February 14, 2021

JERICHO BROWN

February 14, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Anna Iselli

Pulitzer Prize-winning Poet
Author of The Tradition & The New Testament

I just want to make the poems like a living being…There are moments that I’m not at the desk, but I’m living life. And living life is actually what leads to writing. You have to have experiences to write about. Whether or not you are aware of those experiences as you are writing them down because if you’re doing music first, maybe you’re not aware of what you’re writing. And yet, those experiences are what come to fruition in your writing. You become aware. Oh, I did come on that roller coaster that time that I haven’t thought about in twenty years. Oh I did make love to that cute person that I haven’t thought about in ten years, but you’ve got to make love, you’ve got to get on roller coasters, you’ve got to get your heart broken. You’ve got to dance. You gotta get out and do things and that, too, is a part of writing. You have to trust you’re a writer by identity. And if you can trust that you’re a writer by identity, then you don’t have to be at a desk.

February 13, 2021

MERLIN SHELDRAKE

February 13, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Cooper Berkoff

Biologist & Bestselling Author of Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds,
Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures, Winner of the Wainwright Prize 2021

Humans have been partnering with fungi for an unknowably long time, no doubt for longer than we’ve been humans. Whether as foods, eating mushrooms, as medicines, dosing ourselves with moulds and other mushrooms that might help, parasites or others helpers with infection, mushrooms as tinder or ways to carry a spark, this very important thing that humans needed to do for a very long time, and as agents of fermentation, as in yeasts creating alcohol. So humans have partnered with fungi to solve all sorts of problems and so fungi have found themselves enveloped within human societies and cultures for a long time.

February 13, 2021

LAURENT LE BON

February 13, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk

Fmr. President Musée Picasso
President Centre Pompidou

Picasso is a symbol of the creative process.
Always in metamorphosis. Always in transformation. Sometimes when you become wealthy and famous, you stop having the energy of the creative process, but if you see the whole span of his career, you have 50,000 works of art in all mediums. So the main mission of the museum is to display like a kaleidoscope, and we have always a new angle, a new direction.

February 11, 2021

PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

February 11, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Yesenia Olmos

Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.

February 10, 2021

OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

February 10, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Karina Hammoud

Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International
Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.

February 09, 2021

MASTER SHI HENG YI

February 09, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk

35th Generation of Shaolin Masters
Headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe

Just getting to know what is Buddhism, which is the foundation of every monastery. The Shaolin Temple is in the core, first of all, it’s a Buddhist monastery and when you are starting to read about Buddhism, one of the key sentences, in the beginning, is: With your thoughts, you are creating the world.

February 08, 2021

SUSAN FISHER STERLING

February 08, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Katherine Capristo

Director · National Museum of Women in the Arts

I came to work at the National Museum of Women in the Arts thirty-two years ago. I really took to the idea that the museum was controversial, that a lot of men said, "Why do you need a women's museum? There are so many other museums. Why do women have to be separated?"

February 07, 2021

MIKE PONDSMITH

February 07, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk, Paolo Banzon & Carla McCarron

Creator of Cyberpunk · Origins Award-Winning Game Designer

One of the things I’ve noticed is that a lot of those younger people are actually much nicer than they need to be. And they have to realize that this is going to be your world. It turns out the way you want to make it and so you should be thinking now about what you want out of this. What do you want that world to be? Do not wait around until the two generations beyond you have gone ahead and done it the way they want it because, by the time they get done, you’re not going to have the chance to shift it to where you want it. So start thinking now about where do you want to be? What is the future you want? And don’t be nice about it, just go ahead and start planning it now.

February 03, 2021

DAVID HOLLANDER

February 03, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk

Showrunner · Writer · Director

They are very different skill sets and very different ways of approaching storytelling. Writing is very private. I find writing to be very difficult. I have an idea. I have a feeling, and then I write into it. That part of the process is the most painful and the most demanding. Directing is easier. It’s a very different skill set. It’s applying a story to the technique of how you film it, how it’s going to work. That part is so simple. The writing is brutally hard. There’s an architecture to every season that you write in television. I have to see the whole story. This big twelve-hour story. There’s a lot of math in that. There’s a lot of Where am I going? and How is it going to feel? Because at the end of the day, all I’m doing is trying to make people feel something.

February 02, 2021

HALA ALYAN

February 02, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk & Mustafa Sheikh

Dayton Literary Peace Prize Winning Novelist, Poet & Clinical Psychologist

We become the stories we tell ourselves…I started writing around the time I learned English because we moved to the States soon after my fourth birthday, and so I was here for kindergarten into elementary school. I grasped this new language just as I was learning how to also put things onto the page. Those two things really happened at the same time for me. I entered this world where I felt very different and very other, for all intents and purposes I was set to be raised in Kuwait. And then that of course got turned upside down after the invasion by Saddam. I think that so much of my trying to make sense of the world had to do with the displacement, exile and these experiences that my parents had experienced but then that I had as well as we were fleeing the war. It’s hard to know because I think that language was being formed in my brain at the same time that these things were happening.

February 02, 2021

MARK SELIGER

February 02, 2021/ Interviewed by Mia Funk

Photographer

I always tell people the worst picture can ever take is one you don't take. And that is a simple philosophy. If you don't go out there and do the work, then you will never know. You may think there's going to be another great snowstorm. You might think there's going to be another great moment where a block is going to have a certain kind of rhythm or a culture is going to have a certain amount of innocence or a musician is going to be as reluctant or vulnerable or sympathetic. You just have to embrace the moment and do the work.

January 17, 2021

MUSIC CREDITS

January 17, 2021/ -

Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue No. 22

Performed by: Maria Pan’kiv

License: Public Domain

Source: Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue No. 22

Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude in C Major

Performed by: Kimiko Ishizaka

License: Public Domain

Source: Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude in C Major

Bach - Prelude and Fugue in E Major (Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2)

Performed by: Randolph Hokanson

License: Public Domain

Source: Bach - Prelude and Fugue in E Major

Bach - Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Aria)

Performed by: Kimiko Ishizaka

License: Public Domain

Source: Bach - Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (Aria)

Vivaldi - Winter, Second Movement (Largo)

Performed by: John Harrison

License: CC BY-SA 3.0

Source: Vivaldi - Winter, Second Movement (Largo)

Antonio Vivaldi - Spring, Second Movement (Largo)
Performed by: John Harrison
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: Vivaldi - Four Seasons, 1 Spring mvt 2 Largo

Antonio Vivaldi - Summer, Third Movement (Presto)
Performed by: John Harrison
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: Vivaldi - Four Seasons, 2 Summer mvt 3 Presto

Antonio Vivaldi - Autumn, Second Movement (Adagio molto)
Performed by: John Harrison
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: Vivaldi - Four Seasons, 3 Autumn mvt 2 Adagio molto

Antonio Vivaldi - Winter, First Movement (Allegro non molto)
Performed by: John Harrison
License: CC BY-SA 3.0
Source: Vivaldi - Four Seasons, 4 Winter mvt 1 Allegro non molto

Chopin - Nocturne in F sharp minor, Op. 48 No. 2

Performed by: Luke Faulkner

License: CC BY 3.0

Source: Chopin - Nocturne in F sharp minor, Op. 48 No. 2

Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No. 1

Performed by: Robin Alciatore

License: Public Domain

Source: Erik Satie - Gymnopédie No. 1

TECHNOLOGY & EDUCATION EPISODES

Chris Zabriskie - Heliograph