With the Carolina Panthers facing off against the Denver Broncos in Superbowl 50, football is on our minds this week. And for many of the millions of fans who tune in every Sunday to watch their favorite teams compete, football is little more than a weekly ritual. For English professor Mark Edmundson, the football field is a staging ground for some of life's most important lessons. In his book "Why Football Matters," Edmundson looks back to his own high school years playing the sport and reflects on how it taught him courage, resilience, determination, and other values he'd draw on as an adult.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Paul Koudounaris has spent the past decade traveling around the world, climbing into church crypts and bone chambers and taking photos at over 250 burial sites in 30 countries. He's discovered chapels decorared with skeletons and underground caves filled with skulls—among other things. In this interview, he tells us how he began his obsession with displays of death.
Ted Chiang talks about his short-story collection, "Stories of Your Life and Others."
Plenty of men are obsessed with body image, too. Eric Chaline traces the cult of the male body beautiful back to ancient Greece, in "The Temple of Perfection" -- his new history of the gym.
Sherman Alexie is a celebrated fiction writer who is also Spokane, and who has strong opinions about what it means to be a real Indian.
Standup, prat falls, punch lines. Performing comedy's one thing, writing it's another.
Ian Frazier has been writing comedy for the New Yorker for decades. Catch him talking about the rewards of writing humor, and telling jokes in Russian.
Sy Montgomery tells Steve Paulson about swimming with the pink dolphins of the Amazon. She says they inspire lots of folklore, and are really a species of toothed whale.
City planner and urban historian Tom Martinson tells Steve Paulson why the suburbs are a great place to live.
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