Here are some experiences to which Nick Cave gives voice and song: the "universal condition" of yearning, and of loss; a "spirituality of rigor"; and the transcendent and moral dimensions of what music is about. This Australian musician, writer, and actor first made a name in the wild world of ?80s post-punk and later with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. He also underwent public struggles with addiction and rehab.

Since the accidental death of his 15-year-old son Arthur in 2015, and a few years later, the death of his eldest child Jethro, he has entered yet another transfigured era, co-created an exquisite book called Faith, Hope and Carnage, and become a frank and eloquent interlocutor on grief. As a human and a songwriter, Nick Cave is an embodiment of a life examined and evolved. He sat with Krista in the On Being studio in Minneapolis, and the gorgeous conversation that followed is woven in this episode with his gorgeous music.

Nick Cave is the songwriter and lead singer of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Their albums include Ghosteen, Skeleton Tree, and Push the Sky Away. Nick's recent albums with frequent collaborator Warren Ellis include Seven Psalms and Carnage. His book, which takes the form of an electric conversation with journalist Seán O?Hagan, is Faith, Hope and Carnage. He frequently writes, and answers questions from his fans, on the website The Red Hand Files.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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A little musing on this season, the spectacular finale headed your way ? and ways to stay connected in the time ahead.

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Our built world is designed around something called "normal," and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting for better or worse ? and always, always changing. This is a fact so ordinary ? and yet not something most of us routinely pause to know and to ponder and work with. But Sara Hendren has made it her passion, bringing to it her varied vocations and gifts: being a painter and loving how art reveals truth not by way of simplicity, but by juxtaposition; teaching design to engineering students; parenting three beloved children, one of whom has Down syndrome. 

This is a conversation that will have you moving through the world both marveling at the ordinary adaptations that bodies make and asking, in Sara's words, "restless and generative questions": of why we organize the physical world as though vulnerability and needs for assistance are not commonplace ? indeed salutary ? forms of experience that reveal the genius of what being human is all about.

Sara Hendren is an associate professor in the College of Arts, Media, and Design at Northeastern University in Boston. She previously spent nine years teaching at Olin College of Engineering. Her book is What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. You can also find some of her short pieces of writing on her website, sarahendren.com. Her newsletter is undefended / undefeated.  

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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The ecological crisis we are standing before is at once civilizational and personal ? intimately close to each of us in the places we love and inhabit, and unfolding at a species level. And as much as anyone alive on the planet now, Christiana Figueres has felt the overwhelm of this and stepped into service. She gives voice so eloquently to the grief that we feel and must allow to bind us to each other ? and what she sees as a spiritual evolution the natural world is calling us to. 

If you have wondered how to keep hope alive amidst a thousand reasons to despair, if you are ready to take your despair as fuel ? intrigued by the idea of stepping into love and immediate realities of abundance and regeneration ? this conversation is for you.

Christiana Figueres was Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change from 2010-2016, and is known as the powerhouse who made the 2015 Paris Agreement possible ? in which 195 nations worked with their wildly diverse conditions and points of view on the what and the when and the why, and yet made commitments in service of our hurting planet and the future of humanity. Her book, written together with Tom Rivett-Carnac, is The Future We Choose. She is founding partner of the organization Global Optimism and co-hosts the podcast Outrage + Optimism.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom ? in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.

Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed, but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-world laboratories for him to investigate the entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body ? and the related entanglement between history and place. His poetic sensibility has singularly opened readers to approach a generative reckoning with American history ? on whatever side of that history our ancestors stood. 

Clint Smith has a way of making reckoning possible at a humanizing, softening, bodily level ? in the marrow, you might say, of our bones.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and many other honors. His poetry collections are Counting Descent and Above Ground.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Clint Smith reads his poem, ?Dance Party.? This poem is featured in Clint?s On Being conversation with Krista, ?What We Know in the ?Marrow of Our Bones.?? Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and many other honors. His poetry collections are Counting Descent and Above Ground.

Clint Smith reads his poem, ?Ode to Those First Fifteen Minutes After the Kids Are Finally Asleep.? This poem is featured in Clint?s On Being conversation with Krista, ?What We Know in the ?Marrow of Our Bones.?? Find more of his poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and many other honors. His poetry collections are Counting Descent and Above Ground.

This phrase recurs throughout Clint Smith's writing: "in the marrow of our bones." It is an example of how words can hold encrypted wisdom ? in this case, the reality that memory and emotion lodge in us physically. Words and phrases have carried this truth forward in time long before we had the science to understand it.

Clint Smith is best known for his 2021 book, How the Word Is Passed, but he is first and foremost a poet. He and Krista discuss how his various life chapters have been real-world laboratories for him to investigate the entanglement between language and the intelligence of the body ? and the related entanglement between history and place. His poetic sensibility has singularly opened readers to approach a generative reckoning with American history ? on whatever side of that history our ancestors stood. 

Clint Smith has a way of making reckoning possible at a humanizing, softening, bodily level ? in the marrow, you might say, of our bones.

