The Facts of Life by Pádraig Ó Tuama

A heavy complexity is on the shoulders of the young of our species in these years —  humans growing up in this time. At the same time, from the digital revolution and AI to the ecology and society, they have wisdom and instincts in their bones that will be essential if we are all to flourish and not merely survive this century. In November 2024, the Georgetown University Collaborative on Global Children’s Issues brought Krista together with esteemed children’s and young adult writer Jason Reynolds and Georgetown student Kessley Janvier. The encounter between the three of them spans generations from the 20s to the 40s to the 60s and extended out to a room of people of all ages and walks of life. The wisdom that unfolded is as much about who we will be and how we will be as what we have before us to do, each in our own lives.Jason Reynolds is a New York Times bestselling author of over 20 books for children and young adults. From 2020–2022 he served as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. Among many honors, he has received the Newbury, Printz, and Coretta Scott King awards and in 2024 was named a MacArthur Fellow. He is on faculty at Lesley University for the Writing for Young People MFA Program.Kessley Janvier is a senior at Georgetown University, majoring in history. She’s former president of the Georgetown University NAACP.  She has organized around reparations, as part of Hoyas Advocating for Slavery Accountability, and she has also led efforts to promote climate justice, police accountability, and racial justice.Special thanks this week to Gillian Huebner, Ian Manzi, Rabbi Rachel Gartner and Derek Goldman. On Being Young in America was sponsored by the Culture of Encounter Project and was convened by the Collaborative on Global Children's Issues, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs, and the Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics at Georgetown University in collaboration with The On Being Project.Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

A calming and helpful conversation for making sense of the very story of our time, and how that is coming to us and being powerfully shaped through media and journalism. The theory of change of journalism as it came out of the 20th century, David Bornstein says, is that shining a light on what is going wrong — what is dangerous and dysfunctional, catastrophic or corrupt — will mobilize and lead us to correct it. But this emphasis on the terrible and the extreme, from whichever side of our cultural trenches you inhabit, has helped fuel a paralyzing, dehumanizing fear and the collapse of trust in institutions and in each other. Many of us are turning away from the news altogether. Is that the answer? How to live in this world with this media and retain meaningful, reasonable hope and agency? And what are we not seeing and hearing that we can orient towards? There is no one wiser on these questions than David Bornstein.Krista spoke with David Bornstein before a small group of citizens of Minneapolis in November, 2024. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page. Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list for all things On Being and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including a heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.BIODavid Bornstein is co-founder and CEO of the globally esteemed Solutions Journalism Network. Learn more about their work with news organizations around the world, and their solutions story tracker at solutionsjournalism.org. He has been a journalist focusing primarily on social innovation for three decades. From 2010 to 2021, he co-authored the “Fixes” column in The New York Times. He is the author of The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank and How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, which has been published in 25 languages.Special thanks to Dana Mortenson, who created the event that brought Krista and David together. She is founder of World Savvy, an organization that seeks to reimagine education to build the global competence necessary to navigate a complex and ever-changing world.

Katsi Cook is a beacon in an array of quiet powerful worlds — a magnetic, joyous, loving presence. The public conversation we offer up here was part of a gathering where a fantastic group of young people had come to be nourished, to explore the depths of what community can mean, to become more grounded and whole. They've taken to sitting at the feet of this Mohawk wise woman, mother, and grandmother, and you will experience why. Globally renowned in the field of midwifery, Katsi’s practice and teaching is based in ancient ancestral knowledge, and has taken an esteemed place in research and advances in the science of environmental reproductive health. As founder of the National Aboriginal Council of Midwives of Canada, her work is at heart, she says, about the "reclamation of the transformative power of birth." Katsi is helping our world recover the natural human experience of cross-generational companionship and care. This conversation you'll hear between her and Krista, sitting in a room of mostly young people, was an exercise in the art of eldering — which Katsi Cook calls nothing more and nothing less than "generational wealth transmission."Find an excellent transcript of this show below, edited by humans.Special thanks for the entire experience that brought On Being together with Katsi:Reverend Don Chatfield, Tammy Saltus, and the All Souls Interfaith Gathering congregation; Megan Camp, Tre McCarney, and the team at Shelburne Farms; The Harris and Herzberber Families and High Acres Farms, Philo Ridge Farm, Spirit Aligned Leadership, Gedakina, Guaní Press, and the Akwesasne Freedom School. Jennifer Brandel with Hearken; Mara Zepeda and MCK Keefrider with Linestone, Amelia Rose Barlow, Kristine Hill with Collective Wisdom, and Sara Jolena Wolcott with Sequoia Samanvaya. Audio engineer Abra Clawson. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation; Wayfarer Foundation; Democracy Fund; and (m)otherboard who supported this Gathering, as well as: Aimee Arandia Østensen, Aly Perry, Amanda Herzberger, Andrew Berns, Ashley Henry, Baratunde Thurston, Chief Beverly Cook, Ben Von Wong, Bread and Butter Farm, Carson Linforth Bowley,  Casey Ryan, Charlotte Hardie, Christine Lai, Courtney Mulcahy, David Alder, Ethan Bond-Watts, Elizabeth Stewart, Eve Bradford, Grace Oedel, Hanna Satterlee, Heidi Webb, Jeff Herzberger, Jennifer Daniels, Jonathan Harris, John Stokes, Joey Borgogna, Josie Watson, José Barreiro, Judy Dow,  Katherine Elmer, Kathy Treat, Ken Miles, Liana Gillooly, Loretta Afraid of Bear Cook, Lynn van Housen, Mario Picayo, Michelle Dai Zotti, Paul & Eileen Growald, Raquel Picayo, Rob Anderson,  Speranza Foundation, Tom Cook, Tom Porter, Scott Thrift, Sherry Oakes-Jackson, Ssong Yang, Sue Dixon, Sydney Bolger, Vera Simon-Nobes, Waylon Cook, Wendy Bratt. Katsi Cook is an Onkwehonweh traditional midwife, elder, and Executive Director of Spirit Aligned Leadership Program. She is a Wolf Clan member of the Akwesasne Mohawk Nation and resides at the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe in upstate New York. Her groundbreaking environmental research of Mohawk mother's milk revealed the intergenerational impact of industrial chemicals on the health and well-being of an entire community. Katsi leads a movement of matrilineal awareness and rematriation in Native life. Her book discussed in this episode is Worlds Within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders.______Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list re all things On Being — and to receive Krista’s monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

