Summer festivals are a huge part of the American music scene -- and of the music marketplace. Why do millions of people risk sunburn and dehydration when they could hear the same music better with earbuds? Music critic Maura Johnston unpacks the economics and the atavistic lure of the summer music festival.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Steve Paulson talks with Sharyn November, senior editor for Viking Children's Books and head of Penguin Putnam's Firebird, about the current boom in children's fantasy writing.
Thebe Medupe is an astrophysicist who grew up under apartheid. He talks about the stories he grew up hearing from his village elders and the astronomical legends of the Dogun people in Mali.
Terry Tempest Williams has spent much of her life trying to understand her mother - both a private woman and a trickster. Her memoir is also an exploration of silence and finding one's voice.
TTBOOK host Anne Strainchamps reading a portion of the poem "A Brave and Startling Truth" by the late Maya Angelou.
Larry Brilliant is a doctor, co-founder of the digital social network the Well, and he was the first executive director of Google.org. But back in the Sixties, he was a hippie doctor who joined Wavy Gravy's traveling bus caravan and then landed in an Indian ashram in the Himalayas, where his guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox. Miraculously, his U.N. team of doctors eradicated the world's remaining cases of this terrible disease. He tells Steve Paulson about a remarkable moment in history when anything seemed possible.
Zach Helm wrote the screenplay for "Stranger than Fiction," in which Will Ferrell hears the voice of Emma Thompson apparently narrating his life.
Sudha Koul is a Kashmiri Hindu living in the United States. Koul says her homeland is the most beautiful place on Earth.
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