Jim Fadiman is one of the original psychonauts – a friend of Richard Alpert and Ken Kesey in the Sixties – who went on to do pioneering research on psychedelics and creativity, and helped found the transpersonal psychology movement. In this EXTENDED interview, Steve Paulson talks with Fadiman about a lifetime of unconventional thinking.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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The renowned atheist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has just written a book for children: “The Magic of Reality.” In this NEW AND UNCUT interview, Steve Paulson talks with Dawkins about the difference between supernatural magic and poetic magic, and why atheists no longer need to hide in the closet.
Rob Nixon grew up near the ostrich farms of South Africa. He tells Steve Paulson about the 19th century fashion craze for ostrich plumes and the fortunes it created.
How do modern societies compare to hunter gatherer cultures? In "The World Until Yesterday," Jared Diamond, explores our radically different values - on everything from childrearing to what we think about strangers. Here's Steve's EXTENDED interview with Diamond.
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.
Poet Robert Wrigley is sometimes called a nature poet. His books include “Reign of Snakes” and “Lives of the Animals.”
Ballet is performed all over the world, but in Russia ballet is the route to stardom.
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.
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