Richard Davidson is a neuro-psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a longtime friend of the Dalai Lama. He tells Steve Paulson about observing contemplatives with a brain scanner.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Merge is a quartet that combines poetry with jazz music. Cassandra Cleghorn and Erik Lawrence talk with Jim Fleming about their art and how much they have in common with the Beats.
Jason Goodwin won the Edgar Award for "The Janissary Tree," his first novel featuring Yashim Togalu, a eunuch who lives in 19th century Istanbul. Yashim is back in "The Snake Stone."
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.
Journalist Linda Ellerbee remembers buying oranges in Afghanistan, visiting Vietnam a generation after the war, and bathing in the Mediterranean to mark the passing of Julia Child.
Jeremy Campbell tells Steve Paulson about the ways Mother Nature uses deception to fool predators, and talks about Bill Clinton and the balance of the public good and personal morality.
The rich are getting rich and the gap between the rich and poor in America is getting wider.
Journalist Malcolm Gladwell talks to Steve Paulson about how the words from one of his stories for "The New Yorker" ended up on Broadway and how this made him change his attitude about plagiarism.
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