To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Paul Beatty on 'The Nazi and the Barber'

Bookmarks

Paul Beatty, the Booker Prize Winning Author of "The Sellout" recommends "The Nazi and the Barber," a novel by Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath. More

Latest Stories

To Make Big Social Change, Start With The PB&J Sandwiches

Articles

Organizer and activist DeRay Mckesson says hoping for big change is great, but it doesn't go anywhere without small actions where people take care of one another.

Length:

12:25

Everything Is Actually Awesome

Dangerous Ideas

Steven Pinker presents a Dangerous Idea: things today are actually better than they've ever been.

Length:

3:18

A Naturalist's Hopeful Pilgrimage

Sonic Sidebar

Claire Peaslee is a naturalist who lives in Point Reyes, California, a place decimated by recent forest fires that sits literally on top of the San Andreas Fault. Yet she finds hope there through pilgrimage.

Length:

4:22

Can We Find Hope? Or Do We Need To Make Our Own?

Articles

Conceptually, hope feels big, amorphous, hard to define exactly. But for the past few months, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producers have been trying anyway. Scientists, activists, futurists, theologians, artists, authors all weighed in on what they think when they hear the word "hope."

Hope Rises

Interactive

Hope is a complicated, even slippery, word. One that demands a poet’s voice. Here’s Alice Walker, reading her poem “Hope is a Woman Who Has Lost Her Fear.”

Length:

2:49

The Science Of Looking On The Bright Side

Articles

How neuroscientist Tali Sharot accidentally stumbled on what’s known as “the optimism bias” — our hard-wired belief that our future will be better than our past or present.

Length:

12:21

Yuval Noah Harari on 'Chimpanzee Politics'

Bookmarks

Sometimes you stumble upon a book that sets you on a whole new path. For Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Norah Harari — author of "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" — it wasn’t a novel, a memoir, or even a history book that changed his world. It was a book about chimpanzees.

Length:

4:29

War is Beautiful?

Photo Gallery

David Shields says the New York Times is complicit in romanticizing war through imagery.

In The Case Of Iran, Who Decides What Constitutes 'War'?

Articles

Was Qassem Soleimani 'assassinated'? 'Killed'? The legal differences are complicated, says Brookings Institution fellow Scott Anderson.

Length:

10:04

Lidia Yuknavitch on 'Borne'

Bookmarks

The main character in Jeff VanderMeer’s other-worldly tale is a polymorphous bear who moves in magical and unexpected ways, and keeps secrets in his fur. It’s both a futuristic story and one with deep history, the kind of dystopian fiction that drew Yuknavitch in, again, and again.

Length:

3:25