Groundbreaking Peabody Award-winning conversation about the big questions of meaning, hosted by Krista Tippett. Every Thursday a new discovery about the immensity of our lives — and frequent special features like poetry, music and Q + A with Krista.

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Jimmy Wales — The Sum of All Human Knowledge

Each of us, in our everyday interactions, chooses between letting technology shape us and shaping it towards human purposes, even towards honoring what we hold dear. Sherry Turkle, director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, is full of usable ideas — from how to declare email bankruptcy to teaching our children the rewards of solitude.

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/alive-enough-reflecting-our-technology/63

Sherry Turkle — Alive Enough? Reflecting — Our Technology (Nov 15, 2012)

Human memory is a sensory experience, says psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. Through his longtime research and innovation in trauma treatment, he shares what he's learning about how bodywork like yoga or eye movement therapy can restore a sense of goodness and safety. What he’s learning speaks to a resilience we can all cultivate in the face of the overwhelming events — which, after all, make up the drama of culture, of news, and of life.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/restoring-the-body-bessel-van-der-kolk-on-yoga-emdr-and-treating-trauma/5801

Bessel van der Kolk — Restoring the Body: Yoga, EMDR, and Treating Trauma

Details and poem text: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/16/mark-strand-dreams-collected-poems/

MORE / POEM TEXT

"Dreams" by Mark Strand read by Maria Popova

Steeped in the cutting edge of research around the social lives of networked teens, danah boyd demystifies technology while being wise about the changes it’s making to life and relationship. She has intriguing advice on the technologically-fueled generation gaps of our age — that our children’s immersion in social media may offer a kind of respite from their over-structured, overscheduled analog lives. And that cyber-bullying is an online reflection of the offline world, and blaming technology is missing the point.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/danah-boyd-online-reflections-of-our-offline-lives/7449

danah boyd — Online Reflections of Our Offline Lives

She has called Brain Pickings, her invention and labor of love, a “human-powered discovery engine for interestingness.” What Maria Popova really delivers, to hundreds of thousands of people each day, is wisdom of the old-fashioned sort, presented in new-fashioned digital ways. She cross-pollinates — between philosophy and design, physics and poetry, the intellectual and the experiential. We meet Maria Popova at 30, and explore her gleanings, thus far, on what it means to lead a good life — intellectually, creatively, and spiritually.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/maria-popova-cartographer-of-meaning-in-a-digital-age/7580

Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital World

Background, context, and poem text: http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/15/nikki-giovanni-love-friendship-loneliness/

"I'm Not Lonely" by Nikki Giovanni (read by Maria Popova)

"Love Is" by Nikki Giovanni (read by Maria Popova)

"When I Die" by Nikki Giovanni (read by Maria Popova)

Genetics describes DNA sequencing, but epigenetics sees that genes can be turned on and off and expressed differently through changes in environment and behavior. Rachel Yehuda is a pioneer in understanding how the effects of stress and trauma can transmit biologically, beyond cataclysmic events, to the next generation. She has studied the children of Holocaust survivors and of pregnant women who survived the 9/11 attacks. But her science is a form of power for flourishing beyond the traumas large and small that mark each of our lives and those of our families and communities.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/rachel-yehuda-how-trauma-and-resilience-cross-generations/7786

Rachel Yehuda — How Trauma and Resilience Cross Generations

When Tiffany Shlain thinks of her favorite quote from naturalist John Muir, she thinks of the internet: "When you tug at a single thing in the universe, you find it's attached to everything else." As a filmmaker and founder of the Webby Awards — the "Oscars of the internet" — she is committed to reframing technology as an expression of the best of what humanity is capable, with all the complexity that entails. With her young family, she has helped popularize the practice of the "tech shabbat" — 24 unplugged hours each week. Her perspective on our technology-enhanced lives is ultimately a purposeful and enriching one: the internet is our global brain, towards which we can apply all the wisdom we are gaining about the brains in our heads and the character in our lives.

See more at http://www.onbeing.org/program/tiffany-shlain-growing-up-the-internet/8545

Tiffany Shlain — Growing Up the Internet

Pauline Boss is Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Loss, Trauma and Resilience: Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss, Loving Someone Who Has Dementia, and Ambiguous Loss. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Pauline Boss — The Myth of Closure." Find more at onbeing.org.

[Unedited] Pauline Boss with Krista Tippett

There is no such thing as closure. Family therapist Pauline Boss says that the idea of closure in fact leads us astray — it’s a myth we need put aside, like the idea we’ve accepted that grief has five linear stages and we come out the other side done with it. She coined the term “ambiguous loss,” creating a new field in family therapy and psychology. And she has wisdom for the complicated griefs and losses in all of our lives and in how we best approach the losses of others — including those very much in our public midst right now. Find more at www.onbeing.org/program/pauline-boss-the-myth-of-closure/8757

Pauline Boss — The Myth of Closure

Jimmy Wales is the co-founder and promoter of Wikipedia and chair emeritus of the Wikimedia Foundation. This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Jimmy Wales — The Sum of All Human Knowledge" Find more at onbeing.org.

