Tapestry from CBC Radio

Mary Hynes talks to the legendary Mavis Staples. For more than six decades she has used her gift of music to advance civil rights and social justice. With her father and siblings in the Staple Singers, they performed at rallies and the sermons of Dr. Martin Luther King and created what is known as the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.

Mary Hynes talks to Karl Pillemer is a gerontologist and a professor of human development at Cornell University. For five years, he and his colleagues interviewed more than a thousand people over the age of 65, asking them what they had learned about how to live a good life.

In 1939, the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous published what has become known as The Big Book. It outlines 12 steps in which alcoholics admit they have no control over alcohol and that they need the help of a higher power to get sober. More than 70 years later, many people are asking whether belief in a higher power is necessary in order to stop drinking. Can atheists and agnostics use the steps to get sober?

Mary Hynes talks to historian Sergio Luzzatto about Padre Pio, Italy's favourite saint.

Somehow or other, whatever version of you that you bring to the outside world, is revealed on your face. Mary Hynes talks to a young woman in Ottawa, who began wearing the niqab when she was 13, about the Muslim act of covering the female face. Jonathan Goldstein, host of CBC radio's WireTap, talks about what he sees, when he looks in the mirror. Physician, author and neurologist Oliver Sacks talks about what it's like when you can't recognize a face from one meeting to the next. And Judith Harris, Jungian analyst, explores the Jungian idea of taking off your mask.