James McBride won the National Book Award for "The Good Lord Bird," his novel about the abolitionist John Brown. He explains why he doesn't like most fictional portraits of slavery and how he tried to tell a different story.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
We explore the fine art of creative collaboration and start with the music of John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Joel Hirschorn thinks urban sprawl is a terrible idea and tells Steve Paulson all the reasons why.
If evolution is a game called survival of the fittest, how do you explain altruism? The “altruism equation” is a mathematical rule discovered by George Price...
Feminist Naomi Wolf tells Anne Strainchamps that common obstetrical practices make things easier for the hospital, not the mother and baby, and she explains why many post-feminist women are shocked by the demands of early motherhood.
Mary Ann Caws is an internationally respected scholar of surrealism. She has translated many of the movements major texts and is the editor of “Surrealism (Themes and Movements).”
Karen Wenborn tells Jim Fleming about Classical Comics which have published three versions of Shakespeare plays, pairing various versions of the texts with bright, action-packed, comic book style visuals.
There's a nagging question at major sporting events: Are the athletes cheating? Steroids, human growth hormones and blood doping techniques are extending the outer limits of performance, and athletes can use them if they want -- unless they're professionals or Olympic athletes. But is doping really a problem? Australian philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a simple litmus test: What contribution is coming from the technology and what is coming from the athlete?
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