Shulem Deen was a Skverer— a member of one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the U.S. Then he got curious about secular life and the world outside his small village in Rockland County, NY. The community branded him a heretic and expelled him.More
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Interviews By Topic
Hemingway rewrote the ending to his classic novel dozens of times. After he died, his grandson Sean Hemingway collected those other endings and published them in a new edition of the literary classic.More
About a year ago, a group of progressive activists started a campaign to buy Twitter. Give the public shares in everyone’s favorite social media platform and turn it into a co-op. How's that working out?More
If you’re old enough, you’ll remember the Monkees, the pop group with a hit TV show. Michael Nesmith wore the green stocking cap. Since then, he’s reinvented his career several times over. He (sort of) invented country rock. And the music video.More
Is procrastination just a bad habit? Or is it something worse, like a vice? Jennifer Baker waxes philosophical about the dark side of putting things off.More
Chrisoula Andreou offers some strategies that can help us stop putting things off.More
When it comes to writing, it's easy to procrastinate. But Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell has managed to avoid that temptation.More
Web video superstar Felicia Day talks about how the Internet allowed her to use her weirdness to achieve her dreams of becoming an actress and to fulfill her creative ambitions.More
Piers Steel gives us a procrastination primer. Steel's the author of "The Procrastination Equation: How to Stop Putting Things Off and Start Getting Stuff Done." He's a Distinguished Research Chair at the University of Calgary.More
Have we lost sight of ancient virtues like courage, compassion and truth? Mark Edmundson thinks we have, and he says we'd do well to read Homer, Plato and the ancient sages.More
Carlos Fraenkel wanted to take philosophy out into the streets, so he met with students at Palestinian and Egyptian universities, and found that Plato, Maimonides and other great philosophers can open up a culture of conversation and debate.More
Princeton historian Anthony Grafton explains how learning conversational Latin inspired his students.More
Writer Rod Dreher on how his faith compelled him to return home in search of forgiveness.More
Psychologist Robert Enright breaks down cognitive steps to letting go of trauma.More
John Cage’s "4’33” was first performed on August 29th, 1952, by pianist David Tudor. He came out on stage, sat at the piano, and did not play. The audience was not impressed. Kyle Gann tells the story in “No Such Thing as Silence."More
For more than 60 years, the great French mime Marcel Marceau dominated stages around the world without ever saying a word. Shawn Wen documents Marceau's story in a book-length essay called “A Twenty Minute Silence Followed by Applause.”More
Journalist Elizabeth Kolbert argues that human vices are just as important as human virtues in shaping evolution.More