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.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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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.
Mick Aston is an archeologist and the co-creator of the British television show “Time Team.” Aston and a crew of archeologists and scientists descend on a site and see what they can come up with in three days.
Rebecca Goldstein explains how Spinoza envisioned God and why his conception appealed to later scientists like Einstein.
Poet Robert Wrigley is sometimes called a nature poet. His books include “Reign of Snakes” and “Lives of the Animals.”
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.
Maurice Sendak's new book, “Brundibar” is a collaboration with playwright Tony Kushner. It’s a story about confronting evil, based on events from the Holocaust.
Musue Haddad of Liberia went on a two-day trip to visit her parents in 1989. While she was on this trip, civil war broke out in her country. Haddad has not seen her parents or the rest of her family since.
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