The former mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, take us on a walking tour of the neighborhood of one of his big heroes, the late urban thinker, Jane Jacobs.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad just won the 2016 National Book Award.
Steve Paulson spoke with him about this powerful, sweeping epic.
The "connectome" is one of the most audacious science projects ever conceived: a detailed map of the human brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. In this EXTENDED interview, MIT computational neuroscientist Sebastian Seung explains what we can learn.
Stephen Mitchell has composed a new translation of “Gilgamesh,” the epic poem of ancient Mesopotamia.
The Pacific Gyre is a region in the middle of the Pacific Ocean around which all the major currents swirl. As a result, debris that floats into the gyre gets stuck there.
Solar engineer Martha Lenio was the first woman to command a mission on the HI-SEAS — the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's a project co-sponsored by NASA and the Univeristy of Hawaii that simulates what it would be like to live on Mars for eight months. To survive in such extremes, they were sequestered into a 1,000 square foot dome, and when they went outside they had to wear space suits. When Lenio got there, she said it didn't feel much like Mars, but she changed her mind after 8 months without the sun and wind on her skin. She spoke with Anne Strainchamps about missing her family — and missing YouTube cat videos.
Steven Johnson tells Anne Strainchamps how television storytelling has become more sophisticated with mutiple plots lines extending over several episodes.
Tony Faber says violins have to age for fifty years to sound their best.
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