Michele Norris, former co-host of NPR's All Things Considered, talks with Anne Strainchamps about her family's hidden racial past.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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.
Author and playwright Michael Frayn talks with Steve Paulson about his play “Copenhagen” and the dramatic meeting between physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. At issue is the degree to which Heisenberg was spying for the Nazis and his role in the development of a German atom bomb.
Pat Willard is the author of “Secrets of Saffron.” She tells Steve Paulson how you harvest saffron and why it’s more than a flavoring.
Muffy Mead-Ferro recalls her one and only experience of scrap-booking. She is the author of “Confessions of a Slacker Mom.”
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.
Jon Kabat-Zinn talks with Steve Paulson about what it means to be mindful of the body’s functioning, like breathing.
Kumail Nanjiani is a Pakistani standup comedian living in Chicago and performing a one-man show called "Unpronounceable."
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