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PODCAST

Wonder Cabinet

Wonder Cabinet Productions

Wonder Cabinet is an independent podcast from Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson, Peabody Award-winning creators of public radio"s To The Best Of Our Knowledge. For 35 years, that show brought long-form conversations to 200+ stations nationwide; its interviews are now archived in the Library of Congress.Episodes feature intimate, long-form conversations with scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists who are re-imagining our relationship with the planet. Some study black holes or quantum

society & culture philosophy

All Episodes

35:32

Being Alive with Melanie Challenger

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/10/03

Our obsession with the dream of artificial, disembodied intelligence is deadening our experience of life itself. Melanie Challenger — a philosopher, naturalist and National Geographic Explorer — says it’s time to let go of the centuries-old human history of pretending we’re not animals, of separating ourselves from the rest of the natural world. The essence of life, she says, is being a body — the source of the agency, purpose and intelligence that defines every living being, from the

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37:04

The Power of Ritual with Rabbi Geoff Mitelman

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/09/26

What kind of truth can a sacred text offer about the world? Rabbi Geoff Mitelman reads the Torah as poetry — open to multiple interpretations and evoking a sense of transcendence, even magic.Mitelman is a Reform rabbi and the founding director of Sinai and Synapses, an organization building bridges between science and religion, particularly Judaism. He reads the creation story in Genesis as a profoundly mysterious text — complementary to the scientific account of the Big Bang.Mitelman

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50:57

Tree Thinking with Robert Moor

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/08/29

Can you imagine being a tree? Robert Moor has spent years trying—climbing into their canopies, studying their biology and learning to see trees in ways most of us don’t. He considers himself a “tree person.”Moor believes that when you spend a lot of time in trees, time slows down—and branching and pruning can become life lessons. He’s interested not just in how trees grow, but in what they might teach us about ourselves. In his book In Trees, he says his goal isn’t to anthropomorphize trees

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35:56

The Ecowomanist Theology of Rev. Dr. Melanie L. Harris

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/08/22

Rev. Dr. Melanie Harris is a professor of Black Feminist and Womanist Theologies at Wake Forest University, an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and one of the founders of ecowomanism — a theology and environmental philosophy centering the voices, wisdom, and spiritual practices of Black women and women of color.In this conversation, Harris traces her own eco-memories back to Dearfield, Colorado, one of the historic Black-owned farming settlements founded by

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45:25

Poetry Against Despair with Christian Wiman

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/08/15

How do you find joy in suffering? That’s one of the questions Christian Wiman explores in his poetry and his life.The former editor of Poetry magazine, Wiman is the author of seven books of poetry, including his latest, The Dance. He also teaches at Yale Divinity School. He’s been called “the most important Christian writer in America,” though his relationship with God is marked by uncertainty as much as faith. That tension runs through his poetry, where mystical experience, doubt,

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01:00:55

Chasing Wilderness with Cal Flyn (and Gary Snyder)

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/08/08

For thousands of years, people have dreamed of walking off the map — lighting out for the remote unknown, into landscapes untouched and untamed. The classic wilderness quest is as old as literature itself: you go into the wild, and you come out changed. It's woven into ancient spiritual texts, medieval myths, and European accounts of the so-called "New World."But wilderness is an idea as slippery as it is powerful — and wilderness preservation is a complicated and often costly ideal. That's

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42:34

The Conscious Universe: Panpsychism with Philip Goff

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/08/01

What if consciousness isn't something that emerges from the brain—but is embedded in the fabric of reality itself?That's the provocative idea behind panpsychism— that consciousness goes all the way down to the fundamental building blocks of the cosmos. Philosopher Philip Goff, one of panpsychism’s leading advocates, argues that it offers the best solution to one of science's deepest mysteries: how consciousness arises at all. We also hear from novelist Philip Pullman, whose fantasy series

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51:12

The Spiritual Ecology of Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/06/20

Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee grew up in London with a Russian Sufi mystic living downstairs, seekers showing up at all hours and meditation happening constantly. Then his family moved to a coastal redwood forest in Northern California, where he learned to surf and fell in love with wilderness. Today, Emmanuel is the founder, executive editor and podcast host of Emergence Magazine – for nearly a decade, one of the most important venues for spiritually-infused ecological writing. His new book,

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47:03

An Evening of Wonder with Alan Lightman

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/06/13

What happens when a physicist experiences a moment of transcendence that science cannot explain?Alan Lightman has spent much of his life exploring the mysteries of the universe—from black holes and the nature of time to the fundamental laws that govern reality. A physicist, novelist and longtime professor at MIT, he's fascinated by the transformative power of awe and wonder.In this live conversation recorded at New York's Morgan Library, Lightman reflects on extraordinary encounters in

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39:10

Rewilding Attention with D. Graham Burnett

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/05/23

We all know our attention is being competed for — but historian of science D. Graham Burnett calls it something more alarming: a "civilizational biohack." In this episode, we talk with Burnett, a Princeton historian of science and co-founder of "The Friends of Attention," about the movement to liberate our minds from the 17-trillion-dollar attention economy. He draws on surprising sources — the German Romantics, St. Augustine, Simone Weil, Henry James — to argue that we've lost touch with

