Terry Tempest Williams has spent much of her life trying to understand her mother - both a private woman and a trickster. Her memoir is also an exploration of silence and finding one's voice.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Summer festivals are a huge part of the American music scene -- and of the music marketplace. Why do millions of people risk sunburn and dehydration when they could hear the same music better with earbuds? Music critic Maura Johnston unpacks the economics and the atavistic lure of the summer music festival.
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote a history of beauty. A few years later, he followed it up with a study of ugliness. Here’s what he found
Essayist Susan Ehrlich is a practicing pediatrian who remembers what it was like treating her father during his final hours.
Larry Brilliant is a doctor, co-founder of the digital social network the Well, and he was the first executive director of Google.org. But back in the Sixties, he was a hippie doctor who joined Wavy Gravy's traveling bus caravan and then landed in an Indian ashram in the Himalayas, where his guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox. Miraculously, his U.N. team of doctors eradicated the world's remaining cases of this terrible disease. He tells Steve Paulson about a remarkable moment in history when anything seemed possible.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
Olivia Laing talks about her book, "The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking."
Russell Simmons has been called the godfather of hip hop. He tells Steve Paulson he got his start selling street drugs as a teenager.
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