Poltergeists, ghosts, telepathy and other psychic phenomena used to be considered legitimate subjects for scientific research. Historian Jeffrey Kripal recounts the intellectual history of the paranormal.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Journalist Susan Orlean set out to discover why this night is so special to Americans and tells Steve Paulson about some of her Saturday night excursions.
A fantasy novel written by a Somali-American Mennonite raised in the US who wrote it while teaching English during a civil war in what is now South Sudan and then revised it in Egypt.
Sarah Lewis talks about her book, "The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery."
Journalist William Claassen calls himself a nomadic pilgrim. He spent many years traveling to cloistered communities from various religious traditions around the world.
Doug Gordon found Steve Nieve in Chicago and talked with him about his music and his collection of sounds.
One of the most horrific episodes in American history occurred on December 29, 1890. The U.S. Cavalry surrounded an encampment of Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and massacred some 300 people. The details of the carnage of the Wounded Knee Massacre are almost unbearable. As Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man who witnessed the massacre, put it, “Something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died." This tragedy is the bleak backdrop for Jonis Agee's new novel, "The Bones of Paradise." Set 10 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, all the characters in her novel - from white cattle ranchers to the Lakota - are wrestling with the ghosts of the massacre. Agee tells Steve Paulson about the origins of her novel.
Thomas Pakenham’s passion for trees has led him all over the world. He tells Anne Strainchamps that trees can be majestic, sacred, and haunting.
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