The first stories in "Thousand and One Nights" were written down in the ninth century. They’ve been added to over the years. In some ways, it’s not so much a book as a living river of stories. Some of the most recent additions come from the celebrated novelist Salman Rushdie.
You can also hear many more interviews with Rushdie.
Ziauddin Sardar responds to the question "is there really a clash of civilizations?"
Steve Paulson reports on the state of Chinese literature today. He talks with Annie Wang, Nobel Prize Laureate Gao Xingjian and National Book Award winner Ha Jin.
There's an entire sector of the economy run by people who are working diligently to get inside your head and harvest your attention? Does that creep you out? They're called the Attention Merchants. And their business model consists of attracting your attention and then reselling it for profit. They're ad-based TV channels, clickbait producers and the big social media producers. Law professor Tim Wu is the author of "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads."
When is government surveillance appropriate? Shane Harris talks about the rise of American surveillance, cyber warfare and privacy.
What are you making? In San Francisco, two radio producers are collecting stories in a project called “The Making Of...”
Historian Sean Wilentz tells Jim Fleming the birth of Dylan’s music is deeply bound up in the politics of the time.
The demographics of the United States are changing: how does the latest wave of immigration fit into the historical pattern?
