Gregory Stock tells Jim Fleming that designing our babies’ genes will begin as a matter of screening out diseases.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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The kind of people who live in places like Jackson, Kentucky often get characterized as poor, white and angry. And worse, as redneck and racist – hillbilly white trash. J.D. Vance knows them well. They’re his people. He grew up in Kentucky coal country and the Ohio rust belt - places he left behind when he went to Yale Law School. Today he practices in Silicon Valley, but he’s just written a book called “Hillbilly Elegy," which should be required reading for this election year. Welcome to Jackson, Kentucky.
A lot of people dismiss fashion as frivolous, but Media Studies professor Minh-Ha Pham says it's a great lens through which to study race, gender and class politics. "Fashion and so many other kinds of culture and practices that are traditionally associated with women... are often seen as frivolous," she says, and "that dismissal of fashion is linked to a larger, a broader sexism in our culture."
Stories of ghosts and clairvoyants are everywhere, but can they stand up to scientific scrutiny? A hundred years ago, William James led an elite group of scientists to investigate the paranormal. Deborah Blum tells this remarkable story.
Hanna Pylvainen's debut novel "We Sinners" is loosely based on her own history in a fundamentalist Lutheran community.
Satirist George Saunders has been a Guggenheim Fellow and received a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant." For his essay on the dumbing down on American media, he created "Megaphone Guy."
Greg Critser says that most of the claims of the advocates of organic food have very little science behind them. He thinks chefs should concentrate on creating satisfying food and not saving the world.
Hendrik Hartog explodes the myth that the 19th century was the golden age of marriage. He tells Jim Fleming that separation, desertion, and bigamy were common long before divorce was legal.
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