Do nations need states? Do ethnic, religious, and/or linguistic groups of people – do they, in this age of globalization, do they need to form a country with borders and an army and all that comes along with that? Do they need to be a state?
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Literary theorist Terry Eagleton's Dangerous Idea? The humanities are dying.
Azhar Usman is a comedian who's appearing on the "Allah Made Me Funny! Official Muslim Comedy Tour."
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.
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.
Writer David Morris explains why "Solo Faces" by James Salter is one of his favorite books.
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.
Christopher Moore talks with Steve Paulson about the world’s most untranslatable words.
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