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."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt says Shakespeare believed all rulers suffered from insomnia.
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."
Tom Szaky tells Jim Fleming how his company turns candy wrappers and juice bottles into pencil cases and backpacks.
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."
What is water? When Anne Strainchamps asked Wisconsin's Poet Laureate, Kimberly Blaeser called up the story and myth of the Anishinaabe. Blaeser says growing up on the White Earth Reservation, surrounded by lakes, made her who she is today.
Sherron Watkins is the whistle-blower who tried to tell Ken Lay what was going on at Enron. With co-author, journalist Mimi Schwartz, Watkins lays out the story in her book “Power Failure.”
William Gibson talks about coining the word "cyberspace" to use in his fiction.
Pages