Clint Smith is a staff writer at The Atlantic. His narrative nonfiction book, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning With the History of Slavery Across America, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and many other honors. His poetry collections are Counting Descent and Above Ground.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Clint Smith ? What We Know in the ?Marrow of Our Bones.?" Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

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From Krista: I loved being interviewed by Dan Harris as much as I've ever enjoyed being on the other side of the microphone (as the saying goes). He drew things out of me I didn't know I had to say. And I'm so impressed with him as a human being, and what he's created with Ten Percent Happier. I hope you might enjoy this!

Listen to Ten Percent Happier in all the podcast places: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast

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The host of On Being shares lessons learned from 20 years of interviews, including: how to live with open questions, counterprogramming against your negativity bias, and getting over the God question.

In this episode we talk about:

You may not know Latanya Sweeney's name, but as much as any other single person ? and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance ? she has led on the frontier of our gradual understanding of how far from anonymous you and I are in almost any database we inhabit, and how far from neutral all the algorithms by which we increasingly navigate our lives.

In this conversation with Krista, she brings a helpful big-picture view to our lives with technology, seeing how far we've come ? and not ? since the advent of the internet, and setting that in the context of history both industrial and digital. She insists that we don't have to accept the harms of digital technology in order to reap its benefits ? and she sees very clearly the work that will take. From where she sits, the new generative AI is in equal measure an exciting and alarming evolution. And she shares with us the questions she is asking, and how she and her students and the emerging field of Public Interest Technology might help us all make sense.

This is the second in what will be an ongoing occasional On Being episode to delve into and accompany our lives with this new technological revolution ? training clear eyes on downsides and dangers while cultivating an attention to how we might elevate the new frontier of AI ? and how, in fact, it might invite us more deeply into our humanity.

Latanya Sweeney is the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School, among her many other credentials. She?s founder and director of Harvard?s Public Interest Tech Lab and its Data Privacy Lab, and she?s the former Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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You may not know Latanya Sweeney's name, but as much as any other single person ? and with good humor and grace as well as brilliance ? she has led on the frontier of our gradual understanding of how far from anonymous you and I are in almost any database we inhabit, and how far from neutral all the algorithms by which we increasingly navigate our lives.

In this conversation with Krista, she brings a helpful big-picture view to our lives with technology, seeing how far we've come ? and not ? since the advent of the internet, and setting that in the context of history both industrial and digital. She insists that we don't have to accept the harms of digital technology in order to reap its benefits ? and she sees very clearly the work that will take. From where she sits, the new generative AI is in equal measure an exciting and alarming evolution. And she shares with us the questions she is asking, and how she and her students and the emerging field of Public Interest Technology might help us all make sense.

This is the second in what will be an ongoing occasional On Being episode to delve into and accompany our lives with this new technological revolution ? training clear eyes on downsides and dangers while cultivating an attention to how we might elevate the new frontier of AI ? and how, in fact, it might invite us more deeply into our humanity.

Latanya Sweeney is the Daniel Paul Professor of the Practice of Government and Technology at the Harvard Kennedy School, among her many other credentials. She?s founder and director of Harvard?s Public Interest Tech Lab and its Data Privacy Lab, and she?s the former Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Latanya Sweeney ? On Shaping Technology to Human Purpose." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

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A wondrous, buried treasure from the 20-year On Being archive, with renowned yoga teacher Matthew Sanford. Be prepared, as you listen to what follows, to take in subtleties and gracefulness you've never before pondered ? or tried to feel in yourself ? in the interplay between your mind and your body.

Matthew has an immensely energetic physical presence. He has been paralyzed from the chest down since a car accident in 1978. But he likes to say that his experience is only more extreme, not so different, from that of everyone else. He's written, "We are all leaving our bodies ? this is the inevitable arc of living. Death cannot be avoided; neither can the inward silence that comes with the aging process." Matthew?s intricate knowledge of that "inward silence," which he was forced to befriend after the noisy connections which most of us take for granted were severed ? it?s revelatory. So is his insistence that it?s not possible to live more deeply in your body ? in all its grace and all its flaws ? without becoming more compassionate towards all of life. And: if you do yoga, you will never think about what it is affecting inside you in the same way again.

Krista sat with Matthew Sanford in 2006, just after he'd published his beautiful book Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence.

Matthew Sanford is the founder and president of Mind Body Solutions. He teaches yoga for all kinds of bodies, including adaptive yoga classes weekly, and holds regular virtual gatherings with people around the world. A video library of his teaching methods for yoga teachers is freely available. His book is Waking: A Memoir of Trauma and Transcendence.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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Baratunde Thurston is a comedian, writer, and media entrepreneur. He has eyes open to the contradictions, strangeness, and beauty of being human. He looks for learning happening even amidst our hardest cultural tangles. And he intertwines all of this, innovatively and searchingly, with his lifelong joy in the natural world. 

