On Being with Krista Tippett

By: On Being Studios
  • Summary

  • Wisdom to replenish and orient in a tender, tumultuous time to be alive. Spiritual inquiry, science, social healing, and poetry. Conversations to live by. With a 20-year archive featuring luminaries like Mary Oliver, Thich Nhat Hanh, and Desmond Tutu, each episode brings a new discovery about the immensity of our lives. Hosted by Krista Tippett, Learn more about the On Being Project’s work in the world at onbeing.org.
    2019 The On Being Project. All rights reserved.
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Episodes
  • adrienne maree brown — On Radical Imagination and Moving Towards Life
    Jul 3 2024

    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.

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    1 hr and 20 mins
  • “The End of Poetry” by Ada Limón
    Jun 28 2024

    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.

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    2 mins
  • Atul Gawande — On Mortality and Meaning
    Jun 27 2024

    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.

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    1 hr and 3 mins

Featured Article: The Best Unsolved Mystery Podcasts to Uncover Your Inner Investigator


There are so many unsolved mysteries in the world, from murders that have stumped investigators for decades to the enigma of extraterrestrials, supernatural phenomena, and the afterlife. Such seemingly eclectic subjects all stimulate our capacity to wonder and have fascinated humans for as long as we've been telling stories. No wonder that some of our favorite podcasts seek to shed light on such mysteries, both big and small.

What listeners say about On Being with Krista Tippett

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Brilliant conversation about love.

To impact the epidemic of loneliness, we all need social connections. In this episode, Krista speaks with the U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, on how we can all give and receive more love as well as cultivating kindness in ourselves, with our communities, and beyond. it is just what the "doctor ordered."

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Powerful

Even though the overall length is an hour plus, it feels like ten minutes. Robin and Resmaa share so much with the listeners. I appreciate their candor and honesty.

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beautiful poems

The poems are beautiful but the depth of the discussion even more! Thank you.

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A celebration of our shared humanness

Some wonderful conversations. I’m slowly working my way through the archives. Seems to me, no matter what the title of the episode or who the guest is, the ongoing thread of this generally worthwhile podcast is simply what it means to be fully human in today’s world.

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