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 mystery of the cosmos, the deep intelligence of the Earth, and ideas to re-enchant everyday life. These are expansive interviews about experiences of wonder and transcendence – and ideas that open new doors. 

We’re living through a period of turbulent change, so there's a question we’re asking: what would happen if we let wonder be our guide -- not as an escape from reality, but as a way to inhabit it more deeply? 

The first two episodes of “Wonder Cabinet” premiere on January 31, and new editions will be released weekly on Saturdays. 

Visit https://wondercabinetproductions.com

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 but roots downward—into bodies, ecosystems, decay, and deep time. We begin with her essay “Your Body Is an Ancestor,” published shortly before Halloween and the Day of the Dead, and follow her imagery into our shared prehistoric past. 

The conversation also explores how Strand’s experience of chronic illness reshaped her understanding of nature, selfhood, and health. Rather than seeing the sick body as broken, she turns to ecological metaphors: spider webs, soil structures, caterpillars dissolving inside cocoons. What might it mean to understand ourselves not as machines that fail, but as landscapes that change?

Along the way, we talk about fantasy and “romantasy,” Tolkien, Harry Potter, Dramione fan fiction and communal storytelling rituals. 

This is a conversation about wonder with dirt under its fingernails: embodied, mythic, ecological, and deeply alive to the cycles of death and regeneration that bind us all.

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• Substack: "Your Body is an Ancestor"
• Sophie Strand’s website 
• Follow her work on Instagram and Substack
• Order her memoir

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00:00:00 Meet Sophie Strand
00:04:34 Body as Ancestor
00:10:08 Roots of Sin
00:18:21 Spores and Consciousness
00:27:49 Stories We Can't Explain
00:35:39 Science as Wonder

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Wonder Cabinet is hosted by Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson.

Find out more about the show at wondercabinetproductions.com, where you can subscribe to the podcast and our newsletter. 

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 on some of the biggest mysteries in physics, including black holes and quantum gravity. 

In a wide-ranging conversation, Steve Paulson talks with Rovelli about his early, profound experiences with LSD; his discovery of the "spectacular" beauty of general relativity and quantum mechanics; his lifelong search for purpose in both the cosmos and his own life; and why scientists need to be politically engaged. Carlo also tells us about the big idea that he’d put in our own wonder cabinet.

This interview was recorded at the Island of Knowledge think tank in Tuscany, a project supported by Dartmouth College and the John Templeton Foundation. We also play a short excerpt from Anne Strainchamps’ earlier interview with Rovelli that originally aired on Wisconsin Public Radio’s To The Best Of Our Knowledge. 

This Wonder Cabinet episode was not funded, endorsed or affiliated with Wisconsin Public Media or the University of Wisconsin - Madison.

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• TTBOOK Interview — Deep time: Carlo Rovelli's white holes, where time dissolves
• Carlo Rovelli's Website — Official research and publications

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00:00:00 Introduction & The Chirp of Black Holes

00:04:10 Early Years in Verona

00:10:00 Falling in Love with Physics

00:17:30 Search for Truth

00:25:05 Politics of Wonder

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Wonder Cabinet is hosted by Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson.

Find out more about the show at wondercabinetproductions.com, where you can subscribe to the podcast and our newsletter. 

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 "The Beginning Comes After the End," writer and activist Rebecca Solnit makes the case that something is dying, all right — because something better is being born. A rising worldview that embraces antiracism, feminism, environmental thinking, Indigenous and non-Western ideas, and a vision of a more interconnected, compassionate world.  

Solnit is an engaged writer and intellectual in the tradition of Barbara Ehrenreich, Susan Sontag and George Orwell. Her new book picks up where her earlier bestseller “Hope in the Dark”  left off — with an argument against despair and historical amnesia. In this conversation, we explore the extraordinary scale of progressive social, political, scientific and cultural change over the past century, the roots of Solnit’s stance of “pragmatic, embodied hope,” her thoughts on “moral wonder, “ and her years in San Francisco’s underground punk rock scene.  She also tells us what she’d put in our own wonder cabinet: an AIDS Memorial Quilt square sewn by Rosa Parks. 

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• To The Best Of Our Knowledge — Tending a wartime garden: what Orwell’s fascination with roses tells us about the human need for beauty 
• Rebecca Solnit’s newsletter 
• Pre-order “The Beginning Comes After the End," due out March 3, 2026. 

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00:00:00 Introduction 

00:04:00 A Land Back Ceremony 

00:08:05 Progress in Disguise 

00:18:35 Hope and Interconnection 

00:29:45 Defiant Hope

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Wonder Cabinet is hosted by Anne Strainchamps and Steve Paulson.

Find out more about the show at wondercabinetproductions.com, where you can subscribe to the podcast and our newsletter. 

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 death and the possibility of an afterlife. Dying, he says, may be “the ultimate experience of wonder,” and he believes ghost stories can open powerful imaginative spaces for novelists. Saunders reflects on his own Buddhist practice as he considers these life-and-death questions, and he tells us why he thinks fiction is uniquely suited to grappling with complex moral issues and why Tolstoy and Chekhov are his personal sources of inspiration.

