First Amendment lawyer Ron Collins talks with Steve Paulson about the renegade comedian and junkie Lenny Bruce who was repeatedly arrested for obscenity.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
One of the many utopian groups that started during the late 19th century and early 20th century was the House of David—perhaps the first cult to become a pop culture sensation. Their compound in Benton Harbon, Michigan had an amusement park and a zoo; they had a baseball team that once played an exhibition game against Babe Ruth and the Yankees, and they had bands—highly regarded, touring bands. Here's Henry Sapoznik—the director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture here at the University of Wisconsin—on the mythology and music of the House of David.
Writer Kim Hiss discovered her own symbiotic relationship with animals in winter. She was working as an editor for Field and Stream Magazine and it was her first hunt.
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.
Stephen Prothero tells Jim Fleming that Jesus has become an American icon like Mickey Mouse and that the commercial proliferation of Jesus kitsch indirectly spreads a religious message.
Here is our Executive Producer Steve Paulson's list of books that have blown his mind recently, with hopes that some of them will expand yours in 2015, if they haven't already.
Seduction seems like a dirty word these days. In our era of frankness, hook-ups and FWBs, why bother seducing someone?
Betsy Prioleau says charm is an endangered, misunderstood and useful art.
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