President Johnson signed the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into existence on November 7, 1967, making possible the network of 1,300 PBS and NPR stations that currently provide service across the country. Emphasizing educational, cultural, and community-based programming, PBS and NPR have earned a reputation for not just reliability and innovation but for going places where the commercial media providers mostly do not go.

For example, the award-winning StoryCorps counters the dominance of the celebrity-industrial complex by giving voice to ordinary Americans, so helping “to weave into the fabric of our culture the understanding that everyone’s story matters.” Over the past fourteen years some 65,000 Americans have stepped into the StoryCorps recording booths, many of their stories broadcast on public radio and television and also published in a series of bestsellers. In his Introduction to the latest book in the series, Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay notes how his own decision at age twenty-two to give up medical school for broadcast journalism mirrors similar decisions made by many in his book, “everyday people who have found — and often fought — their way to doing exactly what they were meant to do with their lives.” For eighty-five-year-old Herman Heyn, the path to becoming Baltimore’s street-corner astronomer wound through college and an endless series of short-term jobs, arriving at the inevitable in 1987: “Some people like trees, some people like birds. For me, it’s stars.” For some 3,000 nights over the past thirty years, Heyn has taken his telescope and his tips hat to the streets, where he invites the world to have a peek at his passion:

When I set up, I have a sign on the front of the telescope that says, “Tonight Saturn and its rings. HAV-A-LOOK!” That’s my trademark: HAV-A-LOOK! Then, as people are passing by, I’ll say, “Have a look, folks. The moon: an awesome view through my telescope!” or “Have a look, folks. Tonight the rings of Saturn. A chance of a lifetime!”

Despite its award-winning shows and high esteem, public broadcasting has never established itself in America as it has done in Britain, Canada, and many other countries around the world, where similarly funded and mandated radio and television stations often anchor the media spectrum and are integral to an inclusive national identity. Funding issues aside, public broadcasting seems especially vulnerable in today’s “Here Comes Everybody” world — this the title of Clay Shirky’s 2008 book, which describes how “mass amateurization” has made everyone a private broadcaster. The authors of Spreadable Media: Creating Value an Meaning in a Networked Culture argue that the new technologies and platforms are a historic opportunity, one that can be harnessed to service “an inclusive, equitable, and robust media landscape.” But books such as The Death of Expertise argue that our digital addictions, driven by the familiar clickbait commercialism, have created an over-entertained public that is “confused and ornery” on the important issues, if not “resolutely ignorant and uninformed.” In World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech, Franklin Foer concurs, arguing that many well-intentioned and professional media outlets have made a devil’s bargain we will all regret:

Dependence generates desperation — a mad, shameless chase to gain clicks through Facebook, a relentless effort to game Google’s algorithms. It leads media outlets to sign terrible deals that look like self-preserving necessities: granting Facebook the right to sell their advertising, or giving Google permission to publish articles directly on its fast-loading server. In the end, such arrangements simply allow Facebook and Google to hold these companies ever tighter.

A vigorous public broadcasting network may have an important national role in today’s commercialized, partisan, and over-saturated media landscape. But all of us must make better — and fewer — media choices, says Tim Wu in The Attention Merchants. Just as urban sprawl has taken over too many green spaces, media sprawl has been allowed into every minute of our lives, and we are in desperate need of zoning schemes to reclaim our own consciousness:

If we desire a future that avoids the enslavement of the propaganda state as well as the narcosis of the consumer and celebrity culture, we must first acknowledge the preciousness of our attention and resolve not to part with it as cheaply or unthinkingly as we so often have. And then we must act, individually and collectively, to make our attention our own again, and so reclaim ownership of the very experience of living.

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The garden, the man, the rib, the woman. The command, the apple, the snake, the expulsion into pain and death. The story of the couple in the primal garden is a sequence of scenes so ancient and familiar we may think we “know” it as we know ourselves — and in fact, as Stephen Greenblatt argues in his richly woven new book, The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve, it is a story that’s so compelling that once we hear it, it feels impossible to forget. But the fact that we all recognize the outlines of this odd origin myth doesn’t make it any less strange. Why would God, so generous in his initial creation, so immediately and pointedly tempt the people he himself had just made? If the people were made in God’s image, how could they not already know good from evil? Why a snake? Why a rib? Didn’t the all-knowing actually know he was creating curious souls? In this rich book, Stephen Greenblatt plays tour guide to some of the story’s enduring oddness. With him, we can unpeel layers of history and try to encounter the myth as it emerges and evolves along with our culture.

This means starting at the beginning, so to speak, in the landscape into which and against which the myth was created. It means traveling through the ways it has been used — to separate Jews from those around them; to cement the notion of Original Sin in early Christianity; to make humans fall so that they can — in graceful medieval counterpoint — later be saved by Jesus. Adam and Eve’s shame has been used to justify the oppression of peoples who may not have had reason to be ashamed of their nakedness; Eve’s eating of the fruit has been used to justify a forceful misogyny that has held all women through all time responsible for Eve’s error. Greenblatt explores these foundations, illuminating histories, variants, art, and historic exegesis, so that the origin myth itself re-forms as a forked garden of weird possibility.

There is the section where Greenblatt reminds us that in Islam, Adam and Eve are not a sinful counterpoint used to set the stage for later salvation, but figures of error, and later of both stewardship and prophetic illumination. (In that version, Eve was not tempted by a serpent but by a particularly beautiful camel.) There is a long chapter in which Greenblatt invites us to see Adam and Eve as a creation myth in comparison to what it is not — namely, a story like Gilgamesh, where coming to the city and meeting prostitutes (as opposed to eating fruit and getting kicked out of a garden) is the fundamental civilizing act. There are two chapters about Augustine’s childhood that feel like fascinating divagation until Greenblatt ties them together to let us know how Augustine (who himself apparently had fathered a child out of wedlock and then banished the mistress he loved) helped cement the idea of Original Sin. There are trips through Renaissance art studios, with an especially nice cameo of Dürer crafting his own naked body as a possible study for the original man. And there are several chapters about Milton’s basic antisocial character and his own first bad marriage that help set the groundwork for understanding how the late-blooming poet was finally able to craft Adam and Eve so beautifully within Paradise Lost.

In short, this is a book of stories about a story, stories that help us see the way a story is a river that also takes on the shapes of what it flows by, even when it eventually encounters such formidable challengers as Darwin. Or, to float another metaphor, it’s a book that reminded me of the Hebrew Bible’s concept of Midrash, where interpretive stories enclose and nest and build upon biblical stories, so that the story about the story becomes integral to finding ones way back to the story itself. Writing about Dürer, Greenblatt remarks that his 1503 “nude self-portrait bears witness . . . to the search for the original, the essential body.” Greenblatt’s book is not autobiographical, exactly, but one does sense in it the hunger to strip the story away from all the vines that have come to cling to it. Greenblatt wants to peer back through both vine and story to see what each tells us about our strange, unusual humanity. In some ways, the modernity that has made the story seem smaller is itself small in comparison to the centuries of belief that preceded it. And the story as story remains puzzlingly unforgettable. Even when it falls, it lives on.

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