Literary theorist Terry Eagleton's Dangerous Idea? The humanities are dying.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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."
Eric Lax has had regular conversations with Woody Allen over the past 36 years which he's turned into a book called "Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies and Moviemaking."
Coleman Barks has made it his life's work to translate the poetry of 13th century mystic and poet Rumi.
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.
If you had to pick one writer, one poet, who has persistently reminded us of the connection between inner and outer landscapes it would be Terry Tempest Williams. She's advocated again and again for the preservation of wild places and the importance of national wilderness through books like “Refuge,” “Desert Quartet,” “Finding Beauty in a Broken World” and “When Women Were Birds.” She'll soon be releasing a new book -- “The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks.”
Bill Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground. In this conversation with Steve Paulson, Ayers insists he was not a terrorist since his objective was never to kill people.
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