A sweet and searching conversation between Krista and the man behind Bon Iver at this year's On Air Fest, full of wisdom and revelation. He is a person who experiences deeply, who metabolizes creatively, and who just keeps growing. He opens up with Krista about the strangeness of being loved for how he put his broken heart to music. They venture into the mysteries of God and of numbers, the problem of fame, and the deep working of time in a life. He's now released a gorgeous fifth album, SABLE, fABLE. This one tells of immense healing and learning.Justin Vernon is a singer, songwriter and producer and founder and frontman of the band — sometimes called an art project  — known as Bon Iver. He lives and makes music in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He has been on a personal and professional adventure since releasing his first album in 2007, For Emma, Forever Ago. His new album SABLE/fABLE is his fifth. He's received multiple Grammys and collaborated with many other artists from Taylor Swift to the Blind Boys of Alabama to Travis Scott and Kanye West.This was recorded live at the 2025 On Air Fest in Brooklyn, New York. Find an excellent transcript of this show, edited by humans, on our show page at onbeing.org.Sign yourself and others up for The Pause to be on our mailing list re all things On Being — and to receive Krista's monthly Saturday morning newsletter, including heads up on new episodes, special offerings, recommendations, and event invitations.

On Being is back on April 16, with a special season tethered in the persistent beauty and courage of what it can mean to be human — six conversations Krista has had out in the world in recent months, followed by an experimental, seven-week reflection/action experience— Hope, Imagination, and Remaking the World — to undertake with others in your life. From singer-songwriter Bon Iver (Justin Vernon) to Mohawk elder Katsi Cook to writer Jason Reynolds. Illuminating our lives of love and our lives with the news and our lives of prayer. Befriending across generations and taking in the trauma of the other. All together, an offering towards the questions we're living on every place on the spectrum of our life together: How do we stand with calm and agency and accompaniment before the gravity of this time. How do we keep body and soul together as we do so? Sign yourself and others up for our mailing list and monthly newsletter, The Pause, to be the first to know when each new episode drops.______The Pause — a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round. 

The delightful Nikki Giovanni died on Dec. 9. It is a joy and a solace to relisten to this beloved conversation she had with Krista in 2016 – to experience her signature mix of high seriousness, sweeping perspective, and insistent pleasure. Her words and her spirit feel, if anything, more necessary now. In the 1960s, she was a poet of the Black Arts Movement that nourished civil rights. She became a professor at Virginia Tech, where she called forth beauty and courage after the 2007 shooting there — a precursor to violence that has become all too familiar in American life in the intervening years. And she was an adored voice to a new generation — an enthusiastic elder to all — at home in her body and in the world, even while she saw and exulted in the beyond of this tumultuous age of her lifetime.Nikki Giovanni was a University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech. Some of her best known collections from which the readings in this show were taken include Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, Black Feeling, Black Talk/Black Judgement, and The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni. Her final publications include Make Me Rain: Poems & Prose and A Library.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.

She is known as the voice of a generation. The Queen of Folk. A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington. As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and songs and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer-songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also reentering the public imagination with a big new movie. And her classic heartbreak hit about him, “Diamonds and Rust,” is topping global charts anew.But Joan Baez at 83 is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend. She grew up the daughter of a Mexican physicist father and a Scottish mother in a seemingly idyllic family. But even at the height of her fame, she was struggling mightily with mysterious interior demons. She and her beloved sisters finally reckoned in midlife with a truth of abuse they had buried, even in memory, at great cost. She has reckoned with fracture inside herself and been on an odyssey of wholeness. She is frank and funny, irreverent and wise. Among other gifts, she offers a refreshing way in to what it means to sing and live the reality of “overcoming,” personal and civilizational.Krista spoke with Joan on stage at the 2024 Chicago Humanities Festival.Joan Baez published her first (wonderful) book of poetry at the age of 83: When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. She was one of the leading artists of the 1960s folk revival, and brought her voice to the Civil Rights and anti-war movements of that decade. She performed for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums. She has won scores of awards and was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. In addition to her poetry, she has published a book of drawings, Am I Pretty When I Fly?: An Album of Upside Down Drawings, and painted a series of portraits called Mischief Makers. You can find the links for her books here.Find the transcript for this show at onbeing.org.______Sign up for The Pause — a monthly Saturday morning companion to all things On Being, with heads-up on new episodes, special offerings, event invitations, recommendations, and reflections from Krista all year round.

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.______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.

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.

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.