The wonderful civil rights elder Vincent Harding liked to look around the world for what he called "live human signposts" — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit. And adrienne maree brown, who has inspired worlds of social creativity with her notions of "pleasure activism" and "emergent strategy," is surely one of these. We're listening with new ears as she brings together so many of the threads that have recurred in this season of On Being: on looking the harsh complexity of this world full in the face while dancing with joy as life force and fuel, and on keeping clear eyes on the reasons for ecological despair while giving oneself over to a loving apprenticeship with the natural world as teacher and guide. A love of visionary science fiction also finds a robust place in her work and this conversation. She altogether shines a light on an emerging ecosystem in our world over and against the drumbeat of what is fractured and breaking — the cultivation of old and new ways of seeing, towards a transformative wholeness of living.adrienne maree brown’s influential books include Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, and Pleasure Activism. More recently, she has published Maroons, a work of speculative fiction, and she co-edited the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements. She also co-hosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World. And, a special heads up: in late summer 2024, adrienne maree brown will publish a phenomenal new book — Loving Corrections.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

An impassioned plea, a yearning for connection — the poem U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón wrote when she says all language failed her. Take in Ada's reading of her piece, “The End of Poetry” — and hear her read more of her work in the On Being episode, “To Be Made Whole.”Ada Limón is the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States. She’s written six books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, and Bright Dead Things, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her most recent volume is The Hurting Kind. As poet laureate, she edited the collection You Are Here, part of her signature project focusing on how poetry can connect us to the natural world. She is a 2023 MacArthur Fellow, a former host of the poetry podcast The Slowdown, and an instructor in the MFA program at Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.

We are strange creatures. It is hard for us to speak about, or let in, the reality of frailty and death — the elemental fact of mortality itself. In this century, western medicine has gradually moved away from its understanding of death as a failure — where care stops with a terminal diagnosis. Hospice has moved, from something rare to something expected. And yet advances in technology have made it ever harder for physicians and patients to make a call to stop fighting death — often at the expense of the quality of this last time of life. Meanwhile, there is a new longevity industry which resists the very notion of decline, much less finitude. Fascinatingly, the simple question which transformed the surgeon Atul Gawande’s life and practice of medicine is this: What does a good day look like? As he has come to see, standing reverently before our mortality is an exercise in more intricately inhabiting why we want to be alive. This conversation evokes both grief and hope, sadness at so many deaths — including our species-level losses to Covid — that have not allowed for this measure of care. Yet it also includes very actionable encouragement towards the agency that is there to claim in our mortal odysseys ahead.Atul Gawande's writing for The New Yorker and his books have been read by millions, most famously Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. He currently serves as Assistant Administrator for Global Health at the U.S. Agency for International Development. He previously practiced general and endocrine surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and was a professor at both Harvard Medical School and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in October 2017.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

Today, a poem with a poignant question to live: “...and are we not of interest to each other?” Carry Elizabeth Alexander’s reading of her poem “Ars Poetica #100: I Believe” with you — and hear Elizabeth read more of her poetry in the On Being episode, “Words That Shimmer.”Elizabeth Alexander is a poet, author, and educator. Since 2018, she has served as president of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2019 and is Chancellor Emeritus of the Academy of American Poets. Her books include American Sublime, a 2006 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the memoir, The Light of the World, a 2016 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Her most recent book is The Trayvon Generation.

We humans have this drive to erect barriers between ourselves and others, Luis Alberto Urrea says, and yet this makes us a little crazy. He is an exuberant, wise, and refreshing companion into the deep meaning and the problem of borders — what they are really about, what we do with them, and what they do to us. The Mexican-American border was as close and personal to him as it could be when he was growing up — an apt expression of his parents’ turbulent Mexican-American divorce. In his writing and in this conversation, he complicates every dehumanizing stereotype of Mexicans, "migrants" — and border guards. A deep truth of our time, Luis insists, is that “we miss each other.” He offers a vision of the larger possibility of our time beyond the terrible tangles of today: that we might evolve the old illusion of the melting pot into a 21st-century richness of “us." And he delightfully models that messiness and humor will be required.Luis Alberto Urrea is a distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of Illinois Chicago. His books of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction include Into the Beautiful North, The Devil’s Highway, The Hummingbird’s Daughter, and Goodnight, Irene.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in July 2018.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

In our world of so much suffering, it can feel hard or wrong to invoke the word "joy." Yet joy has been one of the most insistent, recurrent rallying cries in almost every life-giving conversation that Krista has had across recent months and years, even and especially with people on the front lines of humanity's struggles. Ross Gay helps illuminate this paradox and turn it into a muscle.We are good at fighting, as he puts it, and not as good at holding in our imaginations what is to be adored and preserved and exalted — advocating for what we love, for what we find beautiful and necessary. But without this, he says, we cannot speak meaningfully even about our longings for a more just world, a more whole existence for all. To understand that we are all suffering — and so to practice tenderness and mercy —  is a quality of what Ross calls “adult joy." Starting with his cherished essay collection The Book of Delights, he began to accompany many in an everyday spiritual discipline of practicing delight and cultivating joy.Ross Gay is a poet, essayist, teacher, and passionate community gardener. He lives in Bloomington, Indiana, where he’s a professor of English at Indiana University. His books include The Book of Delights, The Book of (More) Delights, and Inciting Joy, as well as the poetry collections Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude and Be Holding.  Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in July 2019.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

