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.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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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.
Science writer Winifred Gallagher has come to the rescue of the decor challenged with her book "House Thinking: A Room by Room Look at How We Live."
One hundred years ago, Fritz Haber invented the first chemical weapon and convinced the German army to use it. His wife Clara, also a chemist, fiercely opposed her husband's project. When she couldn't stop it, she committed suicide. Judith Claire Mitchell tells the story in her tragic and yet funny novel "A Reunion of Ghosts."
Howard Axelrod was accidentally blinded in one eye in a freak accident when he was in college. Disoriented and depressed, he retreated to an off-the-grid cabin in the Vermont wilderness. He stayed there, alone, for 2 years. Now he's published a memoir about his period of renunciation, "The Point of Vanishing."
Psychologist and philosopher Thomas Moore talks with Anne Strainchamps about the connections between springtime and death, and how flowers reflect this.
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