One of the founders of queer theory says his childhood in the Pentecostal church laid the ground for his evolution as a gay man and literary scholar. Michael Warner grew up around faith healing and speaking in tongues. He says it was an education in thinking beyond "normal".
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Jesse Ball's new novel is called "How to Set a Fire and Why." The protagonist is a teenage girl who joins a secret Arson Club at her new school.
Saadi Simawe spent six years in an Iraqi prison for publishing verse opposed to Saddam Husssein’s Bath party. Now he’s an exile and teaches at Grinnell College in Iowa.
Alena Graedon's debut novel is an intellectual thriller set in the near future. Print is dead, words have been monetized, and a "word flu" is running rampant. The book is called "The Word Exchange."
Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue, says it's time to get pragmatic about managing climate change.
Svetlana Boym tells Anne Strainchamps that nostalgia was invented in the 17th century and seen as an actual physical condition for the next century of so.
Noted nature writer Terry Tempest Williams knows that the woods can be frightening, if you go walking in them with the wrong person. She tells the story of how she narrowly escaped a brutal attack while hiking.
By now, it's almost commonplace to worry that the amount of time you spend on the Internet is actually rewiring your brain. But the first person to really put the issue on the cultural map was the writer Nicholas Carr -- in a book that's become a contemporary classic: "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."
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