The kaleidoscopic view of life and love and the world that is Baratunde's builds and builds in this conversation Krista had with him around the edges of the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival ? towards an exuberant glimpse of how we can all be more fully human and socially creative.

Baratunde Thurston's latest adventure is hosting the fascinating PBS series America Outdoors. He's been Director of Digital at The Onion, produced The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, and advised on digital strategy at The White House. He's a founding partner of the media start-up Puck, and creator and host of the podcast How To Citizen. He's the author of several books, including How To Be Black.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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In this season of On Being and those to come, we are going to train the core human questions on the emerging ?generative AI.? Beyond the hype and the doom, what is this new technology calling us to as human beings? What is our agency to shape it to human purpose, and how might it bring us ? literally ? to our senses? This inaugural conversation with Reid Hoffman is a wide and deep beginning foundation. He and Krista venture into unexpectedly relevant places, like the nature of friendship in human life, and what it would mean to create ?contained, boundaried AI? ? and Reid's use of words like ?delightful? and ?elevating? as qualities we can impart to this technology which, as we're hearing again and again, is going to change everything.

Reid Hoffman is co-founder and former executive chairman of LinkedIn, and a partner at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners. He's known by some as the philosopher of Silicon Valley. He is currently on the board of Microsoft and was an early investor in OpenAI, which brought ChatGPT into the world. His latest book, which he co-wrote together with GPT-4, is Impromptu: Amplifying Our Humanity Through AI. His newest venture is Inflection AI, the creator of Pi ? ?a supportive and empathetic conversational AI.? He is a host on the podcasts Masters of Scale, Greymatter, and Possible, which will launch its second season this fall. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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?Becoming other people? for a living, as Kerry Washington likes to describe her craft, turns out to be a revelatory lens on the high drama that is the human condition. As a ?learning actor,? a kind of actor/anthropologist, she has brought elegance and moral rigor to all kinds of roles: as the uber-glamorous, tough-as-nails Olivia Pope on Scandal; as the wife of Idi Amin and the wife of Ray Charles; from Little Fires Everywhere to Django Unchained. Just after Scandal ended seven triumphant seasons, she starred on Broadway as Kendra, a jeans-clad mother in a Miami police station waiting to hear what has happened to her beloved son. Krista was in that audience, and saw how Kerry attended not just to her role on stage but to bringing a beautifully racially mixed audience to participating and reflecting together. 

So this conversation has been a while in coming. It is rich with grace and surprising angles of insight ? on the roles we all learn to play in the stories of the lives that we are given, and the evolution that is possible in how we assume those characters and leave them behind and grow them up. 

This episode of On Being was produced with consideration of the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike and with external legal guidance. In distributing this episode, we attest to our belief that no statements made involve promotion of struck work in violation of the SAG-AFTRA Strike Order.

Kerry Washington is the author of a new memoir, Thicker Than Water, and founder of the production company Simpson Street. Her many credits include the television series Little Fires Everywhere, the Broadway play ? and Netflix film ? American Son, and the film Django Unchained. She starred as Olivia Pope on seven seasons of the hit TV series Scandal. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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We love the theologian Kate Bowler's allergy to every platitude and her wisdom and wit about the strange and messy fullness of what it means to be in a human body. She's best known for her 2018 book Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I've Loved) ? a poetic and powerful reflection on learning at age 35 that she had Stage IV colon cancer. 

From a reset on how to think about aging, to the new reality in our time of living with cancer as a chronic illness, to the telling of truths to our young, this beautiful conversation is full of the vividly whole humanity that Kate Bowler singularly embodies. 

(Also, as you'll hear, if she hadn't become a theologian, she might have been a stand-up comedian.)

Krista and Kate spoke as part of the 2023 Aspen Ideas Festival.

Kate Bowler's beloved books include Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I?ve Loved) and most recently, The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days. She is an associate professor at Duke Divinity School and made an early name in her field of American religious history with her 2013 book Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. She also hosts the podcast Everything Happens.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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This blessing is featured in Kate?s conversation with Krista, ?On Being in a Body.? It's published in her book The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days. 

Kate Bowler's beloved books include Everything Happens for a Reason (And Other Lies I?ve Loved) and most recently, The Lives We Actually Have: 100 Blessings for Imperfect Days. She is an associate professor at Duke Divinity School, and made an early name in her field of American religious history with her 2013 book Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel. She also hosts the podcast Everything Happens.

A big conversation to live by starting NEXT WEEK ? every Thursday ? from September 21. 

Loss ? and love. AI ? and the intelligence that lives in our bodies. 

Kerry Washington, Kate Bowler, Reid Hoffman, Latanya Sweeney, Nick Cave, Baratunde Thurston ? and more.

Subscribe, tell your friends, and buckle your (metaphorical) seatbelts.

From Krista: I have been texting this exquisite poem from our archives to my beloveds. Perhaps it will touch you ? hold you ? as it is touching and holding me.

