Walter Kirn bookmarks "The Dog of the South" by Charles Portis.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian novelist whose book "Half of A Yellow Sun" is set during the period of civil violence surrounding the creation of Biafra.
Daniel Tammet has memorized the number pi into the tens of thousands of digits. He's learned new languages in a few weeks. He describes the gift - and the burden - of being an autistic savant.
Writer David Morris explains why "Solo Faces" by James Salter is one of his favorite books.
Bob Varsha is the play-by-play announcer for Formula One racing on the SPEED Channel. He tells Anne Strainchamps that top teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their cars...
The power of big data—why so many corporations and government agencies and political pollsters and baseball teams are after it—is that it can reveal things we might otherwise not see. But statistics alone can't do that. We need to transform those statistics into stories. One artist doing that is Brian Foo, aka the Data Driven DJ. He takes large data sets and turns them into music. His first song, "Two Trains," amplifies a dire but often ignored truth about our country: income inequality.
Primatologist Barbara J. King tells Steve Paulson about her belief that the rudimentary qualities of religion can be seen in the behavior of the great apes.
Ellen Handler Spitz is the author of many books on psychology and aesthetics. She talks with Jim Fleming about her latest - "The Brightening Glance: Imagination and Childhood."
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