Celebrated jazz pianist Vijay Iyer has a Ph.D in music cognition and a penchant for asking big questions - like, what is music? And what does it do for us? Steve Paulson caught up with Vijay backstage before a recent concert, where they talked about improvisation and the parallels between jazz and basketball.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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The first stories in "Thousand and One Nights" were written down in the ninth century. They’ve been added to over the years. In some ways, it’s not so much a book as a living river of stories. Some of the most recent additions come from the celebrated novelist Salman Rushdie.
You can also hear many more interviews with Rushdie.
Ziauddin Sardar, a London based scholar and cultural critic, tells Steve what’s needed now is “an Islamic science” and explains what that is.
Steve Paulson produced this essay/report on the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.
Olivia Laing says John Cheever's "The Swimmer" is one of the finest short stories every written.
Athlete and fashion model Aimee Mullins, owner of more than a dozen pairs of the most fabulous prosthetic legs you can imagine. Her superpowers.
For photos of Aimee Mullins CLICK HERE.
Many of history's greatest scientists, from Newton to Maxwell to Einstein, have devoted significant study to the behavior of light, and, as a result, most physicists thought there was little left to say on the subject. But in April 2016, Paul Eastham, a physicist at Trinity College in Dublin, published a new paper proving that a fundamental assumption scientists had made about light was wrong.
Sean Pica is the executive director of Hudson Link for Higher Education in Prison, a degree granting program out of Sing-Sing Prison in New York State. It's full-circle for Pica who was convicted and served time for a crime he committed as a teenager.
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