Saunders is the author of such celebrated books as “Tenth of December,” “Pastoralia,” and the Booker Prize-winning “Lincoln in the Bardo.”  His nonfiction book about the great Russian writers is “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.”

This interview was recorded at the Central Library in downtown Madison shortly before Saunders spoke at the Wisconsin Book Festival.

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• To the Best of Our Knowledge — On his short story collection “Tenth of December. 
• To the Best of Our Knowledge: Reflecting on “Lincoln in the Bardo.”
• Substack Story Club with George Saunders

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00:00:00 Introduction and Reading from Vigil

00:07:50 The Plane Crash and Death Obsession

00:15:00 The Writing Process and Wonder

00:24:30 Moral Accountability in Fiction

00:32:20 Chekhov, Succession, and Accuracy

00:40:00 Kindness, Criticism, and Final Thoughts

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 documenting rare plants. They shared a vision of the interconnectedness of all life. We know that Dickinson, with her background in botany, geology, astronomy and chemistry, was enthralled by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. And it certainly seems possible that Darwin, with his degree in theology and his lifelong love of poetry and literature, might have admired the American poet whose close observations and delicate perceptions echoed his own. 

Bergland’s dual biography, just out in paper, is vivid, sparkling intellectual history – a window onto a time when scientific thinking still embraced emotion and wonder as modes of perception. Could the belief in “natural magic” that infused Dickinson’s and Darwin’s ideas restore our own faith in a universe alive with meaning? Our conversation about the poet who studied natural history and the naturalist who loved poetry suggests a way forward – by reclaiming their shared ecological wonder. 

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• Now out in paperback: "Natural Magic: Emily Dickinson, Charles Darwin, and the Dawn of Modern Science"
• Previous books from Renee Bergland: "Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics" and "The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects" 

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0:00 — Meeting Renee Bergland

9:00 — What Is Natural Magic?

20:00 — Beauty, Truth, and Evolution

34:00 — Hope and the Garden of Change

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 mycologists, Indigenous river-keepers, and activists who see the natural world as animate and ensouled. Known for celebrated books like “Underland,” “The Old Ways,” and “Mountains of the Mind,” Macfarlane blends storytelling, natural history and philosophy in an invitation to reimagine our relationship with the living Earth.

If rivers have rights—and perhaps even a kind of consciousness—how would that change the way we see the world?

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• To the Best of Our Knowledge – Macfarlane describes the allure and our fascination with the underground world of caves, mines, catacombs and glacial shafts beneath the earth's surface. 
• To the Best of Our Knowledge - Macfarlane offers a book recommendation: “The Living Mountain” by the Scottish poet and writer Nan Shepherd.
• University of Cambridge – Robert Macfarlane’s faculty page

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00:00:00 Introduction

00:03:00 Is a River Alive?

00:10:50 Ecuador's Cloud Forest

00:19:40 Chennai's Dying Rivers

00:24:15 Wild River in Quebec

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 emerged more than 200 million years ago, they didn’t just adapt to the world—they transformed it. Through strategies of beauty, attraction, and reciprocity, they turned rivals into partners, reshaping ecosystems and making possible the rich diversity of life we know today.

In a lyrical, science-rich conversation, we explore:

— Why Haskell calls flowers “nature’s revolutionaries”
— How beauty, pleasure, and desire function as evolutionary strategies
— The deep interdependence between flowers, animals, and humans
— What flowers can teach us about resilience in a time of ecological crisis
— How re-centering flowers might change the story we tell about life on Earth

We live on a floral planet, Haskell says—and more than that, we are a floral species, utterly dependent on flowering plants for food, habitat, and survival. The lessons flowers offer—about creativity, cooperation, and transformation—may be exactly what we need to navigate a rapidly changing world.

What would it mean to tell the story of life not through predators and conquest, but through seduction, partnership and bloom?

• David's book: How Flowers Made Our World: The Story of Nature’s Revolutionaries 
• To the Best of Our Knowledge (2020): David George Haskell on the forest unseen
• To the Best of Our Knowledge feature (2021): Listening to trees as fellow citizens

00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:50 Flowers Remade the World
00:12:40 The Scent of Ancient Flowers
00:22:00 The Language of Perfume
00:30:30 Belonging to the Living World

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 shamans — the sikerie — drummed, danced and entered trance, their tattooed bodies painted in turmeric. In these altered states, they appeared to move between worlds. 

How does an empirically-minded scientist make sense of such experiences? Singh combines immersive fieldwork with cross-cultural research into shamanic traditions, past and present. He calls shamanism a “timeless religion,” one that may go back to our earliest ancestors — and still lives on in the world’s major religions.

Along the way, he asks a provocative question: Was Jesus a shaman?

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• Manvir’s book, Shamanism
• Manvir’s article in The Guardian on the debate over the history of psychedelics in indigenous cultures

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0:00 The Macumba Exorcism in Brazil
4:35 Meeting the Sikerei of Siberut
8:30 Inside a Shamanic Healing Ceremony
17:05 Psychedelics and Altered States
22:10 Shamanism as the First Religion
29:25 Was Jesus a Shaman?

