Writer Roxane Gay talks about tackling her trolls and “writing to the point of uncomfortability.”More
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Interviews By Topic
In 2015, Mingyur Rinpoche completed a four and a half year wandering retreat, an experience that nearly killed him. He told Steve Paulson about the incredible journey, and the meditative insights he learned along the way.More
Psychologist Clark McCauley has studied terrorist groups and lone actor extremists for years. He says in many cases, it's not ideology that inspires terrorists — it's social bonds.More
Can psychedelics help you find God? Clinical psychologist Bill Richards thinks so. More
Psychedelic drugs show remarkable promise for treating addiction and end-of-life anxiety.More
Katherine MacLean describes her work as a skilled guide to a psychedelic trip. More
Desperate for help with his PTSD, Dan Kasza took a strange brew of frog venom and ayahuasca.More
How taking microdoses of LSD for a month helped her find a calm she hadn’t known for years.More
Doug Eck directs Google’s new “Magenta” project, an experiment in teaching machines to make art, leveraging advances in machine learning like neural networks to enable computers to do things like compose music.More
As an acquisitions editor for Penguin Books, Jodie Archer saw many novelists struggling to write books that would sell. Then she went to grad school at Stanford, where she and her advisor created an algorithm to help.More
When a computer program fixes a writer’s novel, or improvises a few bars of music, is that real creativity? Are they not just doing what they were programmed to do? Blaise Agüera y Arcas would wholeheartedly disagree.More
We're asking listeners to show us what brings love into their lives. Share yours on Instagram by tagging it #TTBOOK.More
Our musical guest for this hour, Asumaya, talks about how one person can play the music of a full band. Alongside some performances, he...More
Comedian Esteban Touma reflects on love and marriage, and reveals how squirrels explain the mysteries of evolution.More
We don't always consider the small changes in our influences, thinking and communication that occur directly as a result of those wasted seconds bouncing between emails, Facebook posts and Reddit threads, but conceptual artist and professor Kenneth Goldsmith argues there's opportunity in those precious clicks and darts from page to page.More
Around 2 million years ago, it’s believed our hominin ancestors settled down and adopted a more communal style of living centered around...More
Author Laurie Halse Anderson discusses slavery, the Revolutionary War and the long history of discrepancy between America’s democratic ideals and its practices.More