Karen Joy Fowler bookmarks "Dazzle of Day" by Molly Gloss.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
According to historian Thomas Laqueur, neither sanitation nor the soul fully explain the rang of rituals we've developed for caring for dead bodies. For him, there is a deeper anthropological truth at work: caring for the dead marks the human transition from nature into culture.
Elizabeth Little is a writer and editor who collects languages. She tells Jim Fleming about the perils of learning tonal languages.
Author of "Waiting for Snow in Havana" started to worry about death as a child, growing up in Cuba during an era of public executions ...
Brian Turtle tells Steve Paulson how he came up with the game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" and plays a few rounds with Steve.
I dunno, but it seems kind of extreme, not to mention risky, to bio-engineer a mass mosquito die-off. So Steve Paulson tracked down the world’s greatest living entomologist to see what he has to say. E. O Wilson is sometimes called “the ant man” – that’s the insect he studied most – but he’s best known as the evolutionary biologist and a champion of biodiversity. He’s 86 years old now, and has just finished what is probably his last book – called “Half Earth”. It’s a passionate plea to save humanity by dedicating half the planet to nature. You’d assume that Wilson would be happy to let mosquitos live in that half… but that’s not what he told Steve.
Daniel Levitin is a neuroscientist with a twist; he's also a musician and record producer. He says brain imaging is showing how our brains listen to and make music.
Eugene Mirman is an indie comic and the author of an outlandish self-help send-up called "The Will to Whatevs." He tells Jim Fleming that school was horrible for him and gave rise to his nerd humor.
Pages
