Ray Kurzweil tells Steve Paulson humans will merge with new technology and vastly improve their intelligence.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
Nicola Griffith was born in England, is a lesbian and has MS. She's also a writer, whose character Aud, the deep-minded, has starred in several mysteries.More
Tyrone Muhammad is tired of seeing so many young black men die from street violence. So the Newark mortician is using an in-your-face strategy to show people the effects of that violence: taking his work into the streets.More
Karen King tells Anne Strainchamps that there are many early Christian texts that didn't make it into the Bible.More
Nicola Griffith set her award-winning historical novel, "Hild," in seventh-century Britain. It's based on the real life of the fierce young girl who eventually became one of the most powerful women of her day -- St. Hilda of Whitby.More
Kyle Bowser is the producer of "The Bible Experience" — a 19-CD audio recording of the New Testament featuring a celebrity all-black cast.More
Nikki Giovanni reads "Poem for Lady Whose Voice I Like"More
Nikki Giovanni reads Untitled (For Margaret Danner).More
At the height of the Vietnam War, on the night of the full moon, a baby girl is born along the Song Ma River in her mother's grave. Her name is Rabbit, and she can hear the dead. In a luminous debut novel, "She Weeps Each Time You're Born," Wisconsin poet and writer Quan Barry explores wartime Vietnam through the eyes of a little girl with an uncommon gift.More
Nature is more than pristine meadows and eroded canyons. There's also a history of how people have shaped and sometimes fought over the land. Lauret Savoy uncovers this shadow history and the racism that's embedded in the American landscape.More
The story of finding and recording the rarest bird in America: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.More
Robert Rand was working as a Senior Editor at NPR when he was crippled by panic attacks. He cured himself by taking up zydeco dancing.More
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says most neuroscientists have downplayed the differences between the left and right sides of the brain. He says he thinks the left hemisphere has become so dominant in Western culture that we're losing the sense of what makes us human.More
James Gardner is the author of “Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe.”More
His writing explodes with manic, high-octane verbal energy, and he wrote about everything under the sun. Verbal pyrotechnics aside,Salon book critic Laura Miller says David Foster Wallace was the most important writer of his time because he was obsessed with the question of how to live authentically in a media-saturated culture of hype. More
Do intellectuals have any place in Hollywood? James Schamus is a scholar of narrative theory who also runs a movie studio. In this NEW and UNCUT interview, Steve Paulson talks with Focus Features CEO Schamus. More
Historian Garry Wills details Jefferson’s complex relationship with slavery and says its legacy still haunts us.More