Colonization in Africa was much more than a land grab. It was a project to replace — and even erase — local cultures. To label them inferior. Music, arts, literature and of course language. In other words, it permeated everything. So how do you undo that? How do you unlearn what you’ve been forced to learn?

In this hour, produced in partnership with the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) and Africa is a Country — we learn what it means to decolonize the mind.

Original Air Date: March 20, 2021

Interviews In This Hour:

Reckon with the Past To Decolonize the Future — Reclaiming the Hidden History of Blackness — Never Write In The Language of the Colonizer

Guests:

Adom Getachew, Simon Gikandi, Ngugi wa Thiong’o

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Decolonizing the Mind

What’s the last dream you remember having? Some of us dream every night. But we’re in too much of a hurry to remember our dreams or think about them the next day. Others of us are dream-deprived. What if we embrace our dreams — and our night selves —  as a way to understand ourselves better, to connect to each other, even to lead a better life?

Original Air Date: February 24, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:

Why dream life matters — The lives we live inside our dreams — A dreaming mind, illustrated — Embracing your night self

Guests:

Rubin Naiman, Kelly Bulkeley, Roz Chast, Annabel Abbs-Streets

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In Your Dreams

In the first episode of "Luminous," our series about the philosophy and the future of psychedelics, how can psilocybin ease our fears about dying? And how can psychedelics change the way we approach the end of life?

Original Air Date: April 08, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

How a pioneering psychedelic researcher 'leaned in' to his terminal cancer diagnosis — Dying without fear: How psychedelics can ease the anxiety of terminal illness — The terror and the ecstasy of psychedelics

Guests:

Roland Griffiths, Lou Lukas, Anthony Bossis

Editorial note: Roland Griffiths passed away on Oct. 16, 2023. The conversation with him in this episode took place in January 2023. 

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Luminous: What Can Psychedelics Teach Us About Dying?

The bond we share with dogs runs deep. The satisfaction of gentle head scratches or a round of playing fetch is simple and pure, but in other ways, the connection we have is truly unknowable. How do dogs make our lives better? How do they think? And how do we give them the lives they deserve?

Original Air Date: February 05, 2022

Interviews In This Hour:

Adventure, goofiness and trail snacks: Stories from the dog musher's journal — Getting inside the mind of a dog — Nothing makes losing a dog easy. But a bridge dog can help. — Joy and peace, high up on Dog Mountain

Guests:

Blair Braverman, Quince Mountain, Donna Haraway, Sarah Miller

Further Reading:

Pet Loss Resource Center: Resources for animal loss and grief

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To All The Dogs We've Loved

Today we're bringing you a conversation from "Kelly Corrigan Wonders." As a podcaster, Kelly is a kindred spirit – curious, genuine, caring — and this conversation is from a series about one of TTBOOK’s own core values – intellectual humility.  It’s about the magic that happens when we stop trying to be right all the time.

In this episode, Kelly talks with researcher and academic Daryl Van Tongeren about how we come to conclusions and what, if anything, can interrupt the creation of overconfident, under-researched, ironclad, and divisive by nature convictions.

Daryl teaches at Hope College in Michigan and researches the social motivation for meaning and its relation to virtues and morals.

Listen to this: The What, Why and How of Intellectual Humility

In the world of internet influencers and YouTube stars, it’s not enough to be ordinary anymore. You need to be special. But where did this craze for personal branding come from? Why are we so obsessed with ourselves? To understand this cult of the self, we need to go back to 19th century spiritual movements and the rise of the huckster — and also the myth of rugged individualism. But if we’re always shouting “Me me me,” what are we losing? What has it cost us?

Original Air Date: February 03, 2024

Interviews In This Hour:

If nobody sees you online, do you exist? — How personal branding became an American religion — Why rugged individualism is a dangerous myth — The philosophers who invented the modern self

Guests:

Angelo Bautista, Tara Isabella Burton, Alissa Quart, Andrea Wulf

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Cult of the Self

We all need a good fantasy world to retreat to sometimes – whether it's Hogwarts or Middle Earth, Westeros or Wakanda. But magical thinking can be dangerous too. And escapism isn't always innocent. So where do you draw the line between fantasy and reality?

Original Air Date: September 17, 2022

Interviews In This Hour:

Why not escape into fantasy? A tale of Disney adults — The magical thinkers, the dreamers, and the hucksters of America's fantasyland — Neil Gaiman on where dreams — and nightmares — come from

Guests:

Sarah Rachul, Marianne Eloise, Kurt Andersen, Neil Gaiman

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Losing Yourself in Fantasy

2019 was an important year throughout the African diaspora — the 400th year since enslaved Africans first arrived in the United States. In Ghana — once the center of the European slave trade — 2019 was declared "the year of return" and the start of a campaign to encourage descendants of enslaved Africans to re-connect with the land of their ancestors. Thousands of African-Americans made the trip to Ghana — and many have decided to stay. They're fed up with police brutality and systemic racism in the US, ready to build new lives in Africa — and their number is growing.

Original Air Date: September 03, 2022

Interviews In This Hour:

‘This is where I should be’: 1,500 Black Americans make Ghana their new home — The land of your ancestors — Should Africans move to America? — A Black friendship

Guests:

Robert Hanserd, Ridwan Karim Dini-Osman, Prince Marfo, Ato Quayson, Emmanuel Kofi Apraku Bempong

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Year of Return

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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Docupoetry

When you’re on the clock, you’re always running out of time – because in our culture, time is money. The relentless countdown is making us and the planet sick. But clock time isn’t the only kind. There are older, deeper rhythms of time that sustain life. What would it be like to live more in tune with nature’s clocks?

