In 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class at Kenyon College in California. Anne Strainchamps looks back at this recording and what it's come to mean to her and her family.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Arts and Culture
Nikki Giovanni reads "Poem for Lady Whose Voice I Like"More
Some of the world's most celebrated scientists and artists have been dyslexic. Cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf says dyslexia can be a gift, but schools must learn how to teach dyslexics to read.More
Kazuo Ishiguro discusses his latest novel, "The Buried Giant." Set in a mythic past with ogres and pixies, it's a dramatic shift from his previous work.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
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
Mark Mothersbaugh is co-founder of the new-wave band Devo. They think humanity is de-evolving.More
Joan Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, helped shape a highly personal brand of nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. Her early essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979) influenced generations of writers. Her later memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," chronicled the deaths of her husband and daughter. In 2011 Didion talked with Steve Paulson about illness and growing old in the wake of the death of her daughter, Quintana.More
The Reduced Shakespeare Company perform an even further abridged version of their theatrical show "The Bible: The Complete Word of God" - abridged.More
Nikki Giovanni reads Untitled (For Margaret Danner).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
Pattiann Rogers is a celebrated essayist and poet. She's won numerous awards and is the author of fourteen books. She shares some of her favorite bee poems with Anne.More
Jonah Lehrer says that the great French writer Proust described insights into the way the mind processes memory long before the scientists could prove how the brain worked.More
Richard Holmes talks with Steve Paulson about how art and science influenced each other during the Romantic period.More
Lauren Beukes talks about her new novel, "The Shining Girls."More
