Gershom Gorenberg talks with Steve Paulson about the site that the Jews call the Temple Mount which the Muslims revere as Al-Aqsa.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Guy Consolmagno is an American planetary researcher and a Jesuit priest. He's the curator of one of the world's great collections of meteorites, at the Vatican Observatory. He gets a lot of questions about how he can be both a priest and a scientist. Luckily, he has a sense of humor about it -- witness a recent appearance on the Colbert Report -- and believes science and religion can work together.
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."
Charles Duhigg, a reporter for the New York Times, has been researching the scientific and social history of habits for his new book, The Power of Habit. In it, he discusses the unique ways that habits shape our lives, both neurologically and practically. He learned that habits are powerfully hardwired into your brain — and stored separately from your memories — making them rather easy to develop and very difficult to change.
Historian and author Graham Robb tells Steve Paulson that there was a great deal of tolerance for homosexuals in the 19th century, as long as they were discreet.
In the early 20th century, as visual artists started experimenting with abstraction and surrealism, musicians were experimenting too. But why, nearly 100 years later, are the works of Modern visual artists more popular than Avant Garde music?
Gerald Clarke tells Steve Paulson that Judy’s mother introduced her to drugs; that she was exploited by the studio system; and that she had an amazing ability to pull herself together.
What's it like to grow up with a mom who's a Freudian therapist? Commentator Erin Clune has a few personal observations.
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