Novelist Tom Perrotta talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.
Novelist Tom Perrotta talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.
Yossi Halevi is a religious Israeli Jew. He went looking for common ground with his Muslim neighbors. He describes what happened in his book “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden.”
Vivek Maddala composes new scores for silent movies. He tells Steve Paulson how music can tell a story.
Legendary showman P.T. Barnum once owned a slave named Joice Heth. Barnum claimed she was 161 years old and a former nanny to George Washington. Benjamin Reiss tells the story in his book "The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America."
Robert Zubrin explains how he thinks we should go about colonizing Mars, and how settling a new world will save this one. And he describes how NASA’s using his ideas.
In her book, "Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation," Seo-Young Chu argues that science fiction is a kind of "high-intensity realism." She spoke with Jim Fleming.
Steven Johnson talks about his new book, "Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age."
When Samuel Clemens took on the pen name “Mark Twain,” he was doing more cleverly appropriating a measure of depth. He was also tapping into one of the most well-known sounds along the river: sounding calls. Owen Selles tells about these calls in this piece, adapted from an essay he originally wrote for the online magazine Edge Effects.