Film-maker Walter Williams created the “Mr. Bill” character for “Saturday Night Live.” He was born and raised in New Orleans and has thought a lot about the natural history of his hometown.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Jill Fredston has rowed more than 20,000 miles of Arctic water, along the coastlines of Alaska and Greenland and alongside whales and polar bears.
Visionary computer scientist Jaron Lanier explores the rise of the tech industry in his book "Who Owns the Future?" In it, he explains why the next information economy is hurting the middle class.
Samuel R. Delany has been described as "American science fiction's most consistently brilliant and inventive writer." Delany's non-fiction includes the essay collection, "The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction." He talked to Steve Paulson about his love of language.
John Brown was an abolitionist who from the beginning was committed to the abolition of slavery and called for ending it through armed insurrection.
Caltech physicist Sean Carroll thinks big...really big. And not just about quantum physics, the multiverse and the other weird ideas in his field. He also loves philosophy and wonders whether there's any underlying meaning to our lives. In this wide-ranging conversation, Carroll talks with Steve Paulson about science, the universe and what he calls "poetic naturalism."
Americans are still fighting over the legacy of the Vietnam War, but one perspective is missing: the Vietnamese experience. Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen provides a Vietnamese perspective.
One of the many utopian groups that started during the late 19th century and early 20th century was the House of David—perhaps the first cult to become a pop culture sensation. Their compound in Benton Harbon, Michigan had an amusement park and a zoo; they had a baseball team that once played an exhibition game against Babe Ruth and the Yankees, and they had bands—highly regarded, touring bands. Here's Henry Sapoznik—the director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture here at the University of Wisconsin—on the mythology and music of the House of David.
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