PRI: To the Best of Our Knowledge Podcast

All over the country, a chorus of hope is coming from an unexpected group — teenagers. They are marching, protesting and demanding a better future as we – the adults – watch them with a kind of heartbreaking pride. These teenagers are not waiting for adults to figure things out for them.

They have superpowers — innocence, idealism, and Instagram — and they aren't waiting for permission to use them to reshape the conversation around everything from gun control to education to climate change.

What can we learn from teenagers today? What do they have that the rest of us don't?

Guests:

Angie Jiang , Kevin Coval , Luis Carranza , Kee Stein , Frances Jensen , Angie Thomas , Tyler Ruzich

If life is a play, what happens during the last act? What’s it like to live knowing you have a limited amount of time left? This week, we’re talking about how to face, and in some cases, embrace your third act, whenever it arrives. Whether you’re looking at retirement, a late-life job change, an illness or just a lot of birthday candles on the cake — how do you live differently when you reach what’s likely to be your final act?

Guests:

Sabrina Frey , Daniel Pink , Maureen "Ma Dukes" Yancey , Martin Amis

New Years celebrations are all parties and hats, songs and champagne. No one ever seems to talk about the fact that something big just ended. An entire year of life, come and gone. Shouldn’t we pause to mourn, or mark its passing with a little reverence?

We don’t handle endings well, in general. So this hour, let’s learn about how to make a good ending — whether leaving a lover, quitting a job, or getting ready for the end of life itself.

Guests:

Steve Almond , Ilana Gershon , Sean Hemingway , Simon Critchley , David Giffels

Your finger’s hovering over the "delete" button on your Facebook app. Your friends are abandoning Twitter. Every day brings fresh revelations of data breaches, privacy abuses, Russian spies, trolls. Is it time to hit “delete” on all of it?

But then again, we joined these platforms for a reason. In a more perfect world, what could these platforms be doing for us?

Guests:

Jaron Lanier , Ethan Zuckerman , Whitney Phillips , DeRay Mckesson , Yuval Noah Harari

Using a complex network of chemical signals, trees talk to each other and form alliances with fellow trees, even other species. In fact, whole forests exist as a kind of superorganism. And some trees are incredibly old. Did you know a single bristlecone pine can live up to 6,000 years? And the root mass of aspens might live 100,000 years? We explore the science and history of trees and talk with Richard Powers about his epic novel "The Overstory."

Guests:

Mark Hirsch , Richard Powers , Suzanne Simard , Amos Clifford , Daegan Miller

Even the most welcome gift can spark guilt, resentment, obligation or vulnerability. We can be inspired by the generosity of others, or unsettled by uncertainty of how to say thank you, or whether an especially generous gift comes with strings attached.

This hour, unwrapping the tangled emotions behind giving — and getting.

Guests:

Megan Costello , Haddyr Copley-Woods , David Graeber , Anand Giridharadas , Elizabeth Dunn

We’ve been taught to ignore, stifle, or just get over anger for many years — but what if we embraced it? It seems like most of us are feeling angry these days. But what if we took that emotion and instead of letting it eat us up, used it as fuel to do something, to actually help us feel better? Could anger be a useful emotion?

Guests:

Rebecca Traister , Cristen Conger , Caroline Ervin , Richard Davidson , Alice Walker

What's the essence of religion? God? Scripture? Moral codes? Or is it really about something more mysterious and unexplainable?

In this hour, we explore the roots of religion — religion before it's even called "religion." Because if you strip away all the doctrine, the dogma, the rules for how to live — what’s left are primal spiritual experiences. But what do they tell us about ourselves and our world?

Guests:

Elizabeth Krohn , Jeff Kripal , Elaine Pagels , Jericho Brown

Modern anti-depressants have saved a lot of minds. And lives. But our 30-year experiment with modern anti-depressants is taking a toll. What have they done to our bodies? And how do we navigate that trade-off between body and mind? Is it clear that they even work?

There are a lot of us who struggle with mood disorders or mental illness of one sort or another. If you do, we here at TTBOOK want you to know that you’re not alone. If you're looking for more in-depth knowledge on what you might be going through, the National Alliance on Mental Illness is an incredible resource.

And if you just need something to elevate your spirit, check out the playlist that Charles made at the bottom of this page. It's packed with the music he listens to when he’s down and needs a lift. Not a fake happy song kind of lift – something honest but also hopeful.

**WARNING: The conversation with Lauren Slater in this show features frank discussion of depression and self-harm. The audio doesn't contain a trigger warning, but for listeners who may be sensitive to discussion of suicide, please consider listening to other interviews on the show separately, or skipping this episode.

Guests:

Lauren Slater , Charles Raison , Anna Fels , Jaime Lowe

We all tell stories about our lives: funny stories, happy stories, sad stories. But are they true stories? In an age of “alternative facts” and “fake news,” we’re all thinking harder about why truth matters – not just in politics, but in our personal lives. A biographer, a poet, a memoirist and a filmmaker describe the moral struggle and personal cost involved in telling not just the truth, but the whole truth.

