Ruth Padel is an acclaimed British poet and a direct descendent of Charles Darwin. She’s now written “Darwin: A Life in Poems,” having grown up hearing stories about her famous ancestor.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Sharon Lovejoy tells Anne Strainchamps about sunflower houses, the giant’s garden, and why she sends kids into the garden with stethoscopes.
Yossi Halevi is a religious Israeli Jew. He went looking for common ground with his Muslim neighbors. He describes what happened in his book “At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden.”
Terry Tempest Williams reads from her book, "Red," and talks about the desert with Steve Paulson.
Novelist Tom Perrotta talks with Anne Strainchamps about life in the suburbs, where everything is nice, and nobody wants a pedophile to move into the neighborhood.
There's a short story about a guy who's so afraid of other people reading his mind that he wears a tin foil hat to protect his thoughts. The tin foil part is crazy, but protecting your mind is maybe not such a bad idea. Academic psychologist Rob Brotherton says there are certain psychological traits that predispose people to believe in conspiracy theories. For example, there's an experiment done by a group of psychologists in Amsterdam. It involves a group of subjects and a messy desk.
FIND OUT HOW LIKELY YOU ARE TO BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES BY TAKING ROB'S QUIZ.
Computer paswords are on on our minds this week. "The New York Times" reporter Ian Urbina talks about his feature story, "The Secret Life of Passwords."
American Wendy Doniger holds two doctorates in Sanskrit and Indian studies from Harvard and Oxford. She’s the author of numerous books on Hinduism and has translated several Sanskrit texts. She’s widely considered one of the most important scholars on Indian religion in the world. So it might surprise you that there is one country in the world she can’t visit: India.
Doniger’s books have been targeted by Hindu Nationalists and by India’s ruling right-wing BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party). Her latest, “The Hindus: An Alternative History,” was the subject of a major lawsuit in India, and its publisher, Penguin Books India, not only pulled the book from circulation but destroyed all remaining copies. Since then, Doniger has received many death threats inside of India and no longer feels safe visiting there. But as she told Steve Paulson, her writing about Hinduism hasn’t changed in over 40 years. What has changed is India.
Pages
