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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Afghan-American author Nadia Hashimi talks about her book, “The Pearl That Broke Its Shell,” as well as the Afghan custom of Bacha Posh – in which a girl is allowed to dress as a boy.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Richard Holmes is fascinated by what he calls "The Age of Wonder." The subtitle of his book is "how the romantic generation discovered the beauty and the terror of science," and he tells Steve Paulson about how Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" came directly out of the scientific climate of the time.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Katy Lederer is a poet who used to manage a hedge fund. Her latest book is "The Heaven-Sent Leaf." She reads from it and talks about her work with Anne Strainchamps.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Earlier this year, the 14th Dalai Lama of Tibet handed over the last of his political power, to a secular, Harvard-educated politician. Lobsang Sangay left his fellowship and family in the United States to take up his new post, and all of its challenges.

 

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Bernan McKinney received the first commercially cloned dog.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Not all illustrators agree on what to call graphic novels or when the first one appeared, but most agree that the man who brought them into the mainstream was Will Eisner.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

The clay tablets found at the Greek palace of Knossos had one of the strangest languages ever discovered.  Margalit Fox tells the story of Linear B - and the obsessed, tragic lives of the two people who devoted their lives to cracking the code.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Prohibition gave us speakeasies, jazz clubs and bathtub gin.  But a new revisionist history uncovers a more disturbing legacy: campaigns against immigrants, the War on Drugs,and the rise of America's "incarceration nation" . Historian Lisa McGirr's "War on Alcohol" traces the unintended consequences of America's experiment in collective, state-sponsored renunciation.

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