Jedediah Purdy is the author of “For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today” and “Being America: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World.”
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Michael Benson is a film-maker who’s compiled an extraordinary book of still photographs. Lawrence Weschler wrote the book’s Afterward.
Feminist film critic Molly Haskell talks about how Hollywood has treated the subject of writer’s block, and we hear clips from “Adaptation” and “Barton Fink.”
Katharine Rogers tells Jim Fleming that there’s a lot more to Oz than the Wizard, and that Baum always loved the theater and would have been thrilled by the Judy Garland movie.
Julian Barnes' novel "The Sense of an Ending" won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. Barnes talks with Steve Paulson about the complications of memory, aging and moral reckoning.
Physicist Joel Primack and Nancy Abrams tell Steve Paulson how humanity has moved back into the center of our myth-making.
Would you prefer to die in your sleep? Turns out, more people who weighed in on our three deaths question chose that option. Many of the people who shared their choices also took the time to write about why they were making their choice. You can read a selection of their responses here, and get some analysis of who wrote and - perhaps - why.
Olivia Gentile is the author of "Life List: A Woman's Quest for the World's Most Amazing Birds." Gentile tells Anne Strainchamps that her book is a biography of Phoebe Snetsinger who saw some 8400 species of birds while fending off a cancer diagnosis.
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