Tom Carson is a novelist, television critic and the author of “Gilligan’s Wake.” He talks about blending James Joyce’s classic “Finnegan’s Wake” with those seven wacky castaways from “Gilligan’s Island.”
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Xinran hosted a call-in radio program in Beijing which for eight years told the heart-rending true stories of women’s lives in China.
Did you know that 7 Up was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Good thing they changed the name. That's one of the fascinating facts from Tristan Donovan's book, "Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World." Donovan takes us on a guided tour of the secret history of fizzy water.
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.
For others, football is sacred. In fact, William Dean says the game is part of "American spiritual culture." He talks with Jim Fleming about the way religious beliefs crop up in American popular culture.
Did you know plants see, smell and communicate with neighboring plants? And have both long and short term memory? Plant geneticist Daniel Chamovitz describes the complex world of plant life.
Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.
Historian William Dalrymple tells Steve Paulson that the British weren't the masters of India when they first arrived. The Mughals were.
Pages
