Arts and Culture

Germany

The refugee crisis is front and center in Germany. So when German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck met a group of African refugees camping out in Berlin, she started asking questions about the lives they were forced to leave behind.More

Artificial Creativity

Machines are getting smarter. They have been for a long time. But is there anything uniquely human that they will never be able to do, like make art?More

Man gets lost

Rebecca Solnit prepares the smartphone era for a time when we no longer know how to not know where we are.More

The mountain beckons

For years, David Roberts climbed some of Alaska’s biggest mountains, and made a number of first ascents. His new book is an examination of why some climbers feel compelled to push the edge of what’s possible.More

Random balls? Or skill grab?

Jason Rohrer is one of the top game designers in the world. So when the Unlawful Internet Gaming Enforcement Act came out, he found a loophole. Turns out, its' not all internet gambling games that are against the law. It's only the ones that are subject to chance. He claims that his new online gambling game is all skill.  More

random strands of light

Choreographer Bill T. Jones says that while many of us are trying to put more skill into our lives, his mentor, the musician John Cage, spent his life trying to do just the opposite. Jones says Cage’s music was often based on randomness and chance.More

Adam and Eve

We decided to trace Western culture's fixation on guilt back to one of its earliest origins — the story of Adam and Eve. It's only a page and a half in the Bible, but literary historian Stephen Greenblatt told Steve Paulson why it has been so influential.More

guilt for smoking

A lot of people feel guilty about something - diet, money, relationships or something else. Our host Anne Strainchamps and writer Devorah Baum definitely do. So we asked them to sit down to talk about how we wound up about in a giant cultural guilt trip.More

Ken Windsor (CC BY 3.0)

Critic Ted Gioia says a new generation of young musicians have discovered an antidote to stale, formulaic pop music in the energy and ecstasy of jazz.More

USA Trilogy

Kim Stanley Robinson recommends "The Greatest Story of the 1920's That We Have: The U.S.A. Trilogy" by John Dos Passos.More

Odysseus und Penelope

Classicist Emily Wilson is the first woman ever to publish an English translation of Homer’s epic. "In some ways, it should be a story that's less about me than about why it has taken the English speaking world so long before there's been a complete published translation of "The Odyssey" by a woman."More

Circe

In Homer's "The Odyssey," Circe was a Greek goddess who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs. Today, Circe finally gets to tell her side of the story, thanks to novelist Madeline Miller.More

Anthony Bourdain

The chef, storyteller and world-traveler has died at age 61. We revisit Steve Paulson's interview with him in 2004.More

office

Do you dread going to work because your office is filled with people who are rude and treat you badly? Christine Porath is trying to do something about it with her book, “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace.”More

Under the dome

Imagine eight scientists, four men and four women, volunteer for a grand experiment focusing on the future of humanity: living for two years inside of a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. That’s the premise behind acclaimed novelist T.C. Boyle’s new book, "The Terranauts." More

Philip Roth, on his fiction and memory

In his final years, the novelist came to terms with how his own story might influence the future interpretation of his fiction.More

What Hath God Wrought cover

When and how did American get so polarized? For answers, Jonathan Chait recommends reading "What Hath God Wrought,"  a history of American politics from 1815-1848 by the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe.More

Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe had a shocking lack of hubris when it came to his journalism. He said what he did as a reporter took no special skills, requiring only the willingness to leave the building and take notes. He also found that to be the best way to craft naturalistic fiction, which he only began writing at 54. He was 88 when he died Monday.More

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