The central question of Philip K. Dick's fiction is "What is reality?" Literary critic Umberto Rossi explains that Dick's work often contains many possible realities.More
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Interviews By Topic
NPR music critic Ann Powers reflects on how Americans have used music to talk around their awkward feelings related to sex and race.More
New York Times film critic A.O. Scott recommends the collected writings of film critic Otis Ferguson, a pioneer of the language of film criticism and advocate for all the types of labor that go into filmmaking.More
Every generation has critics who truly capture the cultural moment they’re living in. Today's may be Mark Greif, who has written memorably about the tyranny of food snobbery, the rise and fall of the hipster, and his own inability to love hip hop.More
When you talk about people's personalities, he says, there's not many things more interesting than what they really want and can't get.More
Author Steve Almond wrestles with the ugly undertones of America's favorite sport.More
In 2011, Mac McClelland was reporting on reconstruction in Haiti when she witnessed another woman's traumatic flashback. Just seeing the horror in that woman's face was enough to traumatize Mac.More
Journalist Jim Rendon tells producer Rehman Tungekar that resilence in the face of trauma is actually quite common.More
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
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