**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: June 03, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

How time came to rule our lives — and how we might free ourselves — The past and future of keeping time

Guests:

Jenny Odell, David Rooney

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Categories:

Deep Time: The Tyranny of Time

You're not even out of bed and you're already worrying. So let's talk about it: How anxious we are, how we got that way, and what to do about it.

Original Air Date: March 25, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

Patricia Pearson on A History of Anxiety — To Waste Time Is To Deepen Life — Treating Anxiety With Horror Films — Natalie Merchant on 'Leave Your Sleep' — Robert Rand on Healing Through Zydeco

Guests:

Patricia Pearson, Richard Polt, Eliza Smith, Natalie Merchant, Robert Rand

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Out of the Anxiety Box

Do you ever feel like there’s something missing in your life? You don’t know exactly what it is. And there’s never enough time to really think about it. You might get a glimpse of it if you slow down, or look deeply at something (or someone), or remember some childhood joy. What if that thing you’re missing is a sense of wonder?

Original Air Date: March 18, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

A sense of wonder through the eyes — and ears — of a child — What goosebumps, tears and grief can teach us about being awestruck — Finding sacred meaning through poetry

Guests:

Lulu Miller, Dacher Keltner, Jennifer Michael Hecht

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Cultivating Wonder

For all the talk about how psychedelics might transform psychiatric care, there's still a fascinating question at the heart of psychedelic science. Is it the mind-blowing experience that fundamentally changes a person’s outlook on life? Or is it the powerful molecules that rewire the brain?

Check out the full series: ttbook.org/luminous

Original Air Date: December 16, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

Does psychedelic therapy need the trip? — Will psychedelics replace antidepressants? — Spiritual warriors in the psychedelic underground

Guests:

David Olson, Charles Raison, Rachel Harris

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Luminous: Is it the drug or is it the trip?

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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Off The Map

America is in the midst of a new debate over how we tell our history. You can see it everywhere – in arguments over critical race theory and AP history classes, in museums and state capitals, in the news and on talk radio. It’s fueled in part by an emerging generation of public historians who are re-shaping our national narratives.

Original Air Date: February 25, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

Uncovering The Blind Spots In Historical Narratives — Columnist Jamelle Bouie on dispelling 'civic myths' with American history — How 'Praise Houses' Reclaim A Lost Piece of Black History

Guests:

Rund Abdelfatah, Ramtin Arablouei, Jamelle Bouie, Charmaine Minniefield

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How Should We Tell Our History?

There are old folktales and legends of people who can become animals. Animals who can become people. And there’s a lesson for our own time in those shapeshifting stories — a recognition that the membrane between what's human and more-than-human is razor thin.

Human identity cannot be separated from our nonhuman kin. From forest ecology to the human microbiome, emerging research suggests that being human is a complicated journey made possible only by the good graces of our many companions. In partnership with the Center for Humans and Nature and with support from the Kalliopeia Foundation, To The Best Of Our Knowledge is exploring this theme of "kinship" in a special radio series.

To learn more about the Kinship series, head to ttbook.org/kinship.

Original Air Date: November 20, 2021

Interviews In This Hour:

Reclaiming the fierce women who are shapeshifters — How a man turned into a raven — Shapeshifters, shamans and the 'New Animism' — Horror author Stephen Graham Jones on what our monsters say about us

Guests:

Sharon Blackie, David Abram, Chris Gosden, Stephen Graham Jones

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Shapeshifting

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?

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

Check out the full series at ttbook.org/deeptime

Deep Time: The Cosmos and Us

Ever want to quit your job, leave the rat race behind, and head back to the land? Buy an old farmhouse or build a solar-powered home and live self-sufficiently on a few acres of your very own? Generations before you have shared that dream. The reality is more complicated. Even owning your own land is an ethical minefield.

Original Air Date: December 18, 2021

Interviews In This Hour:

Can you live off the land and still live ethically? — What does 'owning' land actually mean? — How the Land Back movement is reclaiming land stolen from Indigenous people

Guests:

Makenna Goodman, Simon Winchester, Hayden King

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Whose Land Is It?

Radical politics and radical movements are on the rise everywhere. Against racial violence, and climate change; against gender inequality, corporate greed, low wages, oil pipelines, opioids.  Maybe at heart they all have a common cause.  Maybe they're all — in one way or another — a rebellion against capitalism.

Original Air Date: February 11, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

The Communist Manifesto still inspires — The radical philosopher mapping the crises of capitalism — Are we living through a 'hinge point' moment?

Guests:

China Miéville, Nancy Fraser

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Against Capitalism

We've always told ghost stories, huddling around campfires, scaring ourselves silly. Today there’s a new venue for spooky stories – YouTube, where creators are turning cobwebby VHS video tapes and other relics of the early internet into a new genre – analog horror. In this hour, we celebrate weird fiction in all its forms, going back to the original eldritch being himself, H.P. Lovecraft.

Original Air Date: October 28, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

When dreams escape sleep: the analog horror of 'Somnium DreamViewer' — Kelly Link on 'Pretty Monsters' — The Ecology of Noise in Lovecraft's Fiction — The Magickal Realism and Continuing Influence of H.P. Lovecraft

Here's the original broadcast from 2015 that featured more on Lovecraft, including reckoning with his racist views. 

Guests:

Holly Fernwright, Kelly Link, Dean Lockwood, Erik Davis

Check out our previous episode on H.P. Lovecraft.

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