J.R. Thornton was once a serious tennis player on the junior circuit. Then he moved to China and spent a year training with the Beijing National Team, where he discovered just how different the life of an aspiring champion could be. His novel "Beautiful Country" reveals the incredibly difficult demands on young athletes in China.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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.
Sarah Lewis talks about her book, "The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery."
Doug Gordon found Steve Nieve in Chicago and talked with him about his music and his collection of sounds.
How do you best portray a strong female character, either in TV or in film? That’s a question culture critic Tasha Robinson has been asking herself for a long time now, first during her 13 years as an editor for the A.V. Club and most recently as the senior editor of the movie commentary site, The Dissolve. She tells Charles Monroe Kane that it's relatability — not toughness — that defines a strong woman on screen.
Tom Wolfe reads the opening to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and explains why it's his favorite.
Jim Fleming read “Kubla Khan” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and philosopher Sadie Plant talks with Steve Paulson about drug use by some famous writers, from Coleridge to Freud.
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.
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