Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt says Shakespeare believed all rulers suffered from insomnia.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Wangari Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She is dedicated to re-foresting Africa and talks with Steve Paulson about some of her Greenbelt Movement projects. Her memoir is called "Unbowed."
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."
For centuries religions set moral boundaries. In his new book “The Moral Landscape” prominent atheist Sam Harris argues that science should set them.
James Gleick is a science writer with a particular interest in the cultural impact of technology. He's written a number of best-selling books, including "The Information," "Faster," and "Chaos." And Gleick's just come out with a mind-bending book called "Time Travel: A History."
When is government surveillance appropriate? Shane Harris talks about the rise of American surveillance, cyber warfare and privacy.
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."
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