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.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
There’s a Modern Caveman Movement afoot. And their inspirational leader is 76 year-old Arthur De Vany. A man who says we all should be mimicking our caveman ancestors.
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.
Thomas Seeley is a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. He talks about the social organization of a bee colony with Steve Paulson.
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.”
Tony Perrottet specialized in exotic travel until he decided to go to Rome, then travel the sites of the ancient world using classical Roman tour guides.
Steven Moore tells Steve Paulson about our rich history of experimental fiction.
William Ury tells Jim Fleming that simply being able to talk about past oppression is a powerful healing tool.
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