With the Carolina Panthers facing off against the Denver Broncos in Superbowl 50, football is on our minds this week. And for many of the millions of fans who tune in every Sunday to watch their favorite teams compete, football is little more than a weekly ritual. For English professor Mark Edmundson, the football field is a staging ground for some of life's most important lessons. In his book "Why Football Matters," Edmundson looks back to his own high school years playing the sport and reflects on how it taught him courage, resilience, determination, and other values he'd draw on as an adult.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Sherman Alexie is a celebrated fiction writer who is also Spokane, and who has strong opinions about what it means to be a real Indian.
Standup, prat falls, punch lines. Performing comedy's one thing, writing it's another.
Ian Frazier has been writing comedy for the New Yorker for decades. Catch him talking about the rewards of writing humor, and telling jokes in Russian.
Sue Halpern spent five years subjecting herself to every memory test and brain imaging technique she could find.
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.
Did you know that 7 Up was originally called Bib-Label Lithiated Lemon-Lime Soda? Good thing they changed the name. That's one of the fascinating facts from Tristan Donovan's book, "Fizz: How Soda Shook Up the World." Donovan takes us on a guided tour of the secret history of fizzy water.
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.
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