Frank Wilczek is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist at MIT. He's kind of obsessed, in his own way, with understanding the universe. Specifically, he’s interested in what he calls “the beautiful question." Is the universe naturally, inherently beautiful?More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
What if the geometric structure of the universe has been hidden, for centuries, in crochet? Margaret Wertheim can help you get there with a ball of wool, a crochet hook, and some non-Euclidean geometry.More
Teachers Curtis Acosta and Jose Gonzalez explain the origins of Tucson's Mexican-American Studies program—and how their personal histories in school led them to teach these courses.More
Humanities programs are under siege. Their budgets are getting slashed as critics say schools should focus on job skills. But essayist Mark Slouka believes this is a tragic mistake.More
Daniel Mendelsohn was surprised—and unnerved—when his 81-year father enrolled in his seminar on "The Odyssey." And then delighted to see how his dad’s cranky comments excited his students. The experience also brought Daniel closer to his dad.More
A listener reminds us that it wasn't just teenage boys listening to Pink Floyd in 1973. More
Jonathan Lethem considers Philip K. Dick one of his literary heroes. Lethem talks about how Dick was able to combine his brilliant imagination with his original mainstream ambitions to produce the groundbreaking literary science fiction that he's known for.More
If you think you haven't seen any movies based on Philip K. Dick's work, you're probably wrong. David Gill talks about Hollywood's adaptations of Dick's work.More
During the last two years of his life, Philip K. Dick tried to make sense of a series of strange visionary experiences. Jonathan Lethem explains how these events changed Dick's life.More
Anne R. Dick shares her memories ofher marriage to Philip K. Dick.More
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
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