Interviews By Topic

Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni reads her poem, "For Saundra."More

Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni reads "Poem for Lady Whose Voice I Like"More

Nikki Giovanni

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

wheat

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 male Ivory-Bill leaves as the female returns.

The story of finding and recording the rarest bird in America: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.More

accordian

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

brain light

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

a night sky

James Gardner is the author of “Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe.”More

David Foster Wallace

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

James Schamus

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

Thomas Jefferson

Historian Garry Wills details Jefferson’s complex relationship with slavery and says its legacy still haunts us.More

St. Paul

Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a practicing Catholic. He tells Jim Fleming that the apostle Paul didn't say most of the things people blame him for.More

jesus

Garry Wills tells Jim Fleming that we know very little about the historical Jesus and that it doesn't matter because faith does not depend on historical facts.More

St. Augustine

Historian Garry Wills tells Jim Fleming that despite his “Confessions,” Augustine was no libertine, and dealt with all the major theological problems of early Christianity.More

TTBOOK

Helen Macdonald's book "H is for Hawk" turned her goshawk Mabel into one of the most memorable literary characters of recent years. Mabel is no longer with her, but Helen tells Anne Strainchamps about her new avian companion - an ornery and very smart parrot.More

TTBOOK

Shattered by her father's sudden death, writer Helen Macdonald began dreaming of wild hawks.  In an effort to move beyond her grief, she bought and trained a wild goshawk -- one of the world's fiercest birds of prey.   But between the bird and her grief, she became, in her words "more hawk than human."More

tree roots

Biologist David George Haskell spent a year making weekly visits to the same one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest near his home in Tennessee.  His writes about his experiment in "contemplative science" in a series of gorgeous essays, called "The Forest Unseen".More

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