Wonder Cabinet
Wonder Cabinet is an independent podcast created by Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson, the Peabody Award-winning producers behind public radio's To The Best Of Our Knowledge. The show features intimate, long-form conversations with scientists, philosophers, writers, and artists who are reimagining our relationship with the planet. Topics range from black holes and quantum entanglement to mycelial networks and ancient tree rings, as well as dream worlds, myths, and fairy tales. Inspired by Enlightenment-era cabinets of curiosities, the podcast explores how mechanistic models are giving way to more holistic, relational understandings of life on a sentient Earth.
Episodes
Writing an Enchanted Landscape with Daniel Mason
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 steeped in the natural history of New England, from its geology to its native plants and animals. They capture the uncanny feeling of living in a landscape layered with human history — the stone walls, cellar holes, and
Being Alive with Melanie Challenger
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
The Power of Ritual with Rabbi Geoff Mitelman
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
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. 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 the
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 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-mem
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 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 uncert
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 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
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 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 myste
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 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
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 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 c
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, 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
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 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 profoun
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 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
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 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 exp
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 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 unearth
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 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 Overvi
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 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 hea
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 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
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 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 delic
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 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 a
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, 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 f
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 visiting a dying, deeply flawed man—debating and waiting to see whether he can face the truth about himself before it’s too late.In this conversation, Steve Paulson talks with Saunders about the evolution of his ideas about
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 failures that can lead to systemic collapse, and it’s hard not to see the symptoms of a dying world order in events unfolding around us. But maybe what we’re witnessing is actually grounds for hope. In a forthcoming book "T
Carlo Rovelli: Cosmic Mysteries and the Politics of Wonder
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 meaning—years before he “fell madly in love with physics.” Today, Rovelli is famous for his bestselling books, including "Seven Brief Lessons on Physics" and "Reality Is Not What It Seems," and his pioneering work
Sophie Strand: Ecological Storytelling and Mythic Imagination
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 mushroom spores, from ancient weather gods to mycorrhizal fungi, from Bronze Age collapse to the slow intelligence of soil.In this episode of Wonder Cabinet, we talk with Strand about wonder that doesn’t float upward bu
Introducing 'Wonder Cabinet'
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 the Peabody Award-winning public radio show “To the Best of Our Knowledge.” Each week, Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson host intimate conversations with leading scientists, poets and philosophers about the mys
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