Azar Nafisi reads from her memoir "Things I've Been Silent About." She created a sensation with her book "Reading Lolita in Tehran."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Erin McKean talks with Anne Strainchamps about the pleasures of strange words like “squintefego” and “limiculous.”
Bob Spitz writes about the Beatles time in India with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in his book "The Beatles: The Biography."
Christine Wicker tells Anne Strainchamps about some of the witches, elves, vampires and other oddities she met.
For as closely linked as the voice is to our body and sense of identity, there are also a lot of external forces affecting our voices, both social and technological. In fact, when we're talking about mediated voices—voices we hear in music, film, and of course, on the radio—we're actually not talking about "voices" any more. We're talking about signal processing. And, as media historian Jonathan Sterne tells Craig Eley, signal processing shapes the sound of all vocal media, from your telephone calls to the music of T-Pain.
Colby Buzzell is an Iraq War veteran whose blog and book is called "My War," and he tells Anne Strainchamps why he joined up and how he got past the drug test.
Angie da Silva is a historian of black cultural life in the United States, going back to the Civil War. She collects stories, both through oral history and archival research. But she's not merely a writer. She brings these stories to life through historical reenactment, often as a slave character she's created named Lila. She says that the stories she hears and tells are too often left out of our history books.
In this interview, she talks about her work and tells the story of Mary Meachum, a free black abolitionist who worked on the Mississippi in St. Louis.
David Plotz is the editor of Slate Magazine (slate.com) and the author of "Good Book."
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