*Guests: * Caroline Fraser , Terese Marie Mailhot , Karl Ove Knausgaard , Errol Morris

How do we put the fairness and the fun back in American elections? In this hour, we present a few simple ideas for how to remake the electoral process.

Some are small tweaks — like mandatory voting — that could make the whole system run more smoothly: Others may sound a little crazy, like letting 10-year-olds vote. Or creating a marketplace where people buy, sell and trade their votes. Or making election day a national holiday, with parades. And cake.

**Guests: **Carol Anderson , Jason Brennan , Pippa Norris , E. Glen Weyl , Jonathan Bernstein , Eric Liu

If you think of your life as a series of births, what changes? The first birth is when you arrive here, as a wet, wiggling newborn. But there may be other transitions in your life that feel just as difficult and profound. Some people actually call those passages re-birth. But why does the birth metaphor matter?

This hour, we examine midwives, trans men, and born again Christians. Birth. Rebirth. And Born Again.

Interviews in this hour:

The Power of Choice When You're Giving Birth

Where Are the Midwives?

Midwives in the Golden Age of Television

Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity

"Happy In My Own Skin": The Transition from Bess To Benn

What Does it Really Mean to Be a Born Again Christian?

Guests:

Ayelet Waldman

Stephen Ross

Katherine MacLean

Daniel Kasza

William Richards

Interviews in this hour:

Ayelet Waldman Talks about Depression, LSD, and Her Marriage With Michael Chabon

How Psychedelic Drugs Will Revolutionize Psychiatry

Lessons from a Psychedelic Guide

On A Mountain Top, With Ayahuasca And Frog Poison

Psychedelics and God

Psychedelics: The Next Revolution in Psychiatry?

From our narrow vantage point on Earth, how can we see what's out there, beyond our skies?

Guests:

Francis Halzen

Priya Natarajan

Seth Shostak

Don Gurnett

Neil deGrasse Tyson

Interviews in this hour:

How To Catch A Neutrino

How Do We Investigate The Invisible Parts of the Universe?

Search For Life In All The Wrong Places

What Can You Hear In Space?

The Universe Is Under No Obligation To Make Sense To Us

Why is the world so damn cynical? Rather than surrendering to corrosive, hopeless snark, we look to some unexpected sources to make the case for sincerity.

Guests:

Jason Rohrer

Christy Wampole

Christian Picciolini

Ingrid LaFleur

Interviews in this hour:

"You Are Our Miracle": A Game To Make You Love Your Fellow Player

The Toll of Living Awash in Irony

Can You Change The Mind Of A White Supremacist?

Envisioning a Better Today Through The Tomorrows of Afrofuturism

It was a dirty word 25 years ago. But now, more and more people are identifying as Socialists…in America and on the ballot.

Guests:

Kshama Sawant

Sean Wilentz

Cheryl Blue

Andrew Haug

Erik Olin Wright

Brother Ali

Interviews in this hour:

How Socialism Won in Seattle

In Defense of Liberals

Milwaukee's Socialist Experiment

Rethinking Socialism for Today

Brother Ali on Islam, the Left, and Hip Hop

Bees are endangered, but all over the world, people are stepping up to save them — in backyards, science labs, and the abandoned lots of urban Detroit.

Guests:

Heather Swan

Nicole Lindsey

Timothy Paule

Thor Hanson

Christof Koch

Tania Munz

Stephanie Elkins

Peter Sobol

Anne Strainchamps

Interviews in this hour:

Falling In Love With Bees

'Medicine'

Why We Ought to Live a 'Pro-Bee Lifestyle'

Rebuilding Detroit, Hive by Hive

'Honeybee'

How Do We Wrap Our Minds Around Bee Consciousness?

Waggle Dancing with Karl von Frisch

'To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee'

When suicide bombers blow up crowded marketplaces, or a lone shooter attacks a nightclub, one question we’re always left with is why. This hour, a look at the underlying psychology of political violence.

Guests:

Mubin Shaikh

Clark McCauley

Åsne Seierstad

Tanya Luhrmann

Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche

Interviews in this hour:

The Reformed Radical

The Psychology of Terrorism

What Can Americans Learn from a Norwegian Massacre?

Let’s Change the Way We Think About Thinking

The Buddhist Master Who Went on a Four Year Wandering Retreat

Do chimpanzees have spiritual experiences? A remarkable discovery in West Africa suggests they might.

Guests:

Jane Goodall

Laura Kehoe

Frans de Waal

Barbara King

Ara Norenzayan

Jeff Schloss

Andrew Newberg

Interviews in this hour:

Do Chimpanzees Have Spiritual Experiences?

How “Big Gods” Transformed Human History

An Evolutionary Biologist Searches for God

What Bliss Looks Like In Your Brain