Arts and Culture

 Marcel Proust (seated), Robert de Flers (left) and Lucien Daudet (right), ca. 1894

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

electrode

Richard Holmes talks with Steve Paulson about how art and science influenced each other during the Romantic period.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Lauren Beukes talks about her new novel, "The Shining Girls."More

Nikki Giovanni

Nikki Giovanni reads her poem, "For Saundra."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

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

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

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

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

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

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

Joey Skaggs is a master of the hoax. His elaborate pranks have been fooling media outlets since the 1960s.More

mellotron

Dianna Dilworth is a filmmaker and journalist. Her latest documentary is called "Mellodrama: The Mellotron Movie."More

Stephen Burn recommends David Foster Wallace's critically-acclaimed novel, "Infinite Jest." The book was published 20 years ago, on February 1st, 1996.More

Eugene Thacker talks to Anne Strainchamps about his book, "In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy, Volume 1."More

Journalist DT Max tells Steve Paulson about David Foster Wallace's creative struggles with the novel he left unfinished when he committed suicide in September of 2008. It's called "The Pale King" and explores Wallace's longtime preoccupation with boredom.More

Thing 1 and Thing 2 mural

Brian Boyd talks with Anne Strainchamps about how our love of storytelling helped us evolve.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Edward Wohl tells us about the death of his father in 1999.More

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

The celebrated cartoonist Chris Ware has a graphic novel called “Building Stories.”  It is full of stories. It is an actual building. Steve Paulson says, “it’s like nothing he’s even seen or read before.”More

BookMarks

Eric Liu reviewing “Inventing America” by Gary Wills.More

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