Novelist Wesley Stace (AKA musician John Wesley Harding) tells Jim what the original novel, "Tristram Shandy," is all about.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Rolf De Heer talks about the experience of collaborating with the aboriginal people of Ramingining and how extraordinary the process was.
Journalist William Claassen calls himself a nomadic pilgrim. He spent many years traveling to cloistered communities from various religious traditions around the world.
Steven Pinker tells Steve Paulson that parents don’t really have much to do with shaping their children’s personalities.
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.
Thebe Medupe is an astrophysicist who grew up under apartheid. He talks about the stories he grew up hearing from his village elders and the astronomical legends of the Dogun people in Mali.
Larry Brilliant is a doctor, co-founder of the digital social network the Well, and he was the first executive director of Google.org. But back in the Sixties, he was a hippie doctor who joined Wavy Gravy's traveling bus caravan and then landed in an Indian ashram in the Himalayas, where his guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox. Miraculously, his U.N. team of doctors eradicated the world's remaining cases of this terrible disease. He tells Steve Paulson about a remarkable moment in history when anything seemed possible.
Sherman Alexie wrote a novel in response to 9/11. He thinks the fanaticism of flying planes into buildings is the end game of tribalism and he wanted to teach his sons something else.
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