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."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Houzan Mahmoud is a co-founder of the Iraqi Women's Rights Coalition and editor in chief of "Equal Rights Now," the paper of the Organization for Women's Freedom in Iraq.
Gershom Gorenberg talks with Steve Paulson about the site that the Jews call the Temple Mount which the Muslims revere as Al-Aqsa.
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."
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.
George Michelsen Foy talks about his book, "Zero Decibels: The Quest for Absolute Silence."
Science historian Holly Tucker chronicles the controversies over the first blood transfusions in the 17th century and why this raised fundamental questions about science.
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