Stefan Kanfer tells Jim Fleming that Groucho Marx flaunted authority his whole life, and that the price of his comedic genius was a tormented private life.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Sarah Winchester (born 1840) was the heiress to the Winchester Estate with a 50% holding of the Winchester Repeating Rifle Company. She used her vast fortune to construct a mansion for 38 consecutive years.
Popular legend held that she was cursed by all those who were killed by Winchester rifles. The only way to alleviate her suffering was to continue to add on to her mansion, filling it with strange sealed rooms and staircases and corridors leading nowhere. Pamela Haag tells her tale and gives it some meaning beyond a mere ghost story.
Sherwin Nuland tells Steve Paulson that Leonardo’s driving passion was anatomy and that his painting aimed to capture a particular moment in time.
Before there was Wikileaks, before there was Wikipedia… Before there was Facebook and Twitter and blogs… there was a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham. He’s the guy who, back in 1995, invented the wiki.
Steve Paulson prepared this report on the life of Edward Abbey, who's book changed the way people thought about the earth.
Suprabha Beckjord runs as a spiritual practice. She's a follower of Sri Chinmoy, who believed athletics could enhance spiritual enlightenment. So he set up various weightlifting, swimming, and distance running events. His most famous - and most grueling - is the annual Sri Chinmoy Self-Transcendence 3100 Mile Race. The race, which exceeds the distance from Boston to Los Angeles, takes place around a half- mile loop in Queens, New York. Suprabha Beckjord ran those 3100 miles for 13 years in a row. Her fastest race was 49 days and 14 hours, an average or more than 63 miles a day. Rehman Tungekar talks with her.
The process of data sonification is exactly what it sounds like: the translation of data points into various sounds, each with unique characteristics that can change over time. So instead of turning your spreadsheets into charts and graphs, they can now be turned into a kind of music. Matt Kenney demonstrates how it's done.
Best-selling writer Elizabeth Gilbert brings an intrepid 19th century woman botanist to life in her latest novel, "The Signature of All Things." In this conversation, she introduces us to the wonder of moss, Darwin's correspondance with "lady scientists" and the 16th century mystic, Jacob Boehme.
How do you make music from plants? Here's a recent article about the artist Mileece.
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