Walter Kirn bookmarks "The Dog of the South" by Charles Portis.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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.
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."
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.
Poor, broke and white. Country musician Brandy Clark's been there, but she made it out. She’s 40 years old and won the country music awards’ Song of the Year and was also nominated for best new artist. Charles Monroe-Kane caught up with Brandy, along with her guitar player and backup singer Miles Aubrey, in a studio in Nashville, to talk about her latest album, Big Day in a Small Town.
Producer Cynthia Woodland introduces us to "The Bid Whist Ladies" - a small group of African American women in Madison, Wisconsin who've been meeting once a week to play cards for over 25 years.
Christopher Phillips tells Jim Fleming what happens at Socrates Café, and explains how he reveals the deep philosophical implications of everyday events.
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