Humorist Roy Blount Junior believes New Orleans is the cradle of American culture.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
One hundred years ago, Fritz Haber invented the first chemical weapon and convinced the German army to use it. His wife Clara, also a chemist, fiercely opposed her husband's project. When she couldn't stop it, she committed suicide. Judith Claire Mitchell tells the story in her tragic and yet funny novel "A Reunion of Ghosts."
Tom Szaky tells Jim Fleming how his company turns candy wrappers and juice bottles into pencil cases and backpacks.
What is water? When Anne Strainchamps asked Wisconsin's Poet Laureate, Kimberly Blaeser called up the story and myth of the Anishinaabe. Blaeser says growing up on the White Earth Reservation, surrounded by lakes, made her who she is today.
Sandy Tolan tells Jim Fleming that he became a fan of Hank Aaron’s as a boy in Milwaukee, and was thrilled when “The Hammer” threatened to eclipse Babe Ruth’s home run record.
Howard Axelrod was accidentally blinded in one eye in a freak accident when he was in college. Disoriented and depressed, he retreated to an off-the-grid cabin in the Vermont wilderness. He stayed there, alone, for 2 years. Now he's published a memoir about his period of renunciation, "The Point of Vanishing."
Simon Worrall tells Anne Strainchamps about Mark Hoffman, possibly the greatest literary forger of all time.
William Hitchcock tells Jim Fleming that Europe is divided in its attitudes towards America and that the wariness goes back to the Second World War.
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