This week’s episode of the public radio program “To the Best of our Knowledge” (detail and streaming available here) focuses on “lessons in optimism and the science of happiness.” Against a backdrop of “global fatalism” and our “addiction to the belief that stories aren’t interesting unless they involve misery, corruption, suffering and death” == the show features some “radical optimists” and “hopeful rebels.” The hour is devoted to “evidence that the world is actually better off than you’d think.”