Author and playwright Michael Frayn talks with Steve Paulson about his play “Copenhagen” and the dramatic meeting between physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. At issue is the degree to which Heisenberg was spying for the Nazis and his role in the development of a German atom bomb.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Major Steve Beck is a Marine Casualty Notification Officer. And every Marine family's worst fear is seeing Major Beck at their door.
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.
Harriet Tubman will soon be gracing our twenty dollar bill. Most of us know only one image of her. It's an iconic image taken later in her life in which her hair's covered in a dark cloth and she has a stern expression. But there are other images of Harriet Tubman as well, including a wood cut of her carrying a musket.
Law professor Nicholas Johnson says the image of Harriet Tubman carrying a rifle doesn’t fit with how most Americans view abolitionists and civil rights leaders. After all, weren’t they supposed to be peaceful? But as Johnson tells Steve Paulson, there's a rich tradition of Black Americans owning guns for self-defense.
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.
Muffy Mead-Ferro recalls her one and only experience of scrap-booking. She is the author of “Confessions of a Slacker Mom.”
Steve Paulson chats with three writers from “The Onion” - the satirical newspaper that started out here in Madison.
How did non-life become life? University of Wisconsin geochemist Nita Sahai talks with Anne Strainchamps about how life might have begun on Earth.
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