ON ANOTHER PANEL ABOUT CLIMATE, THEY ASK ME TO SELL THE FUTURE AND ALL I'VE GOT IS A LOVE POEM

To call the young Pakistani-American poet, Ayisha Siddiqa, a "climate activist" feels too simple. She describes herself as a storyteller and human rights and land defender. She is a climate advisor to the U.N. Secretary General, and was a 2023 TIME Woman of the Year. 

The poem is read by the also extraordinary young marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, from her On Being conversation with Krista, What If We Get This Right?

Hello friends, it is a joy to introduce the new season of Poetry Unbound, which is underway. As Krista shares at the top, this episode has everything in it that makes Poetry Unbound such a gift in a noisy podcast world.

If you enjoy this episode, subscribe to Poetry Unbound for new episodes every Monday and Friday through July ? and stay tuned for a new season of On Being this fall. 

We?re pleased to offer Benjamin Gucciardi?s poem, ?The Rungs,? and invite you to connect with Poetry Unbound throughout this season.

Pádraig makes an announcement, and we listen to a few lovely moments from the On Being season we've just brought into the world. 

We're inviting the beautiful humans who gather around On Being to partner in the vitality of the unfolding On Being Project in a new way. 

Our friend Maria Popova says it daringly, beautifully, and she's given us permission to adapt her equation. Giving = loving. 

Any amount of love and sustenance will be gratefully ? indeed, gleefully ? received.

Learn more and make a gift: onbeing.org/LoveUs.

We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he's been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. 

It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity ? and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.

There are many resources for mental health support. If you're in the U.S., find some of them here.

Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he?s the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app ? you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

An excerpt from the On Being episode, "To Be a Healer." The extraordinary physician and public servant stilled a raucous room full of storytellers and podcasters with this offering at the 2023 On Air Fest.

Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he?s the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

We need a modicum of vitality to simply be alive in this time. And we're in an enduringly tender place. The mental health crisis that is invoked all around, especially as we look to the young, is one manifestation of the gravity of the post-2020 world. How to name and honor this more openly? How to hold that together with the ways we've been given to learn and to grow? Who are we called to be moving forward? Dr. Vivek Murthy is a brilliant, wise, and kind companion in these questions. He's a renowned physician and research scientist in his second tenure as U.S. Surgeon General. And for years, he's been naming and investigating loneliness as a public health matter, including his own experience of that very human condition. 

It is beyond rare to be in the presence of a person holding high governmental office who speaks about love with ease and dignity ? and about the agency to be healers that is available to us all. There is so much here to walk away with, and into. This conversation quieted and touched a room full of raucous podcasters at the 2023 On Air Fest in Brooklyn.

There are many resources for mental health support. If you're in the U.S., find some of them here.

Vivek Murthy is the 21st Surgeon General of the United States. He also served in this role from 2014 to 2017. He hosts the podcast House Calls with Dr. Vivek Murthy. And he?s the author of Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World.

This unedited audio includes audience Q & A at the 2023 On Air Fest. Find a shorter, produced version in the On Being episode "Vivek Murthy ? To Be a Healer." The transcript for that show is at onbeing.org.

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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app ? you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

"I like it much better than ?religious? or ?spiritual? ? to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real."

? Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

From Krista, about this week's show:

It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church ? about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she's written, "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.? 

She's written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word ? it feels like a "blessing." And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being "spiritual but not religious." We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time ? even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara's Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.

Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including An Altar in the World,  Leaving Church, Holy Envy, and Learning to Walk in the Dark. Her 2020 book is Always a Guest, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app ? you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

"I like it much better than ?religious? or ?spiritual? ? to be a seeker after the sacred or the holy, which ends up for me being the really real."

? Rev. Barbara Brown Taylor

From Krista, about this week's show:

It's fascinating to trace the arc of spiritual searching and religious belonging in my lifetime. The Episcopal priest and public theologian Barbara Brown Taylor was one of the people I started learning about when I left diplomacy to study theology in the early 1990s. At that time, she was leading a small church in Georgia. And she preached the most extraordinary sermons, and turned them into books read far and wide. Then in 2006, she wrote Leaving Church ? about her decision to leave her life of congregational ministry, finding other ways to stay, as she's written, "alive and alert to the holy communion of the human condition, which takes place on more altars than anyone can count.? 

She's written other books since, with titles like An Altar in the World, Learning to Walk in the Dark, and Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others. Being in the presence of Barbara Brown Taylor's wonderfully wise and meandering mind and spirit, after all these years of knowing her voice in the world, is a true joy. I might even use a religious word ? it feels like a "blessing." And this is not a conversation about the decline of church or about more and more people being "spiritual but not religious." We both agree that this often-repeated phrase is not an adequate way of seeing the human hunger for holiness. This is as alive as it has ever been in our time ? even if it is shape-shifting in ways my Southern Baptist and Barbara's Catholic and Methodist forebears could never have imagined.