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 alive with presence, meaning, and obligation.

Today, she is a global conservationist and founding director of the Loka Initiative, building unlikely partnerships between climate scientists and religious leaders across traditions—from Buddhist monastics to Catholic clergy, Indigenous elders to Muslim clerics and Evangelical pastors. Her work suggests that the climate crisis is not only scientific or political—but spiritual.  

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• UW: About the Loka Initiative 
• Loka Initiative website
• Center for Humans and Nature: Dekila on ecology and the Buddhist concept of interdependence

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0:00 Introduction
4:05 Sacred Mountains of Sikkim
10:20 The Sacred Feminine
16:30 Rituals and the Land
21:25 Scientist by Day, Buddhist by Night
28:25 Bridging Faith and Science

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 its radiance. And she talks about the obsession that tech titans like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have for space exploration, which may be the new frontier of awe—even a new religion.

But awe is never simple. It can be as unsettling as it is beautiful, as terrifying as it is astonishing. It breaks us open even as it draws us in—leaving us to reckon with a world that is stranger than we thought.

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• Faculty profile
• "Astrotopia: The Dangerous Religion of the Corporate Space Race"
• "Pantheologies"
• "Strange Blood"

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0:00 Introduction
3:50 Pantheism: History and Ethics
11:15 Personal Spirituality
19:55 Awe, Wonder, and the Overview Effect
28:35 Space as Religion
35:50 The Wonder Cabinet

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 remarkable happened: the New World became old. The United States went from infant start-up nation to the blueprint for all of creation.

Stanford historian Caroline Winterer traces this deep time revolution in her book How the New World Became Old — and she shows us how profoundly it shaped American identity. We still think of dinosaurs as fun, as children's toys and museum spectacles. Few of us realize how deeply they underwrote a national mythology — one that fueled American exceptionalism, manifest destiny, Christian nationalism and genocide.

This is a story about wonder and awe. And it teaches us that those emotions are neither simple nor neutral.

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• Caroline’s website  
• Caroline’s book "How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America" 

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:03:20 Dinosaurs and the Deep Time Revolution
00:10:10 Darwin and Fundamentalism
00:16:10 The Shadow Side of Wonder
00:29:00 Deep Time Today

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 from within. And as a climate activist, she's haunted by the consequences if we fail to act.

But this conversation goes deeper than economics. Henderson opens up about hitting a personal wall in her climate work — and the unexpected turn that brought wonder back into her life.

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• Website 
• Book: "Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire"
• More writing by Rebecca Henderson

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0:00 Introduction
3:00 Capitalism Reimagined
8:30 The Norway Turnaround
16:50 Hitting the Wall
28:40 Reweaving Ourselves
43:00 Finding the Way Through

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 entertainment but a blueprint for survival, maps for soul retrieval and cultural regeneration. 

The brave, smart heroines and wise old women in these tales offer us an alternative, “post-heroic” model of psychological development, Blackie says. A code of ethics based on kinship with the more-than-human world of animals and plants, and a celebration of old-fashioned virtues like compassion, kindness and reciprocity. Fairy tale heroines, Blackie says, don’t slay dragons — they make them part of the team. 

Fairy tales are part of our collective unconscious, a storehouse of archetypes and images that predate the modern world.  There's a bridge back to the enchanted landscapes and animist sensibilities of our ancestors — a gateway to wonder.  In this conversation, Blackie shows us how to unlock their power and find our way back the imaginal world. 

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• Website
• "The Art of Enchantment" Substack 
• "Ripening: Why Women Need Fairy Tales Now" 
• The Nostos Institute
• Sharon’s other books

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0:00 Introduction
2:25 Why Fairy Tales Are Survival Stories
12:25 Beyond the Hero's Journey
27:05 Jung, Hillman, and the Imaginal World
41:45 Active Imagination and Closing Thanks

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 conversation, Koch reflects on how those mind-bending experiences transformed his deepest assumptions about mind and matter, and whether the cosmos itself might have purpose. He talks about the power and the limits of science, and why he’s come to see consciousness not as a byproduct of matter, but as something far more fundamental, perhaps the fabric of reality itself.

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Personal website 

Allen Institute

TTBOOK: "Your Brain on Shrooms" 

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0:00 Introduction
4:05 Pursuing Ultimate Truth
9:40 Into the Psychedelic Void
16:00 The Loss of Self
20:55 What Science Cannot Explain

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 older, richer forms of attention. And he makes the case that reclaiming it will require more than screentime apps or digital detox – it’ll take collective resistance. Plus: why your Pilates class, your evening needlework, or your walk with the dog might already be forms of radical attention — and how reframing everyday activities can make ordinary life feel richer, more mysterious and more full of wonder.

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• “Attensity: A Manifesto of the Attention Liberation Movement”
• The Friends of Attention
• The Strother School of Radical Attention
• D. Graham Burnett website  

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0:00 Introduction
3:00 Human Fracking
27:30 Attention as Generosity
30:55 Wonder and Disenchantment