Latest Stories

Estee Lauder
Articles

What do Steve Jobs, Estee Lauder and Ted Williams have in common? They were driven by individual compulsions.

Length: 
13:13
Brother Ali
Audio

You can find powerful critiques of capitalism and inequality on political platforms — and also on music stages. Take Brother Ali: he’s a Midwestern, Muslim rapper and one of the most popular socially-conscious hip hop artists out there.

Length: 
12:35
Kshama Sawant, councilwoman in Seattle
Articles

Seattle councilwoman Kshama Sawant is the first socialist to win an election there in almost a century. Her platform included fighting for — and winning — a $15 minimum wage, and a tax on the wealthy.

Length: 
7:06
Demonstrators march for "Medicare for All" and other socialist-leaning policy goals.
Audio

University of Wisconsin sociologist Erik Olin Wright was one of the world's leading Marxist theorists. He died in early 2019. In 2018, he stopped by our studio to talk socialism with Steve Paulson.

Length: 
11:11
Norwegian memorial
Articles

In 2011, nearly 70 teenagers were shot and killed in Norway. The gunman was a white supremacist named Anders Breivik. Journalist Asne Seierstad spent years trying to figure out how someone could do something so evil. 

Length: 
10:59
Bullhorn
Audio

Cleve Jones was a young activist and Harvey Milk’s protege, the man who would later create the AIDS Memorial Quilt.  What he remembers about that time is how the gay community channeled anger and grief into a night he’ll never forget.

Length: 
8:25
Trapped in our bulb
Dangerous Ideas

Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann's Dangerous Idea? To be better adjusted, change the way you think about thinking.

Length: 
02:44
Mubin Shaikh
Articles

Self-described former jihadist Mubin Shaikh believes many terrorists are drawn to political violence for very rational reasons. He recounts his journey into, and out of, extremism.

Length: 
11:11
Germany
Articles

The refugee crisis is front and center in Germany. So when German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck met a group of African refugees camping out in Berlin, she started asking questions about the lives they were forced to leave behind.

Length: 
10:59
mosque
Articles

For his book “The Sultan and the Queen,” Jerry Brotton has uncovered a history that goes against everything we’ve been told about the relationship between Islam and the West.

Length: 
11:13
Greek columns
Articles

We sat down with conservative intellectual Victor Davis Hanson, classics scholar Donna Zuckerberg, and French-Tunisian political scientist Nadia Marzouki to talk about President Trump’s speech, and try to unpack the question at the center of his message: Is the survival of the West the fundamental question of our time?

Length: 
13:07
Artificial Creativity
Articles

Machines are getting smarter. They have been for a long time. But is there anything uniquely human that they will never be able to do, like make art?

Screengrab from "Computer Says Show" used with permission.
Audio

Could a computer write the next West Side Story or Hamilton? That’s what composers Benjamin Till and Nathan Taylor tried to figure out—the result is a musical called “Beyond the Fence."

Length: 
12:21
Man gets lost
Sonic Sidebar

Rebecca Solnit prepares the smartphone era for a time when we no longer know how to not know where we are.

The mountain beckons
Articles

For years, David Roberts climbed some of Alaska’s biggest mountains, and made a number of first ascents. His new book is an examination of why some climbers feel compelled to push the edge of what’s possible.

poker
Video

In 2004, Anne Duke was in the final of the World Series of Poker. She won, but that's not the entire story. It's how she won that became legendary. 

Ken Windsor (CC BY 3.0)
Articles

Critic Ted Gioia says a new generation of young musicians have discovered an antidote to stale, formulaic pop music in the energy and ecstasy of jazz.

Length: 
13:24
Articles

Let’s remember that it wasn’t that long ago that liberals and conservatives were often friends. Jeanne Safer and Richard Brookhiser met during the good old days of American politics. She’s a lifelong liberal; he’s a senior editor for the conservative National Review. They’ve been happily married for more than 35 years.

Length: 
5:32
Ken Stern
Articles

Ken Stern has lived and worked in a liberal bubble for most of his life, including his ten years as the CEO of NPR. Then, Ken decided to get out of his liberal bubble into Red America, where he found that he agreed with a lot of what he heard.

Length: 
12:05
Awash in a sea of Trumpian conservativism
Articles

Charlie Sykes spent more than two decades hosting a popular conservative talk-radio show, railing against Obama and pushing Paul Ryan and Scott Walker onto the national stage. Today, he’s a Trump critic who's disillusioned with the Republican Party.

Length: 
15:10
Odysseus und Penelope
Audio

Classicist Emily Wilson is the first woman ever to publish an English translation of Homer’s epic. "In some ways, it should be a story that's less about me than about why it has taken the English speaking world so long before there's been a complete published translation of "The Odyssey" by a woman."

Length: 
10:18
Circe
Audio

In Homer's "The Odyssey," Circe was a Greek goddess who turned Odysseus’ men into pigs. Today, Circe finally gets to tell her side of the story, thanks to novelist Madeline Miller.

Length: 
11:28
Anthony Bourdain
Articles

The chef, storyteller and world-traveler has died at age 61. We revisit Steve Paulson's interview with him in 2004.

office
Audio

Do you dread going to work because your office is filled with people who are rude and treat you badly? Christine Porath is trying to do something about it with her book, “Mastering Civility: A Manifesto for the Workplace.”

Under the dome
Articles

Imagine eight scientists, four men and four women, volunteer for a grand experiment focusing on the future of humanity: living for two years inside of a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. That’s the premise behind acclaimed novelist T.C. Boyle’s new book, "The Terranauts." 

Coney Island
Audio

Writer Leslie Parry describes what Coney Island would have sounded like during its heyday 100 years ago.

Length: 
1:40
Philip Roth, on his fiction and memory
Articles

In his final years, the novelist came to terms with how his own story might influence the future interpretation of his fiction.

plant
Audio

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.

Length: 
12:47
Tom Wolfe
Articles

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.

an aging world structure
Audio

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.

Length: 
13:22

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