For others, football is sacred. In fact, William Dean says the game is part of "American spiritual culture." He talks with Jim Fleming about the way religious beliefs crop up in American popular culture.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
Stephen Prothero tells Jim Fleming that Jesus has become an American icon like Mickey Mouse and that the commercial proliferation of Jesus kitsch indirectly spreads a religious message.
Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.
Tariq Ali is a historian, activist and writer. He talks with Steve Paulson about the history of the Ottoman empire, and the Islamic clergy’s rejection of modernism.
Many recent conversations about the Wisconsin Idea have focused on the politics and controversies around it, but all the negative attention ignores the fact that at its core, it's an aspirational vision commited to truth and public education. Wisconsin poet laureate Kimberly Blaeser joined Anne Strainchamps to talk about the beauty behind the Wisconsin Idea, and how it reflects the natural world.
What turns you on?
Sure, there are the obvious answers: beauty, brains, braun. But human sexuality is a complicated business. Studying it is more complicated still. That was, until the internet came along.
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