Geoff Dyer talks about his book, "Zona: A Book About A Film About a Journey to a Room."More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
David Foster Wallace wrote memorably about AA in his famous novel "Infinite Jest." Writer Marshall Boswell reads one of his favorite passages.More
Kurt Vonnegut joined his brother, Bernard, at General Electric in the late 1940s. Ginger Strand explains how Kurt's time at G.E. influenced his fiction.More
Canadian cultural critic Hal Niedzviecki makes the case that as a culture, we may for the first time in history be more focused on what is going to happen in the future than on what is happening right now.More
There's no shortage of forecasts about the future these days. But did you know that ordinary people can out-predict the pros? More
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
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