Interviews By Topic

A lonely Antartic landscape.

In 1993, Norwegian explorer Erling Kagge became the first person to cross Antarctica alone. It took him 50 days. The thing that had the biggest impact on him was the silence.More

Roland Griffiths

Roland Griffiths is a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins. He's just turned his attention to psilocybin, a classic hallucinogen commonly known as magic mushrooms. He tells Steve Paulson about his findings.More

Football

Point of attack. Defensive Line. Football and war have a lot in common. Former foreign policy advisor to President Bill Clinton Michael Mandelbaum talks conflict and the game.More

Paul Beatty

Paul Beatty, the Booker Prize Winning Author of "The Sellout" recommends "The Nazi and the Barber," a novel by Holocaust survivor Edgar Hilsenrath. More

The Sellout

Talking about race is fraught these days, so it took guts for Paul Beatty to write his novel "The Sellout." It's a satire about a young black man who winds up on trial at the Supreme Court. And along the way, he enslaves an old friend and re-segregates the local high school.More

Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker presents a Dangerous Idea: things today are actually better than they've ever been.More

Conceptually, hope feels big, amorphous, hard to define exactly. But for the past few months, "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producers have been trying anyway. Scientists, activists, futurists, theologians, artists, authors all weighed in on what they think when they hear the word "hope."More

Yuval Noah Harari

Sometimes you stumble upon a book that sets you on a whole new path. For Israeli historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari — author of "Sapiens," "Homo Deus," and "21 Lessons for the 21st Century" — it wasn’t a novel, a memoir, or even a history book that changed his world. It was a book about chimpanzees.More

Samantha Power

Samantha Power was President Obama's ambassador to the UN, taking part in life-and-death decisions, including whether to launch military strikes. She talks about her two biggest foreign policy challenges — whether to intervene in Libya and Syria.More

Airmen pose with an MQ-9 Reaper at Creech Air Force Base.

Was Qassem Soleimani 'assassinated'? 'Killed'? The legal differences are complicated, says Brookings Institution fellow Scott Anderson.More

Lidia Yuknavitch

The main character in Jeff VanderMeer’s other-worldly tale is a polymorphous bear who moves in magical and unexpected ways, and keeps secrets in his fur. It’s both a futuristic story and one with deep history, the kind of dystopian fiction that drew Yuknavitch in, again, and again.More

George Saunders

The author of "Lincoln in the Bardo" recommends Victor Klemperer's two-volume diary that reads as a slow-motion picture of what the Holocaust looked like before it was known Holocaust.More

robot brain

Steve sat down with logician and mathematician Roger Antonsen and computer science pioneer Barbara J. Grosz to talk about how AI will challenge our own perception of intelligence in ways we might not expect.More

Lynne Cox swimming.

Lynne Cox is an extreme swimmer. At 18, she swam between the islands of New Zealand. She broke the men's and women's records for the English Channel. Then she did the unthinkable — swimming to Antarctica.More

Margaret Atwood

Jean Rhys takes up a "mad" wife’s story in "Wide Sargasso Sea," an overlooked novel recommended by "Handmaid’s Tale" author Margaret Atwood.More

reindeer

Piers Vitebsky is an anthropologist who studies the Eveny — also known as the "Reindeer People of Siberia." He tells Steve Paulson they keep herds of reindeer for meat, but also have personal, consecrated reindeer animal doubles, which they believe will die for them.More

A historic Amundsen Tent in Antarctica.

Lucy Jane Bledsoe is a novelist who's made three trips to Antarctica as part of the National Science Foundation's Artists and Writers in Antarctica Program. She tells Anne Strainchamps that the place is addictive.More

Teju Cole

Teju Cole grew up in Nigeria and then moved to U.S., joining millions of others in the African diaspora. He became an acclaimed novelist and photographer, and now celebrates the cosmopolitan culture of global cities, including Lagos and New York.More

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