Rooted in reality, written with a keen observer’s eye, and shaped with a sense of song, documentary poetry tells the truth in an artist’s voice. For generations, through wars, crisis, and political upheaval, documentary poets have helped make sense of some of our most difficult moments – by expressing what might otherwise be impossible to say. So what are they writing about today?

This episode was produced in partnership with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Original Air Date: January 13, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
The gospel of Suncere Ali Shakur — This is how I drew you — The poetry that bears witness to the everyday

Guests:
Philip Metres, Suncere Ali Shakur, Kaia Sand, Camille Dungy

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How does someone become an official saint? Meet Dorothy Day — journalist, radical activist, mother and lay minister to the poor who died in 1980 — who is being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church. Shannon Henry Kleiber walks in her footsteps through New York City, where she lived and worked, looking for miracles, talking with people whose lives were changed by her, and wondering how and why saints matter today.

We are grateful for additional music for this show from Tom Chapin, Si Kahn and the Chapin Sisters. Thanks also to the Dorothy Day Guild, and The Department of Special Collections and University Archives, Marquette University Archives, which houses Dorothy Day’s papers and photos.

Original Air Date: April 19, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
In search of miracles, favors and graces — Inside the ‘agony and ecstasy’ of Maryhouse — We are all ‘called to be saints’

Guests:
Robert Ellsberg, Martha Hennessy, Fr. James Martin

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Maps, whether drawn by hand or by satellite, reflect the time they were drawn for. How will the next generation of cartographers deal with challenges like a world being reshaped by climate change?

Original Air Date: December 09, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:
Why are islands in the South Pacific disappearing? — Cartography in the age of Google Maps — This is your brain on maps — The mysterious music of the 'phantom islands'

Guests:
Lagipoiva Cherelle Jackson, Mamata Akella, Bill Limpisathian, Andrew Pekler

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Some 500 years ago, the Scientific Revolution transformed civilization. It paved the way for new technology and commerce, but it also created a worldview that set humans above and apart from the rest of nature, leading to the abuse of the planet’s resources. Today, a new scientific paradigm is taking shape; an understanding that all life on Earth — from the tiniest bacteria to the largest ecosystem — is interconnected. Call it biocentrism or “Gaia 2.0.” Anne and Steve travel to the Island of Knowledge in Italy to meet a new generation of scientists and philosophers.

Original Air Date: April 05, 2025

Interviews In This Hour:
Why the human imagination is both our greatest gift and weapon — Just how smart is a robot dog? — How Galileo helped create the modern world — The new science of 'planetary intelligence'

Guests:
Peter Tse, Marcelo Gleiser, Adam Frank

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What can we learn from whales – and whales from us? Technology like AI is fueling new scientific breakthroughs in whale communication that can help us better understand the natural world. And, there’s an international effort to give whales a voice by granting them personhood.

Special thanks to Ocean Alliance and whale.org for some of the whale recordings heard on this episode.

Original Air Date: August 24, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:
Translating whale, with the help of AI — Searching for a whale alphabet — Giving a voice to the whale ancestors — Roger Payne touches a whale

Guests:
Shane Gero, Carl Zimmer, Mere Takoko

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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, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:
Time, loss and the Big Bang — Finding solace in the vastness of space — Carlo Rovelli's white holes, where time dissolves

Guests:
Marcelo Gleiser, Marjolijn van Heemstra, Carlo Rovelli

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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, 2020

Interviews 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 Radano

Further Reading:
CHCI Ideas from Africa Hub

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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, 2025

Interviews 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 mourn

Guests:
David Kessler, Drew Gilpin Faust, Lauren DePino

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