Walter Kirn bookmarks "The Dog of the South" by Charles Portis.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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.
Elizabeth Goodenough edited a book called “The Secret Spaces of Childhood.” Children’s author Zibby Oneal is one of the contributors to the book.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Author of "Crazy Like Us" argues that American versions of depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and eating disorders are spreading around the world.
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