Caltech physicist Sean Carroll thinks big...really big. And not just about quantum physics, the multiverse and the other weird ideas in his field. He also loves philosophy and wonders whether there's any underlying meaning to our lives. In this wide-ranging conversation, Carroll talks with Steve Paulson about science, the universe and what he calls "poetic naturalism."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
John Brown was an abolitionist who from the beginning was committed to the abolition of slavery and called for ending it through armed insurrection.
Historian William Dalrymple tells Steve Paulson that the British weren't the masters of India when they first arrived. The Mughals were.
Charle Monroe Kane talks with Japanese-American rapper Tom Shimura, a.k.a. Lyrics Born, who’s the founder of Quannum Records.
William Tsutsui tells Anne Strainchamps about the original Godzilla and why he became a cultural icon in Japan.
People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
Americans are still fighting over the legacy of the Vietnam War, but one perspective is missing: the Vietnamese experience. Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen provides a Vietnamese perspective.
Simon Winchester talks with Jim Fleming about the short-sightedness of placing cities where the planet doesn't think they should be.
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