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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Salman Ahmad, lead singer of the Pakistani rock group Junoon, talks with Anne Strainchamps about being a Muslim and a rock musician.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Wu Man is a professional Chinese musician living in the West. Her instrument is the pipa, a stringed instrument plucked like a guitar.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Anne Strainchamps sat down with the great Turkish writer Elif Shafak. Her latest novel, “The Architect’s Apprentice,” is an epic tale set in the height of the Ottoman Empire. It has bloodshed. It was palace intrigue. It has romance. And, yes, it has architecture.

Shafak’s tale centers around a 16th century mosque architect named Mimar Sinan. Though a character in her novel, Sinan was also a real person – considered to be the greatest architect in the Islamic World.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Singer/Songwriter John Wesley Harding (AKA novelist Wesley Stace) talks to Anne Strainchamps about his double life as a musician and a novelist. Harding has transformed one of his songs into a novel called “Misfortune.”

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Charle Monroe Kane talks with Japanese-American rapper Tom Shimura, a.k.a. Lyrics Born, who’s the founder of Quannum Records.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done.  But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Tariq Ali is a historian, activist and writer. He talks with Steve Paulson about the history of the Ottoman empire, and the Islamic clergy’s rejection of modernism.

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