In this all-new episode, Krista engages biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus in a second, urgent conversation, alongside creative biomimicry practitioner Azita Ardakani Walton. Together they trace precise guidance and applied wisdom from the natural world for the civilizational callings before us now. What does nature have to teach us about healing from trauma? And how might those of us aspiring to good and generative lives start to function like an ecosystem rather than a collection of separate, siloed projects? We are in kinship. How to make that real — and in making it real, make it more of an offering to the whole wide world?Krista, Azita, and Janine spoke at the January 2024 gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives where Krista also drew out Lyndsey Stonebridge and Lucas Johnson for the recent episode on Hannah Arendt. We're excited to bring you back into that room.Janine Benyus's classic work is Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. She is the co-founder of the non-profit Biomimicry Institute. She also co-founded Biomimicry 3.8, a consulting and training company. Azita Ardakani Walton is a philanthropist and social entrepreneur. She has pursued her work through nature’s principles as a means to inform economics, social organizations, and design. She was the founder of the creative impact agency Lovesocial, and is currently in the pursuit of the relationship between inner life and outer ecology to meet the challenges of these times.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

In a time of stress, uncertainty, and isolation, Christine Runyan turns our attention to what often evades our awareness — the response of our nervous systems. As part of On Being’s 2021 Midwinter Gathering, she offered this brief, practical, gently guided practice as an invitation to befriend your beleaguered body, to “blanket it with a little bit of tenderness, a little bit of kindness.”Delve more deeply into Runyan’s wisdom in her On Being conversation with Krista, “On Healing Our Distressed Nervous Systems.”Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher, and she co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of medical and health care workers.Find the transcript for this practice at onbeing.org.Watch an animated version of this practice on our YouTube page.

The years of pandemic and lockdown are still working powerfully on us from the inside. But we have trouble acknowledging this, much less metabolizing it. This conversation with Christine Runyan, which took place in the dark middle of those years, helps make sense of our present of still-unfolding epidemic distress — as individuals, as communities, as a species. She has cultivated a reverence for the human nervous system. She tells truths about our bodies that western medicine itself is only fitfully learning to see. This quiet conversation is not just revelatory, but healing and calming. It holds startling prescience about some of what we're navigating now. And it offers self-compassion and simple strategies for finding ease within ourselves — and with each other — as we live forward from here.Christine Runyan is a clinical psychologist and professor in the Department of Family Medicine and Community Health at UMass Chan Medical School. She is also a certified mindfulness teacher, and she co-founded and co-leads Tend Health, a clinical consulting practice focused on the mental well-being of medical and health care workers.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in March 2021.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

We are overjoyed to share this heart-stirring performance with you, which transpired when we invited the ornithologist/poet/former On Being guest J. Drew Lanham to offer some poetry at a live On Being event in January 2024. We could not have imagined the lightning in a bottle that unfolded — a live adaptation of the title poem that appears in Drew's wonderful new book, Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.Be sure to listen to his full 2022 conversation (accompanied by poetry and birdsong) with Krista — “Pathfinding Through the Improbable.” And find our full collection of poetry films and readings from two decades of the show, at Experience Poetry.J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. In 2022, he was named the Poet Laureate of Edgefield County, South Carolina, where he grew up. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature and a collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. His new book is Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves.

Here is a stunning sentence for you, written by Lyndsey Stonebridge, our guest this hour, channeling the 20th-century political thinker and journalist Hannah Arendt: "Loneliness is the bully that coerces us into giving up on democracy." This conversation is a kind of guide to generative shared deliberations we might be having with each other and ourselves in this intensely fraught global political moment: on the human underlay that gives democracy its vigor or threatens to undo it; on the difference between facts and truth — and on the difference between violence and power. Krista interviewed Lyndsey once before, in 2017, after Hannah Arendt's classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, had become a belated runaway bestseller. Now Lyndsey has published her own wonderful book offering her and Arendt's full prescient wisdom for this time. What emerges is elevating and exhilaratingly thoughtful — while also brimming with helpful, practicable words and ideas. We have, in Lyndsey's phrase, "un-homed" ourselves. And yet we are always defined by our capacity to give birth to something new — and so to partake again and again in the deepest meaning of freedom.Hannah Arendt's other epic books include The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she famously coined the phrase "the banality of evil." She was born a German Jew in 1906, fled Nazi Germany and spent many years as a stateless person, and died an American citizen in 1975. This conversation with Lyndsey Stonebridge happened in January 2024, as part of a gathering of visionaries, activists, and creatives across many fields. Krista interviewed her alongside Lucas Johnson, a former leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation who now leads our social healing initiatives at The On Being Project.Lyndsey Stonebridge is a Professor of Humanities and Human Rights at the University of Birmingham in the U.K. Her 2024 book is We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. Her other books include Placeless People: Writings, Rights, and Refugees. In 2023, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy.Lucas Johnson is Executive Vice President of Public Life & Social Healing at The On Being Project. He was previously a leader of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, the world’s oldest interfaith peace organization.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.Note: A previous version of this audio mistakenly attributed a quote to James Baldwin. The author of the quote is Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, and appears in an essay she wrote discussing Baldwin’s work.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

