In this UNCUT interview, novelist Deborah Harkness talks about studying the history of magic, and then transforming history into fiction.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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.
Christopher Buckley talks with Steve Paulson about his novel "Boomsday," which posits a piece of runaway legislation providing tax incentives for Boomers who choose to commit suicide...sort of an updated "Modest Proposal."
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.
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.
Coleman Barks has made it his life's work to translate the poetry of 13th century mystic and poet Rumi.
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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