In this UNCUT interview, novelist Deborah Harkness talks about studying the history of magic, and then transforming history into fiction.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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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.
Freakwater is an American country band. They're profiled by TTBOOK producer Veronica Rueckert. We hear lots of music from their new album, "Thinking of You."
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.
Dominique Browning tells Anne Strainchamps that after her divorce, she took a perverse pride in letting her house fall apart. Eventually, she came back to life and started taking care of things again.
Choying Drolma began her life as a Buddhist nun in Nepal. As she tells Steve Paulson, Drolma is now bringing music to the West with American guitarist Steve Tibbetts.
In March of 2000, the conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio. In the art world, speculation swirled about whether his death was suicide or murder? Why would anyone want to murder Lombardi? Maybe because his intricate drawings revealed connections between George W. Bush and the bin Laden family, as well as other connections between banking, organized crime and intelligence agencies. Patricia Goldstone is the author of "Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi." She talks about Lombardi's work and the mystery behind his death.
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