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.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Some of us think of dance as something best left to the professionals, people with years of training and technique. But when Sally Gross started dancing, she realized that she'd never master ballet or modern dance. So she made a whole new kind of dance...
Sherron Watkins is the whistle-blower who tried to tell Ken Lay what was going on at Enron. With co-author, journalist Mimi Schwartz, Watkins lays out the story in her book “Power Failure.”
Anne Strainchamps asks Columbia College philosopher Stephen Asma what his colleagues make of the soul these days.
Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar has spent much of his career regarding the pain of others. He delves into issues like war or globalization with giant installations and photos. But his work does not take use a grand scale, instead, he drills down to one individual. His most famous work is 6-year project on the Rwandan Genocide called “The Rwanda Project.”
Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was the rare book that changed how we think. On its 50th anniversary, historian of science Tom Broman talks about Kuhn's legacy and we hear excerpts from Kuhn's book.
There's an entire sector of the economy run by people who are working diligently to get inside your head and harvest your attention? Does that creep you out? They're called the Attention Merchants. And their business model consists of attracting your attention and then reselling it for profit. They're ad-based TV channels, clickbait producers and the big social media producers. Law professor Tim Wu is the author of "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads."
Yann Mantel won the Booker Prize for his novel “Life of Pi.” It’s the story of a young Indian boy, Pi, trapped at sea with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi believes in and practices three major religions.
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