James Wood is often called the best critic of his generation. He looks back at his own career, from writing brutal take-downs at the Guardian to his current perch at The New Yorker, and tells us why genre fiction makes him "anxious."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
When she moved back to Jordan, molecular biologist Rana Dajani realized that children there didn't read for pleasure. So she started a reading program at her local mosque. Since then, her reading program has reached more than 10,000 kids in Jordan and has spread across the Middle East.More
Ever wonder what goes through the mind of a fighter in the moments before a fight? Here's one take, courtesy of writer Jonathan Gottschall.More
Jonathan Gottschall is an English professor who trained for MMA – mixed martial arts – out of curiosity and wound up in the ring. Steve Paulson talked with him about why, and what it taught him about our relationship with violence.More
Claressa Shields has been boxing since she was 11 years old. Today she’s the world middleweight champion — earning gold medals in the 2012 and 2016 Olympics — and is the subject of the documentary “T-Rex.”More
Sabaa Tahir speaks about the inspiration behind her young adult debut.More
David Thorpe is a filmmaker who went in search of his voice. For his documentary "Do I Sound Gay?" he investigated why he and many other gay men ended up with a "gay voice"—one with precise enunciation and sibilant "s" sounds.More
Before and since Keith Powell's breakthrough role as Toofer on the sitcom "30 Rock," he has confronted Hollywood's penchant for stereotyping black male voices.More
As media historian Jonathan Sterne tells Craig Eley, signal processing shapes the sound of all vocal media, from your telephone calls to the music of T-Pain.More
Choreogapher Bill T. Jones recommends Lawrence Weschler's biography of Robert Irwin, an artist who spent his career attempting to capture the subjectivity of the act of experiencing the world around us.More
Diplomat and writer Emily Parker say by Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa uses fiction to uniquely depict what it actually looks like living day-to-day under a authoritarian regime.More
Junot Diaz — the Dominican-born, MacArthur genius, Pulitzer Prize-winning author — has written some of some of the most brilliant contemporary fiction about the immigrant experience. He spoke to Steve about his book "This Is How You Lose Her."More
In her new book, "Now I Know Who My Comrades Are," Emily Parker profiles a few online activists, and writes about how they're transforming life in China, Cuba and Russia.More
Orhan Pamuk is Turkey’s most famous writer and a cultural ambassador for Turkey around the world. He talks with Steve Paulson about his novel “Snow,” in which a secular poet is confronted by Islamic fundamentalists in a provincial town.More
Junot Diaz recommends Samuel R. Delany's reverse-chronology novel that captures the tragic story of a closeted poet who struggles to reckon with his desires.More
David Foster Wallace’s masterpiece — "Infinite Jest" — is famously difficult to read. Colleen Leahy and Makini Allwood climbed the literary mountain of a book, and they share their experience on a podcast called "And But So."More
It's summertime and the living is easy — but the reading shouldn't be. "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" producers compile a reading list for those seeking a challenge as their beach read. More