Our lives are so rushed, so busy. Always on the clock. Counting the hours, minutes, seconds. Have you ever stopped to wonder: what are you counting? What is this thing, that’s all around us, invisible, inescapable, always running out? What is time?Deep Time is a series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature. We'll explore life beyond the clock, develop habits of "timefulness" and learn how to live with greater awareness of the many types of time in our lives.Original Air Date: November 18, 2023Interviews In This Hour: Time, loss and the Big Bang — Finding solace in the vastness of space — Carlo Rovelli's white holes, where time dissolvesGuests: Marcelo Gleiser, Marjolijn van Heemstra, Carlo RovelliNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Music crosses boundaries between traditional and modern, local and global, personal and political. Take jazz — a musical form born out of forced migration and enslavement. We typically think it originated in New Orleans and then spread around the world. But today, we examine an alternate history of jazz — one that starts in Africa, then crisscrosses the planet, following the movements of people and empires -- from colonial powers to grassroots revolutionaries to contemporary artists throughout the diaspora.This history of jazz is like the music itself: fluid and improvisatory. In this hour, produced in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) — a global consortium of 270 humanities centers and institutes — we hear how both African and African-American music have shaped the sound of the world today. Original Air Date: July 04, 2020Interviews In This Hour: How Meklit Hadero Reimagined Ethiopian Jazz — So You Say You Want A Revolution — Reclaiming the Hidden History of South African Jazz — 'We Are All African When We Listen'Guests: Meklit Hadero, Valmont Layne, Gwen Ansell, Ron RadanoFurther Reading:CHCI Ideas from Africa HubNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

It’s been five years since the start of the pandemic. Some 1.2 million Americans died of COVID. That’s a lot of grief. But our loss is much more than death. Many lost the friendship of the workplace. And for a subset of teenagers, there was the loss of two years of high school. And the list goes on. Many of us are still left unmoored. But maybe our collective grief can bring us together.Original Air Date: March 08, 2025Interviews In This Hour: What happens when a nation doesn't grieve? — What the Civil War can teach us about American grief — How a funeral singer helps us to mournGuests: David Kessler, Drew Gilpin Faust, Lauren DePinoNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Most Americans take their sovereignty for granted — the nation’s right to make its own laws and govern its own people. The same rights we recognize in other sovereign nations, with one glaring exception — the Native nations and tribes who were here first. For Native Americans, sovereignty is not some abstract idea. It’s an ongoing, daily struggle. Original Air Date: July 13, 2024Interviews In This Hour: The battle over tribal rights in Bad River — Quannah ChasingHorse’s two worlds – Native activist and supermodel — Are Indian casinos the key to tribal sovereignty? — No more Native American 'trauma porn'Guests: Mary Mazzio, Quannah ChasingHorse, Steven Andrew Light, David TreuerNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

When you look at your body in the mirror, do you love what you see? Do you pick out the things you don’t like? Maybe you’ve heard of body positivity. But what if we just felt neutral about our bodies? In this episode, we talk about our bodies — how we move through the world in these fleshy vessels, how it feels to exist in our bodies in a world that asks so much from them. How do we live full and embodied lives?Original Air Date: September 30, 2023Interviews In This Hour: Finding Peace in Neutrality: Jessi Kneeland on Rethinking Body Positivity — The Body Speaks: Rae Johnson on Reconnecting with Ourselves to Transform Society — Multiple Identities, One Body: Sami Schalk Discusses Black Disability PoliticsGuests: Jessi Kneeland, Rae Johnson, Sami SchalkNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Some artists work with pen and ink, some use brushes and paint. And some make art out of time. Meet some contemporary artists who are finding new ways to bridge the distance between us and the furthest reaches of time.Deep Time is a series all about the natural ecologies of time from To The Best Of Our Knowledge and the Center for Humans and Nature. We'll explore life beyond the clock, develop habits of "timefulness" and learn how to live with greater awareness of the many types of time in our lives.Original Air Date: February 15, 2025Interviews In This Hour: Crafting cosmic art through deep time — What if clocks were synced to the flow of a river? — Capturing a symphony of time in a dawn chorusGuests: Katie Paterson, Jonathon Keats, Alex BraidwoodNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Jim Thorpe was one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known — a legend in the NFL, MLB, NCAA, and in the Olympics. Today he is being celebrated by a new generation of Native Americans. Rapper Tall Paul’s album is called, “The Story of Jim Thorpe." Tall Paul is an Anishinaabe and Oneida Hip-Hop artist enrolled on the Leech Lake reservation in Minnesota. Biographer David Maraniss is the author of "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe." Activist Suzan Shown Harjo is the recipient of a 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom. She is Cheyenne and Hodulgee Muscogee. Patty Loew is the director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University. She is a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. Special thanks to Robert W. Wheeler and the Smithsonian for archival audio.Original Air Date: January 14, 2023Interviews In This Hour: Was Jim Thorpe the greatest athlete who ever lived? — The white man's trophy — A hero who looks like me — Indigenous excellence: Hip hop and the legacy of Jim ThorpeGuests: Tall Paul, Suzan Shown Harjo, Patty Loew, David MaranissNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Floods and fires have always been with us, but now we may have crossed over into a new stage of permacrisis. So what does resilience look like when you know this fire or flood won’t be the last one? What survival strategies do we need for this age of climate disaster? Original Air Date: February 01, 2025Interviews In This Hour: Resilience or recklessness? The risks of rebuilding where disaster strikes — Can we still talk about 'natural disasters' in the age of climate change? — Why we need better stories to persevere in uncertain timesGuests: Brian Stone, Lorraine Daston, Annalee NewitzNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Americans used to believe that news anchors were basically reporting the truth. But in recent years, trust in journalism has largely evaporated. And that’s not an accident as the news media have been weaponized. So what can journalists do to regain the public trust?Original Air Date: June 15, 2024Interviews In This Hour: Journalist Ezra Klein on podcasting, pundits and when to take yourself out of the news — Reclaiming journalism in a fast-changing media landscape — How a hyperlocal newsletter is redefining the ‘news’Guests: Ezra Klein, Deborah Blum, Rob GurwittNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

Sometimes the world is just too much. Too much awful news, too many things to worry about, too much to do. When you can’t take another headline, can’t handle another email, when you know inside you need something deeper than a vacation—maybe it’s time for a retreat.Original Air Date: January 18, 2025Interviews In This Hour: Pico Iyer’s second home — A plant scientist explores her interior wildernessGuests: Pico Iyer, Monica GaglianoNever want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.