The evidence is mounting... "we" are mostly who we think we are. Our identities are mental constructs, cobbled together from memory and stories. Jonathan Adler gives us a crash course in narrative identity and mental health.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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.
For years, Paul Ewald's been trying to convince people that cancer is caused by germs, not genes.
Michael Pollan tells Judith Strasser where the American front lawn came from, and what it has come to symbolize.
Journalist Kevin Krajick's book tells the story of geologists Chuck Fipke and Stew Blusson, a couple of small-time prospectors who went looking for diamonds in the Canadian tundra.
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.
Jonathan Lethem's new novel is "Chronic City." The book has been described as a cross between the famous borough-centric New Yorker cartoon and the darkest episode of "Seinfeld."
Nicholson Baker's latest novel is called "The Anthologist." Baker tells Anne Strainchamps the book's about a writer who longs to be a poet.
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