Julia Alvarez talks about her novel for young adults, and how it mirrors her own experience reconciling a native Dominican background with the culture of her adopted home: a small town in rural Vermont.
Julia Alvarez talks about her novel for young adults, and how it mirrors her own experience reconciling a native Dominican background with the culture of her adopted home: a small town in rural Vermont.
Ed Boyden, a researcher at MIT, is at the forefront of a new science that aims to map and even heal the brain with light. It’s called optogenetics, and the journal Science has called it one of the great insights of the 21st century. It’s in its early days, but the goal is to one day be able to take a disease like depression, PTSD, or epilepsy and, using bursts of light, just turn it off -- the same way you’d fix a software glitch in a computer.
Can you learn to be more creative? You can if you go to Lynda Barry's workshop on "writing the unthinkable."
You can also listen to the EXTENDED interview, and read the extended transcript.
Olivia Gentile is the author of "Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds." Gentile tells Anne Strainchamps that her book is a biography of Phoebe Snetsinger who saw some 8400 species of birds while fending off a cancer diagnosis.
Physicist Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams tell Steve Paulson how humanity has moved back into the center of our myth-making.
Richard Sennett makes the case that our definition of craft should be expanded to include any job a person commits to executing to the best of their abilities.