Writer and activist Yasmin Nair's Dangerous Idea? Writers should always
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Robert Ellis Orrall is a musician who lives in Nashville, on the same street where Al Gore bought a house. So he wrote a song about it!
Lada Adamic is one of a host of data scientists working at facebook. Anne Strainchamps wanted to know what all those sociologists are up to.
Check out Facebook's social science website.
Marti Leimbach is an autism activist and successful novelist. She talks about her own experiences trying to get help for her autistic son.
Mike Tidwell is a freelance journalist who thinks he’s found the biggest environmental catastrophe in America. In this pre-Katrina interview, Tidwell talks about the time he spent with shrimpers in the bayou country and what they taught him about the devastating price we’re paying for the way we control floods on the Mississippi River.
Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses his six-volume autobiographical novel, "My Struggle."
You could also listen to an extended interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Joan Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, helped shape a highly personal brand of nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. Her early essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979) influenced generations of writers. Her later memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," chronicled the deaths of her husband and daughter. In 2011 Didion talked with Steve Paulson about illness and growing old in the wake of the death of her daughter, Quintana.
Leonard Zwilling tells Jim Fleming about boxing’s impact on the English language. It’s yielded such words and phrases as fan, throw in the towel, and up to scratch.
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