Barbara Brown Taylor is the author of many books, including An Altar in the World,  Leaving Church, Holy Envy, and Learning to Walk in the Dark. Her 2020 book is Always a Guest, a compilation of recent sermons. She is the former rector of Grace-Calvary Episcopal Church of Clarkesville, Georgia, and she taught for two decades in the religion department at Piedmont College.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "Barbara Brown Taylor ? ?This Hunger for Holiness?." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app ? you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

To say that Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a geographer, which she is, is not to convey the vast and varied ways in which she is influencing the makings of the future. She's a mentor and teacher to a new generation of social activism and creativity. She's a visionary of ?abolition,? and that has become a fraught and polarizing word in our fraught and polarized public discourse. But when Ruth Wilson Gilmore speaks of ?abolition,? she is working with a long, long view towards making a whole world, starting now, in which prisons and policing as we do them now become unnecessary, unthinkable. In this sense, abolition is not primarily a matter of what to get rid of, but what to build and to orient around ? being present, for example, to human vulnerability and to the ingredients that make for deep human flourishing. 

Meeting Ruth Wilson Gilmore and drawing her out in this way is an exercise in muscular hope ? and in understanding the passion of a new generation that is shaping what we will collectively become.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore is a professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences, and American Studies, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she is also director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics. She grew up in New Haven, Connecticut. Her paternal grandfather was a janitor at Yale who helped organize the first blue-collar union at that university. And as a tool and die maker for the firearm manufacturer Winchester, her father played a central role in organizing the machinists at that company in the mid-1950s. She has co-founded several organizations, including the California Prison Moratorium Project, Critical Resistance, and the Central California Environmental Justice Network. She has authored and co-edited several books, including Golden Gulag, Abolition Geography, and the forthcoming Change Everything. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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There is a quiet, redemptive story of our time in this conversation ? a radical way of approaching the gravest of our problems by attending to how original vitality functions. Biomimicry takes the natural world as mentor and teacher ? for, as Janine Benyus puts it, "we are surrounded by geniuses." Nature solves problems and performs what appear to us as miracles in every second, all around: running on sunlight, fitting form to function, recycling everything, relentlessly "creating conditions conducive to life.? Janine launched this way of seeing and imagining as a field with her 1997 book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Today she teaches and consults with all kinds of projects and organizations, including major corporations, as you'll hear. 

Welcome to this unfolding parallel universe in our midst, which might just shift the way you see almost everything about our possible futures.

This conversation was part of The Great Northern Festival, a celebration of Minnesota?s signature cold, creative winters.

Janine Benyus is the author of several books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She is the co-founder of the non-profit Biomimicry Institute and Biomimicry 3.8, a consulting and training company.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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The flow and the ingredients by which an idea becomes an offering ? and life practices which call that alchemy forth. The mystery of it all that can only be named and wondered at ? and the ordinary mystery that creativity is a human birthright, a way of being rather than doing, that beckons to us all, in everything we do, from crafting something to conversing to the arranging of furniture in a room.

This is where Krista goes with the rock star music producer Rick Rubin. It's not a conversation about the creative process of the many great musicians he's worked with ? but a conversation that is for and about us all. 

There are some surprises, too, in his lovely, soothing voice ? like the way he finds a metaphor for all of life in pro wrestling. And he leaves the doors of his studio wide open as they speak, so there is a soundtrack of ocean waves.

Rick Rubin has been a singular, transformative creative muse for artists across genres and generations ? from the Beastie Boys to Johnny Cash, from Public Enemy to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, from Adele to Jay-Z. To name just a few. His new (and first) book is The Creative Act: A Way of Being. He is co-founder of the record label Def Jam Recordings, and former co-president of Columbia Records. He is also one of the hosts of the podcast, Broken Record. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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In this rich, expansive, and warm conversation between friends, Krista draws out the heart for humanity behind Isabel Wilkerson's eye on histories we are only now communally learning to tell ? her devotion to understanding not merely who we have been, but who we can be. Her most recent offering of fresh insight to our life together brings "caste" into the light ? a recurrent, instinctive pattern of human societies across the centuries, though far more malignant in some times and places. Caste is a ranking of human value that works more like a pathogen than a belief system ? more like the reflexive grammar of our sentences than our choices of words. In the American context, Isabel Wilkerson says race is the skin, but "caste is the bones." And this shift away from centering race as a focus of analysis actually helps us understand why race and racism continue to shape-shift and regenerate, every best intention and effort and law notwithstanding. But beginning to see caste also gives us fresh eyes and hearts for imagining where to begin, and how to persist, in order finally to shift that. 

Isabel and Krista spoke in Seattle before a packed house at Benaroya Hall, at the invitation of Seattle Arts & Lectures.

[Content Advisory: Beginning at 21:16, there is a discussion of Nazi terminology and a quotation from Hitler with an epithet that is offensive and painful. We chose to include this language to illustrate the heinous nature of the history being discussed and Hitler?s admiration for it.]

