Piri Thomas is best known for his classic memoir “Down These Mean Streets.” Now in his mid-70's, Thomas is still active as an educator and activist with juvenile offenders.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Milwaukee computer programmer Mohan Embar describes competing for -- and winning -- the 2012 Loebner Prize for Artificial Intelligence. His chat bot, Chip Vivant, was the most "human computer" of the year. But it still couldn't pass the Turing Test.
Paul Hawken is the author of "Blessed Unrest." He talks with Anne Strainchamps about the quantity and variety of people and organizations involved in the global activism movement.
Richard Schweid loves eels. He tells Steve Paulson that scientists know very little about their life cycle, but that their numbers seem to be declining.
Katha Pollitt is a celebrated feminist writer and columnist for The Nation magazine. Her new book is "Learning to Drive."
Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy has written another incendiary book: "Sellout: The Politics of Racial Betrayal."
Joel Kotkin tells Anne Strainchamps how the power of e-commerce is changing where and how we live. He says that knowledge workers choose to live in nerdistans and valhallas.
The clay tablets found at the Greek palace of Knossos had one of the strangest languages ever discovered. Margalit Fox tells the story of Linear B - and the obsessed, tragic lives of the two people who devoted their lives to cracking the code.
Pages
