Paul Stoller is an anthropologist who studied sorcery with the Songhay people in Niger. Years later he developed lymphoma and only then did he understand some of what his teacher had been trying to teach him.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Neuroscientist Richard Davidson is a leading expert on the science of mindfulness. He's teamed up with the Dalai Lama to put Buddhist monks in brain scanners, and he's developing a new scientific model for studying emotion.
You can also listen to the EXTENDED interview, and read the extended transcript.
How do you set poetry to music? Grammy Award-winning jazz composer Maria Schneider did it with Ted Kooser's poems, sung by Dawn Upshaw. She tells Anne Strainchamps how she finds beauty in her art.
Cosmology is on our minds, with the remarkable new discovery confirming the Big Bang. To get a better sense of what it all means – and how creation stories like the Big Bang have shaped our sense of ourselves – Steve Paulson turned to Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who writes for NPR’s science blog 13.7. He’s the author of the book “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.”
"The Passage" has been described as "an engrossingly horrific account of a post-apocalyptic America." The author says the idea came out of a discussion with his nine-year-old daughter.
John Freyer decided to sell everything in his apartment on E-Bay. He tells the story in a book called “All My Life for Sale.”
Najla Said is many things: actress, playwright, author. She’s also a Palestinian-Lebanese-Christian-Arab-American who grew up on New York’s Jewish Upper West Side. And she’s the daughter of the late Edward Said –the famous Palestinian intellectual and activist.
Keith Donohue's novel is "The Stolen Child." He tells Jim Fleming the book's about a boy who's stolen by fairies and the boy who replaces him in the human world.
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