A taste of a special mini-season of Poetry Unbound — bringing contemplative curiosity and the life-nurturing tether of poetry to the very present matter of conflict in our world. In this first offering, Pádraig introduces the intriguing idea of poems as teachers and ponders Wisława Szymborska’s “A Word on Statistics," translated by Joanna Trzeciak. This poem covers statistics of the most human kind — like the number of people in a group of 100 who think they know better, who can admire without envy, or who could do terrible things. Listen, and ask yourself: Which categories do I belong to? Which do I believe?Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.All seven parts of the series are ready for listening now in the Poetry Unbound feed and at onbeing.org. Read Pádraig’s weekly Poetry Unbound Substack, read the Poetry Unbound book, or listen back to all of our episodes.

There is an ecological transformation unfolding in the places we love and come from. On a front edge of this reality, which will affect us all, Colette Pichon Battle is a singular model of brilliance and graciousness of mind and spirit and action. And to be with her is to open to the way the stories we tell have blunted us to the courage we’re called to, and the joy we must nurture, as life force and fuel for the work ahead. As a young woman, she left her home state of Louisiana and land to which her family belonged for generations, to go to college and become a powerful lawyer in Washington, D.C. Then in 2005, after Hurricane Katrina made, as she has said, "a crack in the universe," she returned home to a whole new life and calling. Colette Pichon Battle is a vivid embodiment of the new forms societal shift is taking in our world — led by visionary pragmatists close to the ground, in particular places, persistently and lovingly learning and leading the way for us all.Colette Pichon Battle is co-founder and Vision & Initiatives Partner for Taproot Earth, a global organization which has emerged from the Gulf Coast Center for Law & Policy that she founded and led in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. She and her colleagues are influencing manifold aspects of our ecological present, including equitable disaster recovery and global migration, community economic development and energy democracy.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in March 2022.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

In her writing, it is Kate DiCamillo's gift to make bearable the fact that joy and sorrow live so close, side by side, in life as it is (if not as we wish it to be). In this conversation, along with good measures of raucous laughter and a few tears, Kate summons us to hearts "capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries of ourselves and each other" — qualities these years in the life of the world call forth from all of us, young and old, with ever greater poignancy and vigor.Kate DiCamillo has written many bestselling books, beloved by children and adults in touch with their inner eight-year-old, for two decades, including Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Magician’s Elephant, Flora & Ulysses, and The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane. Some of these have been turned into operas and movies. Her new books in 2024 include the middle grade novel Ferris and Orris and Timble: The Beginning. She is a rare two-time winner of the Newbery Medal.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.This show originally aired in March 2022.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and our mailing list for news and invitations all year round. Be the first to know as tickets go on sale for the On Being 2025 live national conversation tour.

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and news and invitations all year round.

A little musing on this season, the spectacular finale headed your way — and ways to stay connected in the time ahead.Subscribe to the The PauseFind our Starting PointsPeruse our LibrariesAnd on YouTube, grab a Poem to Carry in Your Pocket 

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion newsletter to the On Being podcast season, and news and invitations all year round.

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season. 

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

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______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:Getting over the God question when it comes to contemplating religionWhy Western culture has such a dearth of ways to talk about loveWhy she thinks the core of relationships is not about agreeing but about navigating differencesTuning in to our generative agencyHer definition of a wise life as distinct from a knowledgeable or accomplished oneWhy she believes it is as important to know what you love as it is to know what you hateLearning to love big open questions instead of rushing to answersWhy the things we get paid to do may not define whether we're living a worthy life And getting our intentions straight and then trying not to tie them too tightly to our goals

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season, and a way to stay on top of all On Being happenings across the year.

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season, and a way to stay on top of all On Being happenings across the year.

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

“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.______Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

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._____Sign up for The Pause — a Saturday morning companion to the podcast season.

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.

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 POEMTo 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.___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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.___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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 TaylorFrom 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.___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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 TaylorFrom 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.___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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. ___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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.

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. ___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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.

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. ___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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.

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.___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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. Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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.___________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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.

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. __________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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 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.___________________Sign up for The Pause to receive our seasonal Saturday morning newsletter and advance invitations and news on all things On Being.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, “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.