Isabel Wilkerson won a Pulitzer Prize while reporting for the New York Times. Her first book, The Warmth of Other Suns, brought the underreported story of the Great Migration of the 20th century into the light, and she published her best-selling book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents in August 2020. Among many honors, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the ?broad commonwealth of life? that we are ?inextricably entangled with and suffused by?; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot. 

The technologist/artist James Bridle brings all of this into interplay with an intriguing, refreshing lens on our lives with technology ? and with all that artificial intelligence is and might become.

You might not think of intelligence the same way again, or the truth of mythology, or the letters of the alphabet, or what it means to be human. And you will smile next time you access the place where your digital life is stored and realize what it says about us that we named it The Cloud.

James Bridle is an artist and technologist and author of the books Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence and New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Their writing has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, and many other places. Their art has been exhibited around the world, including at NOME Gallery in Berlin. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app ? you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

You might want to take a walk with this one. It is big and full of brain food and an enlivening opening of imagination to possibilities that are emergent now: the notion of the ?broad commonwealth of life? that we are ?inextricably entangled with and suffused by?; the paradox that the more accurately you try to measure some things, the more unmeasurable they become; the way words we use all the time have kept our cellular belonging to the natural world alive, even as civilization forgot. 

The technologist/artist James Bridle brings all of this into interplay with an intriguing, refreshing lens on our lives with technology ? and with all that artificial intelligence is and might become.

You might not think of intelligence the same way again, or the truth of mythology, or the letters of the alphabet, or what it means to be human. And you will smile next time you access the place where your digital life is stored and realize what it says about us that we named it The Cloud.

James Bridle is an artist and technologist and author of the books Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence and New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future. Their writing has appeared in The Guardian, Wired, The Atlantic, and many other places. Their art has been exhibited around the world, including at NOME Gallery in Berlin.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "James Bridle ? The Intelligence Singing All Around Us." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

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Nick Offerman has played many great characters, most famously Ron Swanson in Parks and Recreation, and he starred more recently in an astonishing episode of The Last of Us. But he is driven by passionate callings older and deeper than his public vocation as an actor and comedian. He works with wood, and he works with other people who work with their hands making beautiful, useful things. And this, it turns out, is also a primary source of his tethering in values. It's a source of a spiritual thoughtfulness that runs through this conversation with Krista. So is his love and study of the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, whose audiobook The Need to Be Whole Nick just recorded.

This is a moving and edifying conversation that is also, not surprisingly, a lot of fun.

Nick Offerman grew up on a three-acre homestead "out in a cornfield" in Minooka, Illinois. His five books include Where the Deer and the Antelope Play and Good Clean Fun: Misadventures in Sawdust at Offerman Woodshop. He founded Offerman Woodshop in Los Angeles in 2001, a collective that creates hand-crafted items from spoons to canoes to ukuleles. He's also written a book with his wife, Megan Mullally, called The Greatest Love Story Ever Told, and they have a podcast called In Bed with Nick and Megan. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.
 

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An electric conversation with Ada Limón's wisdom and her poetry ? a refreshing, full-body experience of how this way with words and sound and silence teaches us about being human at all times, but especially now. With an unexpected and exuberant mix of gravity and laughter ? laughter of delight, and of blessed relief ? this conversation holds not only what we have traversed these last years, but how we live forward. 

It unfolded at the Ted Mann Concert Hall in Minneapolis, in collaboration with Northrop at the University of Minnesota and Ada Limón's publisher, Milkweed Editions.

Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She?s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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And: if you can, please take a minute to rate On Being in this podcast app ? you'll be bending the arc of algorithms towards this adventure of conversation and living.

Ada Limón reads her poem, ?A New National Anthem.? This poem is featured in Ada?s On Being conversation with Krista, ?To Be Made Whole.? Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.

Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She?s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. 

Ada Limón reads her poem, ?The Quiet Machine.? This poem is featured in Ada?s On Being conversation with Krista, ?To Be Made Whole.? Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.

Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She?s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.

Ada Limón reads her poem, ?Dead Stars.? This poem is featured in Ada?s On Being conversation with Krista, ?To Be Made Whole.? Find more of her poems, along with our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.

Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She?s written six books of poetry, most recently, The Hurting Kind. Her volume The Carrying won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and her volume Bright Dead Things was a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and she teaches in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina. 

Amanda Ripley began her life as a journalist covering crime, disaster, and terrorism. Then in 2018, she published a brilliant essay called ?Complicating the Narratives,? which she opened by confessing a professional existential crisis. We journalists, she wrote, ?can summon outrage in five words or less. We value the ancient power of storytelling, and we get that good stories require conflict, characters and scene. But in the present era of tribalism, it feels like we?ve reached our collective limitations ? Again and again, we have escalated the conflict and snuffed the complexity out of the conversation."

Yet what Amanda has gone on to investigate ? and so, so helpfully illuminate ? is not just about journalism, or about politics. It touches almost every aspect of human life in almost every society around the world right now. We think we?re divided by issues, arguing about conflicting facts. But at a deeper level, she says, we are trapped in a pattern of distress known as ?high conflict? ? where the conflict itself has become the point, and it sweeps everything into its vortex. 

