To The Best Of Our Knowledge TTBOOK

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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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

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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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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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.

Never want to miss an episode? Subscribe to the podcast.

Want to hear more from us, including extended interviews and favorites from the archive? Subscribe to our newsletter.

It’s easy to get caught up in the hype about how psychedelics might revolutionize the treatment of mental illness. But there are also lots of ethical concerns. And probably none are so troubling as the charges of exploitation and cultural appropriation. The fact is, the knowledge about many psychedelics — like magic mushrooms and ayahuasca — comes from the sacred ceremonies of Indigenous cultures. But over the past century, Western scientists and pharmaceutical companies have been going into these cultures, collecting plants and synthesizing their chemical compounds.

Even if science is all about building on the knowledge of earlier discoveries, what is the psychedelic industry's ethical responsibility? Can psychedelics be decolonized?

Original Air Date: October 21, 2023

Interviews In This Hour:

The Tragic Story of Maria Sabina's Sacred Mushrooms — Empowering Indigenous voices in the psychedelic industry — Bioprospecting for psychedelics: How Pharma hunted for Indigenous plant medicines — Spirit Medicine: Yuria Celidwen's vision for an ethical psychedelics

Guests:

Michael Pollan, Dennis McKenna, Erika Dyck, Katherine MacLean, Sutton King, Rachel Fernandez, Lucas Richert, Yuria Celidwen

For more from this series, visit ttbook.org/luminous.