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.
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.
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?
Apostolos Doxiadis tells Judith Strasser about his novel “Uncle Petros and Goldbach’s Conjecture,” in which a man becomes obsessed with solving a mathematical proof.
Azby Brown talks with Jim Fleming about the Japanese ideal of the very small house – sometimes 500 square feet for a family of four.
BookMark: Vikram Chandra reviews “The King Must Die” by Mary Renault.
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.
Erica Rowell has worked in the movie industry and as a journalist. She's the author of "The Brothers Grim: The Films of Ethan and Joel Coen."
