When and how did American get so polarized? For answers, Jonathan Chait recommends reading "What Hath God Wrought," a history of American politics from 1815-1848 by the Pulitzer prize-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe.More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
Sabrina Frey has metastatic ocular cancer, but she's already lived longer than her doctors expected. What can we learn from how she looks at life? For one, she lives in the moment.More
Tom Wolfe had a shocking lack of hubris when it came to his journalism. He said what he did as a reporter took no special skills, requiring only the willingness to leave the building and take notes. He also found that to be the best way to craft naturalistic fiction, which he only began writing at 54. He was 88 when he died Monday.More
The future feels unpredictable in so many places today. If you look around the world right now, seems like everyone wants their own independent nation. Are the old nation-states...toast? That’s what John Feffer worries about.More
Catalans have a different language, flag and anthem from Spain. Some in the region are fighting for independence. Catalonia is a nation divided in cultural identity, but should it separate from Spain?More
We told Milwaukee DJ Tarik Moody we were doing a whole show about water. He created the perfect playlist to complement our interviews. He shares a few secrets on how to find a track by mood, reference, or feel.More
Wisconsin’s former Poet Laureate Kim Blaeser leaves us with a benediction, calling out the sacred dimension of water.More
The spiritual component of water is hard to ignore. That's part of why Venice Williams refers to Alice's Garden as her parish.More
Beer has gone back from macro to micro. Russ Klisch (Lakefront Brewery) and David Dupee (Good City Brewing) talk with Charles Monroe-Kane about how returning to smaller scale has opened up new creative and business possibilities for beer makers.More
Journalist Dan Egan and political economist Jenny Kehl talk Steve Paulson through the finer points of the politics of water - from debates over water diversion to the struggle to keep the Great Lakes uncontaminated.More
Acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead got the magazine assignment of a lifetime: a week in Vegas, playing in the World Series of Poker. He tells Doug Gordon about high stakes poker and his own "anhedonia," his difficulty experiencing pleasure.More
Is it time to reassess the revolutionary ideas of Karl Marx? May 5th marks the 200th birthday of the thinker, and to mark the bicentennial, we dug into our archives to feature my 2014 interview with Terry Eagleton, who says we never really understood Marx.More
What if Karl Marx were alive today and came back for a visit? That's the premise of the one-man show "Marx in Soho," starring Brian Jones and written by the late historian Howard Zinn.More
For all that's been written about Karl Marx, there's been no book about his marriage to Jenny Marx - until now. Biographer Mary Gabriel explains why Marx's family life had a profound influence on his thinking.More
Benjamin Kunkel is not only a bestselling novelist and co-founder of the literary magazine n+1. He tells Steve Paulson why he's also a become Marxist public intellectual. More
We have hands that can do things like knit, draw, throw pots, and build houses. In fact, there’s a philosopher, Colin McGinn, who thinks hands are what made us human.More
A few years ago, Tyler Knott Gregson challenged himself to write a poem a day on a vintage typewriter. Today, he's a daily Instagram poet.More
Betsan Corkhill founded Britain's therapeutic knitting movement — the clinical application of knitting to treat a variety of mental and physical ailments. More