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 entanglement; others map mycelial networks or count ancient tree rings. And some explore dream worlds, myths, and fairy tales to revive ways of knowing that challenge what we think we understand...
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Nov 14, 2026 · 47:52
Where do you turn when your life falls apart? When you’re stuck in shame and despair? Essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn worked through her own crisis with the help of an unusual guide:…
Nov 7, 2026 · 37:16
Budbreak. Witch’s broom. Wind throw. These are some of the evocative words gathered in " A Forest Language: Words that Illuminate the Astonishing World of Trees ," a new book of…
Oct 31, 2026 · 30:25
Joan Halifax loves Wordsworth’s summons to “see into the life of things.” For the Buddhist abbot of Upaya Zen Center , this kind of deep seeing has been a lifelong pursuit, and…
Oct 24, 2026 · 48:02
Twenty years ago, Maria Popova was newly arrived in the US and working four jobs to pay for college. Lonely and disoriented, she started keeping a record of her search for…
Oct 10, 2026 · 46:35
How does a landscape come alive and even feel enchanted? Bestselling author Daniel Mason explores this question in his novels “ Country People ” and “ North Woods .” Both are…
Oct 3, 2026 · 35:32
Our obsession with the dream of artificial, disembodied intelligence is deadening our experience of life itself. Melanie Challenger — a philosopher, naturalist and National…
Sep 26, 2026 · 37:04
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…
Aug 29, 2026 · 50:57
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…
Aug 22, 2026 · 35:56
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…
Aug 15, 2026 · 45:25
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…
Aug 8, 2026 · 1:00:55
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…
Aug 1, 2026 · 42:34
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…
Jun 20, 2026 · 51:12
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…
Jun 13, 2026 · 47:03
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…
May 23, 2026 · 39:10
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…
May 16, 2026 · 31:18
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…
May 9, 2026 · 45:22
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…
May 2, 2026 · 49:50
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 ,”…
Apr 25, 2026 · 36:38
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…
Apr 18, 2026 · 42:02
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…
Apr 11, 2026 · 39:21
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.…
Apr 4, 2026 · 34:03
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…
Mar 28, 2026 · 42:20
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,…
Mar 7, 2026 · 37:47
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,…
Feb 28, 2026 · 39:28
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…
Feb 21, 2026 · 44:35
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 visiting a…
Feb 14, 2026 · 38:10
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 failures…
Feb 7, 2026 · 37:41
Carlo Rovelli’s quest to understand the nature of reality began not in a physics lab, but in youthful experiments with consciousness, political protest and a restless hunger for…
Jan 31, 2026 · 38:38
Writer and ecologist Sophie Strand thinks at a scale that can feel dizzying—in the best way. In a single conversation, she can move from the chemical structure of cells to…
Jan 24, 2026 · 2:40
You know that moment of amazed surprise when you encounter something so unexpected that it feels almost magical? Welcome to “Wonder Cabinet,” the new podcast from the creators of…
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