Arts and Culture

BTS fans waiting to see their idols on stage

K-pop is connecting fans from all over the globe in a time of great disconnection, creating one of the biggest fan communities in the world. Producer Angelo Bautista takes us on a journey to the heart of K-pop fandom.More

a band performs on stage

Music critic and author Kalefa Sanneh says "pop music" is no longer a pejorative label. He traces the rise of "Poptimism" and discusses the challenges of being a pop music critic.More

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

Ngugi wa Thiong’o — the renowned Kenyan author — believes African writers should write in their native language, not the colonial language of English or French. He says the best way to decolonize the mind is to reclaim native languages.More

Cecil Rhodes cartoons and statues.

Questions about identity, history, language, what should or should not be taught in school — these are all debates about confronting our past. Political theorist Adom Getachew says many of these issues were debated in Africa more than 60 years ago.More

house at night

Psychologist Rubin Naiman says we’re not only sleep deprived, we are — perhaps more importantly — dream deprived. He tells us why we should get back to our dream states and stop living in such a wake-centric world.More

Annabel Abbs-Streets found a way to creatively and spiritually embrace her sleepless hours. She writes about what she discovered in a book called “Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self.”More

A woman flies

Dreams are funny, confusing and surprising in the world of cartoonist Roz Chast. And they are occasionally disturbing and maybe necessary to process both our everyday and most bizarre thoughts, she tells Shannon Henry Kleiber.More

a boat on water in dreams

Psychologist Kelly Bulkeley has been researching our night thoughts for many years, and keeps a dream journal himself. He talked with Steve Paulson about the spiritual wonder of dreams.More

Stained glass in the chapel on Dog Mountain

If you are now or have ever been a dog lover, there’s a place you need to go — Dog Mountain in Northern Vermont. 150 acres of hills, trails, and ponds just for pups, plus a dog chapel for memorializing lost pets and an annual summer dog party.More

the looming monster of american myth

Social critic Alissa Quart says the American ideal of the self-made, rugged individual is built on a lie. In her book "Bootstrapped," she argues that even the people who preached the gospel of self-reliance, like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau, didn’t live up to it themselves. More

an online number going up

When producer Angelo Bautista was growing up, he dreamed of being in the internet. Not on the internet, but inside of it. Now, he's torn about social media. He's still addicted to scrolling, but posting about his own life — that's another story. But if nobody sees you on the internet, do you exist? More

a woman looking in a mirror

When you look online, you might think the most important pursuit in life is self-creation — optimizing, curating, branding yourself. Social critic Tara Isabella Burton says our current obsession with personal identity has deeply religious roots, which then got co-opted by advertisers and the self-help movement.More

The Sandman. Writer Neil Gaiman on the set of The Sandman.

Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" graphic novel is now a Netflix series. Gaiman has made a career out of tapping into our unconscious dreams and fears. In 2003, Steve Paulson traveled to Gaiman's home in Wisconsin to talk about where his story ideas come from.More

Just over 200 years ago, a group of renegade German writers and philosophers came together in a small town and forever changed who we think we are. Andrea Wulf tells this story in her book “Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self.” More

fireflies

As a documentary poet, Camille Dungy writes not just about headline-making news, but about news on a more intimate scale — about motherhood, marriage, and her garden. It’s an approach she says was very much inspired by the "godmother" of documentary poetry, Muriel Rukeyeser. More

Boots at right angles.

Kaia Sand is a journalist whose day job is executive director of the community newspaper Street Roots in Portland, Oregon. She’s also a poet and she uses both lenses – journalism and poetry – to write about the people she knows and things she sees firsthand in her city. More

We asked Arab-American poet Philip Metres to write an original poem in the style he’s known for — documentary poetry — a genre that blends techniques from journalism and poetry to offer a fresh way of hearing today’s news.More

Jenny Odell

Lately it’s been feeling like time is speeding up.  Whether it’s the news cycle, social media, the information economy or global warming, the pace of life is accelerating beyond what many of us can handle. Jenny Odell blames the clock. More

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