Stephen Marglin is a professor of economics at Harvard and the author of "The Dismal Science: How Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Historian Sean Wilentz tells Jim Fleming the birth of Dylan’s music is deeply bound up in the politics of the time.
The Oxford English Dictionary was created in 1857, and was expected to be finished within ten years. The first edition was finally completed 71 years later.
Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar has spent much of his career regarding the pain of others. He delves into issues like war or globalization with giant installations and photos. But his work does not take use a grand scale, instead, he drills down to one individual. His most famous work is 6-year project on the Rwandan Genocide called “The Rwanda Project.”
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."
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.
Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was the rare book that changed how we think. On its 50th anniversary, historian of science Tom Broman talks about Kuhn's legacy and we hear excerpts from Kuhn's book.
Sarah Vowell is obsessed with presidential assassinations. She talks with Steve Paulson about the lingering mystery and drama surrounding the murder of Abraham Lincoln.
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