If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Why are most Danes and Swedes happy to get along without religion?
How did non-life become life? University of Wisconsin geochemist Nita Sahai talks with Anne Strainchamps about how life might have begun on Earth.
Patricia O’Connor tells Jim Fleming there’s nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive and that people should stop trying to make English behave like Latin.
Janey Buchan founded the Centre for Political Song at Glasgow Caledonian University in Scotland. She plays several examples from the collection for Jim Fleming.
For centuries, the oddities of nature - like two-headed cats and conjoined twins - fascinated people. Science historian Lorraine Daston says a history of wonders is to some degree a history of pre-modern science.
Maurice Sendak's new book, “Brundibar” is a collaboration with playwright Tony Kushner. It’s a story about confronting evil, based on events from the Holocaust.
In 2009, Eric Glatt did the unthinkable for an unpaid intern — he sued his employer, Fox Searchlight Pictures, alleging that they violated the Labor Department's standards for internships. He describes why he believes unpaid internships threaten workers everywhere.
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