Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk is studying the healing power of helping people with post traumatic stress disorder focus less on telling their stories, and more on how their stories feel — how they sound, look, or smell.More
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Interviews By Topic
Juan Thompson was 41 when his father committed suicide. But for him, the grieving process had an extra layer of complication, because his dad was the acclaimed writer and gonzo journalist, Hunter S. Thompson.More
The title of political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg's book says it all, “The Worth of War.” In it, he argues that war has greatly benefited civilization.More
Revenge is a major theme in Elliot Ackerman’s debut novel “Green on Blue.” The novel is told from the point-of-view of an Afghan boy named Aziz who’s seeking to avenge his brother Ali.More
Steve Paulson sat down with Bishop King, founder of the Church of St. John Coltrane, and with Ashley Kahn, author of “A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album” to dig a little deeper.More
It's a rite of passage to find our parents embarrassing, particularly as we start to carve out distinct identities in those early years away from home. For Jeannette Walls, the moment was a bit more extreme. More
Robots that clean the bathroom, cars that drive themselves, computers that diagnose disease. They may sound appealing, but technology writer Nicholas Carr warns that the new age of automation could mean we'll lose basic life skills.More
Androids may seem like a modern idea, but there were life-size androids in the 18th century — beautiful robot women who could look around and even play the harpsichord. Historian Heidi Voskuhl tells this remarkable story.More
Will a computer ever write a great novel? Absolutely, says the pioneering software developer Stephen Wolfram. He believes there's no limit to computer creativity.More
Garth Risk Hallberg's "City on Fire" is a sweeping 900-page story about New York City in the mid-1970s, chronicling everything from the punk music scene to the rise of Wall Street's runaway hedge funds. Hallberg says he's fascinated by the idea of creative destruction.More
Filmmaker Astra Taylor wants to reclaim the democratic potential of personal technology.More
Doug Rushkoff believes personal technology is having an insidious effect on our relationship with time. He calls it “present shock.”More
If you want to know what a state-of-the-art election system looks like, you won't find it in the United States. Pippa Norris runs the Electoral Integrity Project at Harvard and the University of Sidney, which monitors elections in 153 countries. She told Rehman Tungekar that most of our democratic neighbors do a better job.More
Glen Weyl is an economist at Microsoft Research and he’s invented a whole new formula for collective decision making. It’s called quadratic voting — it sets up a marketplace where you can trade your vote, based on what you care about most.More
Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein makes the case for lowering the voting age considerably. Like, to birth.More
Cathy O'Neil, data scientist and author of the blog mathbabe.org, warns that politicians are perilously close to being able to tell voters only what they want to hear.More
Consider that the average American voter doesn't understand basic political facts like who their local representatives are. Should they still be allowed to vote? Philosopher Jason Brennan makes the case for an epistocracy: the rule of the knowledgeable.More
For decades, Todd Robbins has been entertaining audiences with his sideshow act, first at Coney Island and later with several off-Broadway shows. He demonstrated a few tricks of his trade.More