Before the Internet, a good memory wasn't just useful; it was prized as a sign of intelligence. And there were memory geniuses who developed mental tricks for storing information. Philosopher and novelist Simon Critchley delves into the fascinating history of the memory palace, which once promised almost God-like wisdom.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Rupert Isaacson made a journey with his family to seek out shamans in horse-centered cultures to treat his autistic son.
Writer Richard Rodriguez views his so-called brown identity as a racial mixture, dating back to the colonization of the Americas. He tells us why he celebrates being brown, and embraces the term "Hispanic."
We're celebrating National Poetry Month this year by reading some of our favorite poems. Here's Sara with Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra."
A small warning, there are some explicit words in the poem.
Stephen Prothero tells Steve Paulson about the first American cremation, which didn’t really go very well, and the current craze for going out in a blaze of glory.
Reinhold Messner is arguably the world’s greatest living mountaineer. He’s climbed 14 of the world’s tallest peaks, and if that isn’t impressive enough, he was the first to climb Mt. Everest alone and without supplemental oxygen. He recounts some of these adventures in a new book called “Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit.” Steve Paulson caught up with him and asked how he got hooked on climbing.
Thomas Seeley is a professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University. He talks about the social organization of a bee colony with Steve Paulson.
Two experts talk about Vastu, a Hindu philosophy for designing buildings in harmony with the universe.
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