Stephen Prothero tells Steve Paulson about the first American cremation, which didn’t really go very well, and the current craze for going out in a blaze of glory.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Biologist Steven Austad is so confident human beings will soon live to be 150 years old that he’s bet on it with a colleague: Jay Olshansky, who says we’re already living way past our expiration date!
The idea of a universal basic income is getting serious consideration these days from governments -- in Switzerland, Finland, even Kenya. Could it get traction in the U.S.? Absolutely, says journalist Rutger Bregman.
There’s a Modern Caveman Movement afoot. And their inspirational leader is 76 year-old Arthur De Vany. A man who says we all should be mimicking our caveman ancestors.
Reinhold Messner is arguably the world’s greatest living mountaineer. He’s climbed 14 of the world’s tallest peaks, and if that isn’t impressive enough, he was the first to climb Mt. Everest alone and without supplemental oxygen. He recounts some of these adventures in a new book called “Reinhold Messner: My Life at the Limit.” Steve Paulson caught up with him and asked how he got hooked on climbing.
Susan Friedman tells Anne Strainchamps about her friendship, initiated and maintained via e-mail over the internet, with a young woman scholar in Iraq.
We know a lot about how slaves looked at books because of the hundreds of slave narratives they wrote. Scholar Cherene Sherrard-Johnson says a fundamental trope in those narratives is what’s called “the Talking Book.”
Novelist Tim O’Brien talks with Jim Fleming about the life-long consequences of the decisions the Viet Nam generation made in their twenties, and says it’s harder to effectively protest today.
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