of nuns, Dekila was raised in a world where spiritual teaching and healing wa...

Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience?  Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search o...

For thousands of years, flowers have threaded themselves through human life—into our rituals, our art, our language, even our names. We decorate our homes and altars with them, distill their scents, celebrate them in poetry and song. But what if we’ve misunderstood them entirely? In How Flowers Made the World , biologist and writer David George Haskell invites us to see flowers not as delicate emb...

What if a river is alive–but we’ve forgotten how to recognize it? This is the radical idea at the heart of the global “rights of nature” movement, which seeks to grant rivers, forests and ecosystems legal standing. Rooted in ancient traditions and emerging in modern law, it challenges the notion of nature as property and a resource to be exploited. In “Is a River Alive?” , acclaimed writer and exp...

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin both saw nature as alive with mystery – and treated wonder as a way of knowing. Literary scholar and science historian Renee Bergland, author of " Natural Magic, " is our guide to the forgotten kinship between the reclusive poet and the celebrated naturalist.  Dickinson and Darwin never met, but they had at least one close friend in common. Both were both fascina...

What if dying is not an ending, but a moment of radical clarity? In his new novel "Vigil," George Saunders conjures a strange and often comic world of bickering angels visiting a dying, deeply flawed man—debating and waiting to see whether he can face the truth about himself before it’s too late. In this conversation, Steve Paulson talks with Saunders about the evolution of his ideas about death a...

How do you deal with the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution? Social scientists use the term "polycrisis" to describe the kind of cascading, overlapping failures that can lead to systemic collapse, and it’s hard not to see the symptoms of a dying world order in events unfolding around us.  But maybe what we’re witnessing is actually grounds for hope. In a forthcoming book " The Begin...

Carlo Rovelli’s quest to understand the nature of reality began not in a physics lab, but in youthful experiments with consciousness, political protest and a restless hunger for meaning—years before he “fell madly in love with physics.” Today, Rovelli is famous for his bestselling books, including " Seven Brief Lessons on Physics " and " Reality Is Not What It Seems ," and his pioneering work on s...

Writer and ecologist Sophie Strand thinks at a scale that can feel dizzying—in the best way. In a single conversation, she can move from the chemical structure of cells to mushroom spores, from ancient weather gods to mycorrhizal fungi, from Bronze Age collapse to the slow intelligence of soil. In this episode of Wonder Cabinet , we talk with Strand about wonder that doesn’t float upward but roots...

You know that moment of amazed surprise when you encounter something so unexpected that it feels almost magical? Welcome to “Wonder Cabinet,” the new podcast from the creators of the Peabody Award-winning public radio show “To the Best of Our Knowledge.”  Each week, Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson host intimate conversations with leading scientists, poets and philosophers about the mystery of...