Cary Sudler returns to his ancestral home to apologize to the black members of his family for the injustice of slavery.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Do nations need states? Do ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic groups of people – do they, in this age of globalization, do they need to form a country with borders and an army and all that comes along with that? Do they need to be a state?
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.
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.
E. Fuller Torrey is a research psychiatrist who believes there has been a five fold increase in the incidence of insanity in the last 250 years, and that some infectious agent is to blame.
David Ferris is the director of the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project. He tells Anne Strainchamps the project began as a conceptual art project that provided gainful employment to the animals put out of work by the collapse of Thailand's timber industry.
Elizabeth Goodenough edited a book called “The Secret Spaces of Childhood.” Children’s author Zibby Oneal is one of the contributors to the book.
Anne here. My conversation with Turkish writer Elif Şafak back in April still sticks with me as the year comes to a close. In many parts of the world, 2016 was the year of the populist leader—especially in Turkey, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a crackdown on free speech and all forms of opposition. 120 journalists have been jailed, more than 2,000 academics have been dismissed from universities, and more than 100,000 public workers have been fired. How did Turkey—once a model of new democratic nations—become such a different place? Not only did Şafak see this coming, she warned that the West should not consider itself immune.
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