We're celebrating National Poetry Month this year by reading some of our favorite poems. Here's Sara with Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra."
A small warning, there are some explicit words in the poem.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Stephen Prothero tells Steve Paulson about the first American cremation, which didn’t really go very well, and the current craze for going out in a blaze of glory.
Toni Morrison may be a Nobel Laureate, but she still gets labeled a “Black woman writer.” She talks about her childhood and how the Civil Rights Movement magnified class differences.
We know a lot about how slaves looked at books because of the hundreds of slave narratives they wrote. Scholar Cherene Sherrard-Johnson says a fundamental trope in those narratives is what’s called “the Talking Book.”
Reinhold Messner is arguably the world’s greatest living mountaineer. He’s climbed 14 of the world’s tallest peaks, and if that isn’t impressive enough, he was the first to climb Mt. Everest alone and without supplemental oxygen. He recounts some of these adventures in a new book called “Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit.” Steve Paulson caught up with him and asked how he got hooked on climbing.
Ron Mallett has been fascinated with the idea of time travel since his dad's early death.
Seymour Hersh broke the My Lai massacre story during the Vietnam War and he was among the first to document the extent of the abuses and the cover-up at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
What do the NSA disclosures really tell us? Ben Wizner should know. When he's not directing the ACLU's Speech Privacy and Technology Project, he doubles as Edward Snowden's legal adviser. He explains why we should be worried about the agency's push to expand its surveillance programs.
Pages
