Curiosity followed into newsrooms, museums, parks and wartime Vietnam.
Lynn Borton interviews people whose work runs on curiosity, from a Pulitzer-winning Iowa newspaper editor to a relief worker who carried a camera and no gun through wartime Vietnam. The talk stays practical, covering what asking why looks like in a newsroom, a museum, a restoration site or a youth research project.
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Choose to be Curious is Lynn Borton's interview show about curiosity, and it tends to find its subject on the job. The settings range widely: a small-town Iowa newsroom, a museum filled for a weekend with Wikipedia editors, parks and restoration sites photographed over time, and a relief posting in Vietnam in 1969. Borton often introduces a guest with something from her own reading or life. Dan Pink's book Drive, with its account of autonomy, mastery and purpose as sources of motivation, sets up her conversation with TeRay Esquibel. Yale research on science curiosity and political information processing, which found that science comprehension can make politically biased thinking worse, sets up the one with Ky Wildermuth. A childhood memory sets up the talk with her aunt, Lady Borton, who left to do relief work with the American Friends Service Committee during the war when Borton was eight. The guests supply the texture. Art Cullen is editor and co-owner, with his brother John, of the Storm Lake Times-Pilot and won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Writing. He defines news as whatever you don't know. Its essential question, he says, is why. Borton questions the subtitle of his book, Notes from the Edge of the World, and suggests Iowa looks more like the center of the universe. Lisa Seitz Gruwell describes edit-a-thons in which Wikipedians spend a weekend at a museum writing about everything connected to it, with access to its artwork, archives and experts. Ky Wildermuth explains how Chronolog gathers small contributions from strangers into time-lapse records, and why its human, storytelling side turned out to matter more than first expected. TeRay Esquibel relays a youth advisory board's view that adult questions about purpose sound like a new version of 'what do you want to be when you grow up.' Lauren Henkin, discussing The Humane Space, suggests that treating a contemporary painting as a portal for exploration, rather than explaining it, leaves people more open the next time they walk into a museum. Borton's follow-ups push for detail. When Lady Borton recalls a province where control of land shifted by time of day, and where she carried a camera and no gun, the host stops her to ask whether the pictures were personal, journalistic or for the relief organization. The show also admits that curiosity is not always within reach. Borton describes joining Karis Myrick on her podcast, Unapologetically Black Unicorns, to wrestle with moments when choosing to be curious feels like a bad joke. Lady Borton adds a warning that stories hardened into narrative often turn out untrue, because people latch on to one thing and miss the rest. She also offers a lesson about interviewing: go back, because people retell their stories and new pieces fall into place. What a listener takes away is a collection of habits for practicing curiosity, each borrowed from someone's working life.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants curiosity shown through concrete work, like reporting on a rural county, editing Wikipedia or documenting a changing landscape, and who likes an interviewer who presses for specifics.
What sets it apart: The show tests curiosity against particular jobs and situations instead of treating it as a general virtue, and Borton pairs her guests with research she has read while admitting there are times when curiosity feels out of reach.
Choose to be Curious is a show all about curiosity. We talk about research and theory, but mostly it's conversations about how curiosity shows up in work and life. Now syndicated and available via Pacifica RadioNetwork.
A child's question can outlast the lesson; Lynn Borton makes you curious about why.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Lady Borton connects curiosity with the hard work of seeing what assumptions leave out.
Curiosity becomes a disciplined way of looking as Lady Borton remembers going to Vietnam in 1969 for relief work with the American Friends Service Committee, then spending years living and working there, gathering stories and history before they disappear.
A thoughtful case for finding purpose in everyday contribution, especially when ambition starts to feel performative.
Purpose gets usefully scaled down here. Instead of treating it only as a grand calling to make a difference, Lynn Borton makes room for the smaller daily contribution that can improve someone else's day.
A thoughtful look at why Wikipedia's communal depth still matters in an age of instant facts.
Wikipedia's 25th birthday gives Choose to be Curious a clear way into a bigger question: what happens when curiosity meets a living information system.
Art Cullen defines news through the question it refuses to stop asking: why?
At the Storm Lake Times-Pilot, news begins with a plain but stubborn question: why something happened. Choose to be Curious follows that instinct into Art Cullen's account of local journalism, rural abandonment and disenfranchisement, and Lynn Borton's view that his work treats…
A clear, inviting conversation about practicing curiosity when the feeling itself has gone quiet.
Choose to Be Curious begins with Lynn Borton naming a familiar problem: curiosity can slip out of daily life, and sometimes the useful move is to act curious before the feeling returns.
Journalism examined with patience and consequence.
