The relationship between poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge is discussed by Steve Paulson and Adam Sisman.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
We all love the feeling of getting lost in a good story and seeing the world through a character’s eyes. Recently, psychologists have been studying whether that experience actually changes readers. Novelist and cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley tells us about the latest research connecting fiction with empathy.
Terry Tempest Williams has spent much of her life trying to understand her mother - both a private woman and a trickster. Her memoir is also an exploration of silence and finding one's voice.
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.
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.
Olivia Laing talks about her book, "The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking."
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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