On Being with Krista Tippett

[Unedited] Jimmy Wales with Krista Tippett

In the 15 years since its inception, Wikipedia has become as much a global community as a business venture - a living organism with a mission statement to make “the sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world.” And a conversation with co-founder Jimmy Wales - one of the architects of that philosophy and the world-changing project that has grown up around it - is full of surprises. What Wikipedia is learning has resonance for our wider public life  - about the imperfect but gratifying work of navigating truth amidst difference, ongoing learning, and dynamic belonging.

Jimmy Wales — The Sum of All Human Knowledge

The 13th-century mystic and poet Rumi is a best-selling author in the modern West who has long influenced Islamic thought and spirituality, though his Muslim identity is often lost in translation. Enter the exuberant world of Rumi with Iranian-American poet and scholar Fatemeh Keshavarz. Delve into why Rumi matters in our time and how he understood searching and restlessness as a kind of arrival. And through a lush production of his words and poetry -- layered in Persian and English -- experience how he saw every form of human love as a mirror of the divine. And, how Rumi inspired the whirling dervishes.

See more at www.onbeing.org/program/ecstatic-faith-rumi/189

Fatemeh Keshavarz — The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi (March 8, 2012)

Darnell Moore says honest, uncomfortable conversations are a sign of love — and that self-reflection goes hand-in-hand with culture shift and social evolution. A writer and activist, he’s grown wise through his work on successful and less successful civic initiatives, including Mark Zuckerberg’s plan to remake the schools of Newark, New Jersey, and he is a key figure in the ongoing, under-publicized, creative story of The Movement for Black Lives. This conversation was recorded at the 2019 Skoll World Forum in Oxford, England.

Darnell Moore is the U.S. head of strategy and programs at Breakthrough, a global human rights organization. He is a civic media fellow at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Innovation Lab and a writer-in-residence at Columbia University’s Center on African-American Religion, Sexual Politics, and Social Justice. His book is “No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Darnell Moore — Self - Reflection And Social Evolution

Spiritual border-crossing and social creativity were themes in a conversation between Shane Claiborne and Omar Saif Ghobash, two people who have lived with some discomfort within the religious groups they continue to love. Ghobash is a diplomat of the United Arab Emirates and author of Letters to a Young Muslim. One of his responses to the politicization of Islam has been to bring a new art gallery culture to Dubai, creating spaces for thought and beauty. Claiborne is a singular figure in Evangelical Christianity as co-founder of The Simple Way, an intentional neighborhood-based community in North Philadelphia. One of the things he’s doing now is a restorative justice project inspired by a Bible passage — to transform guns into garden tools. This conversation took place at the invitation of Interfaith Philadelphia, which hosted a year of civil conversations modeled after the work of On Being’s Civil Conversations Project.

Shane Claiborne is the founder of The Simple Way, an intentional community in North Philadelphia. He’s recently written a book, Beating Guns, about the movement he co-leads to transform America’s guns into garden tools. His other books include The Irresistible Revolution.

His Excellency Omar Saif Ghobash is now the assistant minister for cultural affairs in the Cabinet of the United Arab Emirates. He was formerly UAE ambassador to France and Russia. His book is Letters to a Young Muslim.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Shane Claiborne and Omar Saif Ghobash — Called and Conflicted

Ta-Nehisi Coates says we must love our country the way we love our friends — and not spare the hard truths. “Can you get to a place where citizens are encouraged to see themselves critically, where they’re encouraged to see their history critically?” he asks. Coates is a poetic journalist and a defining voice of our times. He’s with us in a conversation that is joyful, hard, kind, soaring, and down-to-earth all at once. He spoke with Krista as part of the 2017 Chicago Humanities Festival.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a distinguished writer in residence at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. His books include “Between the World and Me,” “We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy,” and the novel “The Water Dancer.” He’s also the current writer of the Marvel comics “The Black Panther” and “Captain America.”

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org. This episode originally aired in November 2017.

Ta-Nehisi Coates — Imagining a New America

James Baldwin said, “American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.” Imani Perry embodies that prism. For the past few years, Perry has been pondering the notions of slow work and resistant joy as she writes about what it means to raise her two black sons — as a thinker and writer at the intersection of law, race, culture, and literature. This live conversation was recorded at the Chautauqua Institution.

Imani Perry - More Beautiful

Lennon Flowers and Rev. Jennifer Bailey embody a particular wisdom of millennials around grief, loss, and faith. Together they created The People’s Supper, which uses shared meals to build trust and connection among people of different identities and perspectives. Since 2017, they have hosted more than 1,500 meals. In the words they use, the practices they cultivate (some of which we’ve collected on onbeing.org), and the way they think, Flowers and Bailey issue an invitation not to safe space, but to brave space. 

Rev. Jennifer Bailey is co-founder of The People’s Supper and the founder and executive director of Faith Matters Network. She is also an ordained itinerant elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and her writing appears regularly in publications including “Sojourners” and The Huffington Post. 

Lennon Flowers is co-founder of The People’s Supper and the co-founder and executive director of The Dinner Party. She is also an Ashoka Fellow and an Aspen Ideas Scholar. She has written for CNN, “YES!,” “Forbes,” Open Democracy, EdWeek, and “Fast Company.” 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

Jimmy Wales — The Sum of All Human Knowledge

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