Historian Rebecca Spang tells Judith Strasser that "restaurant" originally meant a cup of broth and explains how it evolved into the culinary paradise we know today.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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?
Mitch Horowitz tells Anne Strainchamps that belief in the occult is as old as the colonies and that spiritualism was America's first great religious export.
At the heart of many Americans' fear of black men is an ugly stereotype -- the stereotype of the black criminal. Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad traces some of our current attitudes about race and crime to the late 19th century, when sociologists first began looking at crime statistics.
Dan Fagin just won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “Toms River.” It’s a remarkable nonfiction tale of industrial pollution and its health impacts for people in a small New Jersey town.
Richard Holmes is fascinated by what he calls "The Age of Wonder." The subtitle of his book is "how the romantic generation discovered the beauty and the terror of science," and he tells Steve Paulson about how Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" came directly out of the scientific climate of the time.
In this UNCUT conversation, Jonathan Lethem talks about "Dissident Gardens" and the many faces of a novelist.
For Jeannette Walls, one of the things she struggled with most was keeping her past a secret from just about everyone.
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