Carole Case wrote a history of New York’s Jockey Club, the elite cartel that controls the thoroughbred stud book.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Clayton Eshleman is a poet who’s turned his poetic sensibility loose on the paleolithic cave drawings at Lascaux in France. He talks about these drawings represent shamanic spirit journeys and rituals.
Pre-Modern hunter and gatherer cultures believed that dying was a kind of trial which didn't begin until you left your physical body and entered the supernatural world, according to sociologist Allan Kellehear. In these cultures, death is not the destruction of the body, but the annihilation of the personality and its transformation into something new.
Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert's Dangerous Idea: human vices are just as important as human virtues in shaping evolution.
Poet Billy Collins bookmarks "The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst."
Canadian novelist Sheila Heti talks about her new novel, "How Should a Person Be?" It's fiction, but the characters are real people -- they seem to be Sheila herself and her friends. Some of the dialogue is from actual conversations she transcribed. So what is this thing?
Karen Armstrong is the author of nearly 20 books on religion. She tells Steve Paulson that traditions from Confucianism to Judaism emerged as responses to the rampant violence of their time. And she says our own time has a lot in common with that age.
Bryan Palmer tells Steve Paulson how some population groups, from enslaved Africans to religious heretics, jazz musicians, and homosexuals have found refuge and freedom in the night.
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