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
Richard Powers reads an excerpt from his novel, "Orfeo," inspired by the music of Mahler and set to Mahler's "Kindertotenlieder."
In 2001, reporter Marja Mills met the celebrated and notoriously private author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Harper Lee. The two struck up a friendship and, a few years after their first meeting, the two became neighbors. Mills writes about their friendship in her new memoir, “The Mockingbird Next Door.”
Jim Fleming talks with Mairin Ui Cheide, a sean-nos singer. Sean-nos is old-style traditional singing where songs usually tell a story.
Martyn Stewart is one of audio engineers who went to Alaska in 2006 as part of the Arctic Soundscape Project to record the sounds of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Jon Kabat-Zinn talks with Steve Paulson about what it means to be mindful of the body’s functioning, like breathing.
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.
Jason Soares is a member of the band "Aspects of Physics", whose music has to do with the mathematics of the ratios of how we assign tones into scales in music.
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