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.
Literary theorist Terry Eagleton's Dangerous Idea? The humanities are dying.
Elizabeth Goodenough edited a book called “The Secret Spaces of Childhood.” Children’s author Zibby Oneal is one of the contributors to the book.
E. Fuller Torrey is a research psychiatrist who believes there has been a five fold increase in the incidence of insanity in the last 250 years, and that some infectious agent is to blame.
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.
Pages
