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.
Audio
Lewis Hyde invokes the cultural commons – that vast store of art and ideas from the past that enrich everybody's present.
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.
Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood talks with Steve Paulson about her dystopian science fiction book, “Oryx and Crake.”
Historian Jill Lepore talks with Jim Fleming about Noah Webster and his dictionary. She says Webster thought Americans should have their own language and he celebrated American words.
Independent producer Matt Lieber takes us to visit The Moth, a collective in New York City that explores storytelling as an urban art form.
Kathleen Morris talks about her experience with the mental habit monastics used to describe a kind of frantic escapism and aversion to other people. It's similar, but not identical, to the modern disease of depression.
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