So how to get out? What Amanda has been gathering by way of answers to that question is an extraordinary gift to us all.

Amanda Ripley is an investigative journalist who sometimes describes herself as a "recovering journalist" ? and a trained conflict mediator. She's written several acclaimed books, including High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. You can find her essay ?Complicating the Narratives? on the Solutions Journalism blog. She is the co-founder of the company Good Conflict and hosts the Slate podcast How To!. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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One of the most fascinating developments of our time is that human qualities we have understood in terms of virtue ? experiences we've called spiritual ? are now being taken seriously by science as intelligence ? as elements of human wholeness. Dacher Keltner and his Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley have been pivotal in this emergence. From the earliest years of his career, he investigated how emotions are coded in the muscles of our faces, and how they serve as ?moral sensory systems." He was called on as Emojis evolved; he consulted on Pete Docter's groundbreaking movie Inside Out. 

All of this, as Dacher sees it now, led him deeper and deeper into investigating the primary experience of awe in human life ? moments when we have a sense of wonder, an experience of mystery, that transcends our understanding. These, it turns out, are as common in human life globally as they are measurably health-giving and immunity-boosting. They bring us together with others, again and again. They bring our nervous system and heartbeat and breath into sync ? and even into sync with other bodies around us.

Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and founding director of the Greater Good Science Center. He hosts the podcast The Science of Happiness. His latest book is Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

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We are immensely grateful for your patience in our season of podcasting pause. But enough already. Starting Thursday, February 2, we'll come to you with three months of soaring new On Being conversations with Krista, with an eye towards emergence. The science of awe. The wonder of biomimicry. "Lean Spirituality." What we're talking about ? and not ? when we talk about mental health. "Good conflict." Technology and vitality. Creativity. Woodworking and the meaning of life. Deeper truths and larger stories of ourselves as societies, as a planet, as humans, that at once complicate and enliven our capacity to live with dignity and joy and wholeness. And poetry, and poetry.

As we live into, yes, this new way of being ? with podcasting and not radio, our first audio home ? we're eager to extend an invitation to listen as widely as possible. Please spread the word in your world and your digital places. And show us some love, if you have a minute, by rating On Being in this app. It's a small way to bend the arc of algorithms towards this community of conversation and living. 

We are so thrilled to have you as part of this, and to be back. Sign up for our Saturday newsletter, The Pause, for extras every week and news on all that is happening at the wider On Being Project, at onbeing.org/newsletter.

In the modern western world, vocation was equated with work. But each of us has callings, not merely to be professionals, but to be friends, neighbors, colleagues, family, citizens, lovers of the world. Each of us imprints the people in the world around us, breath to breath and hour to hour, as much in who we are and how we are present as in whatever we do. And just as there are callings for a life, there are callings for our time. 

"Some of us are called to be bridge people.. Some of us are called to be patient calmers of fear. This calling is so tender and so urgent if what we truly want is to coax our own best selves and the best selves of others into the light." 

?Across my life of conversation I have seen that wisdom and wholeness emerge in moments like ours, when human beings have to hold seemingly opposing realities in a creative tension and interplay: power and frailty, death and birth, pain and hope, beauty and brokenness, mystery and conviction, calm and fierceness, mine and yours.?

? Krista Tippett

Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website.

We inhabit a liminal time between what we thought we knew and what we can?t quite yet see. But time is more spacious than we imagine it to be, and it is more of a friend than we always know. Cracking time open, seeing its true manifold nature, expands a sense of the possible in the here and the now. It sends us back to work with the raw materials of our lives, understanding that these are always the materials even of change at a cosmic or a societal level.

"A long, reality-based view of time has a power to replenish our sense of ourselves and the world."

Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website.

We live in a world in love with the form of words that is an opinion, and the way with words that is an argument. Yet it is a deep truth in life ? as in science ? that each of us is shaped as much by the quality of the questions we are asking as by the answers we have it in us to give.  Precisely at a moment like this, of vast aching open questions and very few answers we can agree on, our questions themselves become powerful tools for living and growing. 

"If you are faithful to living a question, that question will be faithful back to you."

Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website.

The first of four short offerings, more wisdom practice than podcast: life-giving, hope-generating words, ideas and practices that can literally shape your experience of reality ? and shape what can become possible. 

At this juncture in the life of the world, we are all stretching. We are finding the ground shifting beneath our feet, whoever we are. Think of these as tethering foundations towards walking our way into our callings in this world of so much pain ? and so much promise.  

We are fluent in the story of our time marked by catastrophe and dysfunction. That is real ? but it?s not the whole story of us. There is also an ordinary and abundant unfolding of dignity and care and generosity, of social creativity and evolution and breakthrough.  How to make that more vibrant, more visible, and more defining?

"We are strange creatures and this is one of our strangest qualities: that we don?t know how to tell this story of us. We don?t know how to take this reality as seriously as we take rupture and what goes wrong."

