What does it mean to be free? And what does it mean to live a personally authentic, honest life with ourselves and with others? These are the questions that Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their existential friends wrestled with in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sarah Bakewell makes the case that their late-night conversations are especially relevant today. She's the author of "At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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"Religion always starts with mysticism," says David Steindl-Rast. Now 89, he's been a Benedictine monk since 1953. Brother David was one of the first Roman Catholics to engage in dialogues between Christians and Buddhists. He tells Steve Paulson about the joys of life in the monastery.
"New Yorker" staff writer and book critic James Wood recommends Theodor Fontane's 1894 novel, "Effi Briest."
Diamanda Galas is a classically trained pianist, with a vocal range of three and a half octaves whose music is dark and intense.
Brian Raftery tells Jim Fleming about karaoke in Japan and the man who invented it.
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.
In this UNCUT interview, Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman talks with Steve Paulson about his latest book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Chris Wren was a bureau chief for the New York Times in Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, Ottawa and Johannesburg. The family cat, Henrietta, accompanied his family to may of those postings.
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