Wonder Cabinet

Tree Thinking with Robert Moor

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.

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

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

Poetry Against Despair with Christian Wiman

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 aut

Chasing Wilderness with Cal Flyn (and Gary Snyder)

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 qu

The Conscious Universe: Panpsychism with Philip Goff

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 c

The Spiritual Ecology of Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee

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

An Evening of Wonder with Alan Lightman

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

Rewilding Attention with D. Graham Burnett

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

Christof Koch on the Cosmic Toad

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 launc

Why We Need Fairy Tales Now — with Sharon Blackie

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 heroin

Rebecca Henderson: Can Capitalism Save the World It’s Destroying?

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 Fi

Caroline Winterer: Dinosaurs, Deep Time and the American Soul

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 deser

Mary-Jane Rubenstein: Pantheism and the Godness of Nature

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 s

Dekila Chungyalpa on the Sacred Feminine and the Living Earth

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 inhe

Manvir Singh: Was Shamanism the First Religion?

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

David George Haskell: Flowers and the Revolutionary Power of Beauty

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

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

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 r

Renee Bergland: The Enchanted Science of Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin

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,

George Saunders: Angels, Ghosts and the Moral Imagination

What if dying is not an ending, but a moment of radical clarity? In his new novel "Vigil," George Saunders conjures a strange and often comic world of bickering angels vi

Rebecca Solnit: Hope After the End

How do you deal with the emotional toll of living in a time of dissolution? Social scientists use the term "polycrisis" to describe the kind of cascading, overlapping fai