How should we decide when to stop life-prolonging treatments for people with severe brain damage and terminal illness? Are live organ donors always out of the question? As medicine makes it possible for us to prolong life, when should we just let - or help - someone die?
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Ted Steinberg tells Jim Fleming that Americans love perfect mono-cultures and are willing to over-water and freely use chemical fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides to achieve them.
Patricia Lockwood is a rising star on the poetry scene. She's been dubbed the "poet laureate of Twitter,” and her latest collection, “Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals" is making waves. This also includes a bonus reading of Lockwood's poem, "Revealing Nature Photographs."
Scott Turow has made a career writing hugely successful legal thrillers, but then he turned to a World War II novel.
Suppose you could remember every day of your life. Would that be a blessing or a curse? For Jill Price it's been a burden. She has a very rare form of memory that gives her nearly total recall.
Simon Critchley is the author of "The Book of Dead Philosophers," a quirky account of how various philosophers thought about death and died themselves.
Theseus killed the Minotaur in the maze in Crete thousands of years ago. Well, according to Steven Sherrill, the Minotaur is now a short- order cook in the American South.
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.
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