Music writer Peter Guralnick tells us how the legendary Sam Phillips created rock and roll as a musical protest.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Zia Hassan had a life-changing conversation with a 9-year old boy in a Washington backyard. A conversation that 2.5 million people around the world have watched on YouTube. Zia tells us about the boy he calls "The Philosopher."
Historian Simon Schama tells Steve Paulson that Rembrandt thought art should tell the truth and that he was an enormously innovative painter.
Computer paswords are on on our minds this week. "The New York Times" reporter Ian Urbina talks about his feature story, "The Secret Life of Passwords."
Legendary showman P.T. Barnum once owned a slave named Joice Heth. Barnum claimed she was 161 years old and a former nanny to George Washington. Benjamin Reiss tells the story in his book "The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America."
Literary critic William Gass talks with Steve Paulson about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and explicates a poem of Rilke’s about a bowl of roses.
Steven Johnson tells Anne Strainchamps how television storytelling has become more sophisticated with mutiple plots lines extending over several episodes.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
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