After a spate of panic attacks and bouts of depression, Jules Evans says philosophy saved his life - especially the ancient Stoics, who inspired today's Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
Nature is more than pristine meadows and eroded canyons. There's also a history of how people have shaped and sometimes fought over the land. Lauret Savoy uncovers this shadow history and the racism that's embedded in the American landscape.More
The story of finding and recording the rarest bird in America: the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker.More
Robert Rand was working as a Senior Editor at NPR when he was crippled by panic attacks. He cured himself by taking up zydeco dancing.More
Psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says most neuroscientists have downplayed the differences between the left and right sides of the brain. He says he thinks the left hemisphere has become so dominant in Western culture that we're losing the sense of what makes us human.More
James Gardner is the author of “Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life Is the Architect of the Universe.”More
His writing explodes with manic, high-octane verbal energy, and he wrote about everything under the sun. Verbal pyrotechnics aside,Salon book critic Laura Miller says David Foster Wallace was the most important writer of his time because he was obsessed with the question of how to live authentically in a media-saturated culture of hype. More
Do intellectuals have any place in Hollywood? James Schamus is a scholar of narrative theory who also runs a movie studio. In this NEW and UNCUT interview, Steve Paulson talks with Focus Features CEO Schamus. More
Historian Garry Wills details Jefferson’s complex relationship with slavery and says its legacy still haunts us.More
Garry Wills is a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and a practicing Catholic. He tells Jim Fleming that the apostle Paul didn't say most of the things people blame him for.More
Garry Wills tells Jim Fleming that we know very little about the historical Jesus and that it doesn't matter because faith does not depend on historical facts.More
Historian Garry Wills tells Jim Fleming that despite his “Confessions,” Augustine was no libertine, and dealt with all the major theological problems of early Christianity.More
Helen Macdonald's book "H is for Hawk" turned her goshawk Mabel into one of the most memorable literary characters of recent years. Mabel is no longer with her, but Helen tells Anne Strainchamps about her new avian companion - an ornery and very smart parrot.More
Shattered by her father's sudden death, writer Helen Macdonald began dreaming of wild hawks. In an effort to move beyond her grief, she bought and trained a wild goshawk -- one of the world's fiercest birds of prey. But between the bird and her grief, she became, in her words "more hawk than human."More
Biologist David George Haskell spent a year making weekly visits to the same one-square-meter patch of old-growth forest near his home in Tennessee. His writes about his experiment in "contemplative science" in a series of gorgeous essays, called "The Forest Unseen".More
Brian Boyd talks with Anne Strainchamps about how our love of storytelling helped us evolve.More
David Abrams tells Steve Paulson about his animistic beliefs and recounts a remarkable story about a shaman who could turn himself into a raven.More
Journalist DT Max tells Steve Paulson about David Foster Wallace's creative struggles with the novel he left unfinished when he committed suicide in September of 2008. It's called "The Pale King" and explores Wallace's longtime preoccupation with boredom.More