Steve Paulson profiles savage literary critic Dale Peck. A collection of Peck’s reviews is called “Hatchet Jobs.”
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
As the daughter of a child psychologist, writer Jessica Lamb-Shapiro grew weary of the simple solutions offered by popular self-help books. So maybe it was only natural that she wanted to understand why people liked them so much. To find out, she read hundreds of books and articles, journeyed to conferences headed by self-improvement icons, and even conquered her fear of flying along the way.
Susan Blackmore is a British psychologist who's written books on consciousness, memes and Zen Buddhism. She says her daily practice of meditation has revealed truths that have eluded the scientific study of consciousness.
You can also listen to the EXTENDED interview, and read the extended transcript.
Historian Simon Schama tells Steve Paulson that Rembrandt thought art should tell the truth and that he was an enormously innovative painter.
Tom Wolfe talks with Steve Paulson, and explains why he's so fascinated by the connection between sex and social status.
Back in 1969, Marine Karl Marlantes was dropped in the middle of a jungle in Vietnam - at the age of 23, put in charge of the lives of 40 other young men. He says he wasn't psychologically or spiritually prepared for that, or for what came after the war.
"I had never known that beauty and death could go together." Joanna Ebenstein runs Brooklyn's Museum of Morbid Anatomy, which celebrates the memento mori that were part of daily life in the past. From art sculpted out of a dead person's hair, to death masks molded from a corpse's face, she give us a tour.
William Ian Miller tells Jim Fleming we're all guilty of faking it, and that a little social duplicity isn't necessarily a bad thing.
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