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31:18

Christof Koch on the Cosmic Toad

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/05/16

What happens when one of the world’s leading neuroscientists has a mystical experience that upends his understanding of reality?In the 1990s, Christof Koch helped launch the modern science of consciousness, searching for the neural basis of subjective experience. A committed materialist, Koch believed brain science would explain how conscious experience is generated. Then several profound psychedelic experiences changed his metaphysical beliefs. “It was like an earthquake,” he says.In this

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45:22

Why We Need Fairy Tales Now — with Sharon Blackie

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/05/09

Sharon Blackie is one of our foremost fairy tale interpreters. In her new book, “Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now,” she reclaims the subversive fairy tale heroines of the past. Not passive, well-behaved princesses — think Tatterhood instead of Cinderella, the Fox Wife instead of Sleeping Beauty — figures from centuries-old European folk tales that were whispered over hearths and spinning wheels, and handed down from one generation of women to the next, not as children’s

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49:50

Rebecca Henderson: Can Capitalism Save the World It’s...

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/05/02

Can capitalism save the world it's destroying?Rebecca Henderson thinks so. An economist at Harvard Business School and author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, she has advised some of the world's biggest corporations and argues that capitalism itself — and what drives corporations — urgently needs to change.She's clear-eyed about capitalism's failures — the inequality, the exploitation, the environmental destruction — which is precisely what drives her passion for reforming it

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36:38

Caroline Winterer: Dinosaurs, Deep Time and the...

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/04/25

T-Rex. Brontosaurus. Diplodocus. Just the names conjure something enormous — a sense of scale that dwarfs human history. Standing before dinosaur tracks in the Utah desert, or gazing up at a towering skeleton in a natural history museum, you feel it: the vertigo of deep time. Millions of years of life and death, compressed into bone and stone.Two hundred years ago, Americans began unearthing mysterious fossils and giant bones they didn't even have names for yet. Almost overnight, something

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42:02

Mary-Jane Rubenstein: Pantheism and the Godness of...

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/04/18

What if nature isn’t just alive—but divine? Pantheism, once branded heresy, is finding new adherents among those who don’t consider themselves religious but still sense something sacred and wondrous in the living world.Mary-Jane Rubenstein, a scholar of philosophy and religion, traces the long, contested history of wonder—from medieval mystics to modern seekers. She reflects on the Overview Effect, that disorienting moment when astronauts gaze back at Earth and feel both its fragility and

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39:21

Dekila Chungyalpa on the Sacred Feminine and the...

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/04/11

Imagine growing up believing that at the heart of existence is a Primordial Mother—and that She is the Earth.For Dekila Chungyalpa, that idea is not metaphor. It’s inheritance.In Tibetan Buddhism, the feminine divine appears as Prajnaparamita, or Yum Chenmo—the “Mother of All Buddhas.” As the daughter and granddaughter of nuns, Dekila was raised in a world where spiritual teaching and healing was often female, and where land itself—especially the sacred Himalayan landscape of Sikkim—was

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34:03

Manvir Singh: Was Shamanism the First Religion?

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/04/04

Shamanism may be humanity’s oldest religion – a tradition found across cultures, where healers slip into unseen realms, speak with spirits, and bring back knowledge from beyond the visible world. But in a modern, scientific age, these practices can seem like little more than superstition. But what if they reveal something deeper in human experience? Anthropologist Manvir Singh set out in search of answers. On a remote island in Indonesia, he lived with the Mentawai people, watching as their

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42:20

David George Haskell: Flowers and the Revolutionary...

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/03/28

For thousands of years, flowers have threaded themselves through human life—into our rituals, our art, our language, even our names. We decorate our homes and altars with them, distill their scents, celebrate them in poetry and song. But what if we’ve misunderstood them entirely?In How Flowers Made the World, biologist and writer David George Haskell invites us to see flowers not as delicate embellishments, but as one of the most powerful forces in Earth’s history. When flowering plants

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37:47

Robert Macfarlane: The Soul of Rivers and the Rights...

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/03/07

What if a river is alive–but we’ve forgotten how to recognize it?This is the radical idea at the heart of the global “rights of nature” movement, which seeks to grant rivers, forests and ecosystems legal standing. Rooted in ancient traditions and emerging in modern law, it challenges the notion of nature as property and a resource to be exploited.In “Is a River Alive?”, acclaimed writer and explorer Robert Macfarlane travels to remote waterways in Ecuador, India and Canada, meeting

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39:28

Renee Bergland: The Enchanted Science of Emily...

Wonder Cabinet ·

2026/02/28

Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin both saw nature as alive with mystery – and treated wonder as a way of knowing. Literary scholar and science historian Renee Bergland, author of "Natural Magic," is our guide to the forgotten kinship between the reclusive poet and the celebrated naturalist. Dickinson and Darwin never met, but they had at least one close friend in common. Both were both fascinated by fossils. Both wandered the woods and swamps near their homes, studying insects and

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