Experience the whole collection of four Foundations for Being Alive Now on the On Being Project website.

Three years ago, Krista texted Pádraig Ó Tuama with a simple question: what if he were to start a poetry podcast that listened as much as it shared? Not long after, Poetry Unbound was born, and it keeps going from strength to strength. Pádraig likes to say that poems are interested in the people who listen to them. And so, as the next season of On Being takes shape for release in early 2023, why not take Poetry Unbound as a listening companion and ritual this fall?

Season six of Poetry Unbound just started, and we?re sharing the first episode around David Wagoner?s beloved poem ?Lost? in this feed, the only episode we?ll feature here this season. You can listen to the rest on Apple, Spotify, at poetryunbound.org, and wherever podcasts are found. And be sure to subscribe to the show to receive a new episode every Monday and Friday through mid-December.

Krista returns from her summer in Berlin, where her present-day self reunited with the 25-year-old of the 1980s, at large in the divided city. Hear the reflections that emerged from her season of creative rest, and her beloved practices of contemplative reading and journaling. 

Pull on the thread of emergence with Krista and our Pause newsletter community as the next season of On Being takes shape: onbeing.org/newsletter. 

You can read the transcript of Krista?s letter in our September 17 edition of The Pause.

A special offering from Krista Tippett and all of us at On Being: an incredible, celebratory event ? listening back and remembering forwards across 20 years of this show in the good company of our beloved friend and former guest, Rev. Jen Bailey, and so many of you. We offer it here as an audio experience, and we think you will enjoy being in the room retroactively. You will hear the voices of wise and graceful lives ? of former guests, and of listeners from far-flung places. You may also catch references to things seen and witnessed throughout the event ? including a stunning opening poem by our dear friend Maria Popova, composed of On Being show titles ? which you can take in fully by viewing the recorded celebration in its entirety on our YouTube channel.

Krista will be back next week to send us off with a poem and short farewell ? a ?see you later? while we rest and dream and make some new things. In the meantime, we will be sharing offerings beyond this podcast. Join us at onbeing.org/staywithus.

?What a time to be alive,? adrienne maree brown has written. ?Right now we are in a fast river together ? every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.? adrienne maree brown and others use many words and phrases to describe what she does, and who she is: A student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A ?scholar of belonging.? A ?scholar of magic.? She grew up loving science fiction, and thought we?d be driving flying cars by now; and yet, has found in speculative fiction the transformative force of vision and imagination that might in fact save us. Our younger listeners have asked to hear adrienne maree brown?s voice on On Being, and here she is, as we enter our own time of evolution. This conversation shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking: working with the complex fullness of reality, and cultivating old and new ways of seeing, to move towards a transformative wholeness of living.

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adrienne maree brown is the author of wildly influential books including Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us and Pleasure Activism, as well as a workbook for facilitation and mediation, Holding Change. She is the co-editor of Octavia?s Brood and co-hosts several podcasts, including Octavia?s Parables and How to Survive the End of the World. She is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, which she founded. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

?What a time to be alive,? adrienne maree brown has written. ?Right now we are in a fast river together ? every day there are changes that seemed unimaginable until they occurred.? adrienne maree brown and others use many words and phrases to describe what she does, and who she is: A student of complexity. A student of change and of how groups change together. A ?scholar of belonging.? A ?scholar of magic.? She grew up loving science fiction, and thought we?d be driving flying cars by now; and yet, has found in speculative fiction the transformative force of vision and imagination that might in fact save us. Our younger listeners have asked to hear adrienne maree brown?s voice on On Being, and here she is, as we enter our own time of evolution. This conversation shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking: working with the complex fullness of reality, and cultivating old and new ways of seeing, to move towards a transformative wholeness of living.

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adrienne maree brown is the author of wildly influential books including Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us and Pleasure Activism, as well as a workbook for facilitation and mediation, Holding Change. She is the co-editor of Octavia?s Brood and co-hosts several podcasts, including Octavia?s Parables and How to Survive the End of the World. She is the writer-in-residence at the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, which she founded.

This interview is edited and produced with music and other features in the On Being episode "adrienne maree brown ? ?We are in a time of new suns?." Find the transcript for that show at onbeing.org.

Krista interviewed the wise and wonderful writer Ocean Vuong on March 8, 2020 in a joyful, crowded room full of podcasters in Brooklyn. A state of emergency had just been declared in New York around a new virus. But no one guessed that within a handful of days such an event would become unimaginable. Most stunning is how presciently, exquisitely Ocean speaks to the world we have come to inhabit? its heartbreak and its poetry, its possibilities for loss and for finding new life. 

?I want to love more than death can harm. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night ? we can live. And we will.?

Ocean Vuong is a professor in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at New York University. His new collection of poetry is Time Is a Mother. He is also the author of a novel, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, and the poetry collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds, which won the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whiting Award. He was a 2019 MacArthur Fellow. 

Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

This show originally aired on April 30, 2020.

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