Politics and History

Kyle Bowser is the producer of "The Bible Experience" — a 19-CD audio recording of the New Testament featuring a celebrity all-black cast.More

Thomas Jefferson

Historian Garry Wills details Jefferson’s complex relationship with slavery and says its legacy still haunts us.More

St. Paul

Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a practicing Catholic. He tells Jim Fleming that the apostle Paul didn't say most of the things people blame him for.More

Thing 1 and Thing 2 mural

Brian Boyd talks with Anne Strainchamps about how our love of storytelling helped us evolve.More

TTBOOK

Writer Karen Armstrong's dangerous idea is to love your enemies.More

Bart Ehrman talks about the complex set of beliefs that existed in the early days of Christianity and says it was several hundred years before a single version of the truth was negotiated.More

Australopithecus africanus at the University of Zurich.

Ann Gibbons is an award-winning science writer and author of “The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors.”More

Larry Brilliant

Larry Brilliant is best known as part of the United Nations team of doctors responsible for curing smallpox. But back in the 1960s, he was a hippie whose guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox.More

lady napping

One way to survive on not quite enough sleep? Writer Daniel Pink swears by what he calls a "nappuccino," a short nap with a cup of coffee. You might want to take notes on this one.More

gathering for food

Staff meetings, family reunions, dinner parties — even with all the digital ways we have to connect, face-to-face gatherings are still a regular part of our lives. Priya Parker thinks we need new traditions to make those gatherings meaningful.More

Steven Pinker

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

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."More

Samantha Power

Samantha Power was President Obama's ambassador to the UN, taking part in life-and-death decisions, including whether to launch military strikes. She talks about her two biggest foreign policy challenges — whether to intervene in Libya and Syria.More

Airmen pose with an MQ-9 Reaper at Creech Air Force Base.

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

Children in Addis Ababa.

Dagmawi Woubshet and Julie Mehretu were both born in Addis Ababa and then moved to America. They wonder what the city's explosive growth will mean for its unique character — one rooted in Ethiopia's history as the only African nation never colonized.More

Art of Julie Mehretu

The families of Dagmawi Woubshet and Julie Mehretu fled Ethiopia because of the brutal Communist regime that overthrew Emperor Haile Selassie. The violence and corruption in the post-colonial era decimated the hope and idealism of many Africans.More

A building at the Zoma Museum

In Addis Ababa, curator Meskerem Assegued and artist Elias Sime have created Zoma Museum as a visionary model of an urban future, using ancient Ethiopian building techniques. They say modern development can be much more than concrete high-rises.More

Cash

Journalist Anand Giridharadas says that sometimes, major philanthropic gifts are a lot less altruistic than they may appear.More

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