Creative lives, talked through carefully.
Héctor and Beto dissect Mexican grammar, slang, and news in native-speed Spanish conversations.
Asian Efficiency's Tan Pham and Brooks Duncan on time management, habits, and AI tools.
A call-in helpline where listener questions turn into reported science and history investigations.
Host Lynn Borton explores the role of Wikipedia as a global repository of curiosity, discussing its volunteer-driven model and the responsibility of being the world's go-to knowledge source.
This episode explores solutions journalism, a rigorous reporting approach that focuses on responses to social problems, their effectiveness, and limitations.
Lady Borton says single narratives are usually wrong, and Lynn Borton builds episode 322 around that refusal to 'latch on to one thing.' The guest, a longtime American Friends Service Committee volunteer, says she went to Vietnam in 1969, lived in Quang Ngai, and learned to keep asking questions instead of assuming the answer.
["On Choose to be Curious, Lynn Borton and Tere Esquibel connect curiosity to Dan Pink's split between capital P purpose and small p purpose.", "Esquibel describes Purpose Commons as a Cornell-linked nonprofit shaped with Anthony Burrow and Jana Heritatis to turn lived experience into research.", "He says the National Contribution Project gives youth $400 to contribute to agencies or causes they choose, then studies purpose, civic engagement, belonging, and wellbeing.", "The episode's central argument is that purpose is 'maintained, not obtained,' and youth often hear adult purpose questions as 'the new version of what do you want to be when you grow up?'"]
["Wikipedia marked its 25th birthday with Lisa Seitz-Gruell, the Wikimedia Foundation's Chief Advancement Officer, as Lynn Borton asks how a volunteer-built knowledge system stays reliable.", "Seitz-Gruell says Wikipedia's 250,000 volunteer editors and 65 million articles depend on global participation, a strict code of conduct, and source-based debates rather than opinions.", "She says the information landscape is getting harder to navigate because AI can deliver fast facts, sources are more polarized, and about 65% of Wikipedia traffic now comes from high-volume re-users.", "The episode closes on a practical question for curious listeners: how to protect the rabbit hole of deep reading and keep paying for the infrastructure that supports free knowledge."]
Art Cullen and Lynn Borton use Storm Lake, Iowa, to test what curiosity does for local journalism, starting with Cullen's definition of news as "whatever you don't know." Cullen, the editor and co-owner of the Storm Lake Times-Pilot and a 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner in Editorial Writing, says a local paper can tell Storm Lake's story in a way a chain newsroom cannot.
Lauren Henkin says a survey of 1,000 U.S.
["Choose to Be Curious spends this episode on Chronologue, a citizen-science platform that turns fixed-point photos into time-lapse records of environmental change.", "Lynn Borton talks with Kai Wildermuth, who traces the idea to Sam Droege at USGS and says the platform now spans 150,000 photos, 1,000 sites, 48 states, and 10 countries.", "The episode connects that design to Dan Cahan's Yale research on science curiosity, which Borton says showed that curiosity can reduce partisan information processing.", "Wildermuth explains how a yellow sign, a phone bracket, and a follow-up email let parks and other sites document restoration, snowpack, wetlands, and other changes without heavy infrastructure."]
["Lynn Borton and Michaela Pond connect curiosity in activism to Erica Chenoweth's 3.5% theory, the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and the 40th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.", "Pond ties that frame to W.O.F.A., which started after Hillary's loss when ICE raids left her Spanish-immersion school missing Hispanic students.", "She says the group's method is to break civic moments into human sized actions, from bridge messages and postcards to the Joyful Wofa Choir and craftivism.", "Her closing argument is that people already care and need permission to ask what's mine to do before democracy can feel more alive."]
Lynn Borton opens Choose to be Curious with Yvonne Marchese, the host of Late Bloomer Living and a self-described "age agitator" and "play instigator." Marchese says "play is serious business" and describes trying to be intentional about play while running a photography business and a podcast.
Jimmy Hatch tells Lynn Borton that "basically, being comfortable is dangerous" and that curiosity is what drives people to figure out who they really are.
["Choose to be Curious centers on Elizabeth Bonowitz's claim that curiosity is 'the sort of mise en place for learning,' a setup state that helps children encode new information.
Lynn Borton introduces the concept of networks of knowledge and curiosity fingerprints, previewing an interview with Shawkat Toorawa.
This episode explores how curiosity can bridge political divides and improve civil dialogue, featuring research on science curiosity and partisan thinking.
Patty Gómez discusses the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) and how cultivating curiosity in teachers and students fosters a collaborative culture of learning and agency.