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.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Sherman Alexie wrote a novel in response to 9/11. He thinks the fanaticism of flying planes into buildings is the end game of tribalism and he wanted to teach his sons something else.
Stefan Gates is the author of and a self-described "Gastronaut" – someone who'll stop at nothing to experience a transcendent moment through food, no matter how bizarre.
A forest is an amazing repository of both knowledge and wisdom. Ecologist Suzanne Simard takes Anne Strainchamps on a walking tour of a forest to point out the remarkable web of life both above and below the ground.
Physicist Ronald Mallet tells Anne Strainchamps why he thinks he can use light to bend the fabric of space and achieve time travel.
Art critic, novelist and editor Wendy Lesser reads excerpts from her essay "Hitchcock's Vertigo."
Producer Charles Monroe-Kane interviewed artist and barber Faisal Abdu'Allah in Madison, WI, at the Atwood Family Barber Shop.
Neuroscientists say that about a quarter of our mental energy is dedicated to maintaining our narrative identities. Julian Keenan says there's got to be an evolutionary benefit for all that "self".
Pages
