Arts and Culture

George Saunders

2017 Man Booker Prize Winner George Saunders talks about his creative process, his fledgling Buddhist practice, and the enduring fascination with Lincoln and the Civil War.More

La Jolla Tide Pools

Editor and publisher Ann VanderMeer is the co-editor of the sprawling anthologies “The Big Book of Science Fiction” and “The New Weird...More

Fargo season 3

Showrunner Noah Hawley's approach for adapting the series captures the classic film's essence.More

magic in the internet

Despite pining for landline telephones, writer Virginia Heffernan sees magic in the potential of the internet.More

digital and analog, together

Many of us are living two lives – old-school analog and cutting-edge digital. Author David Sax says that’s okay. More

headphones

Writer and producer Damon Krukowski explains why we must take care in eschewing analog imperfection in pursuit of more perfect digital sound.More

recording at the rock show

MP3 formatting compresses audio so that the file becomes 75 to 95 percent smaller. What's goes missing in the process? Conceptual artist Kenneth Goldsmith explains. More

refugees

Quan Barry is an award-winning poet and novelist who founded the website ASPHODEL.INFO, which is dedicated to publishing a new poem each week in response to current events.More

Magazines on coffee table

When you hear "poet", what kind of person comes to mind?  Emily Dickinson in her white dress? Robert Frost in the snowy woods, with...More

Chicago skyline

A hundred years ago, the poet Carl Sandburg turned Chicago into an American icon. He called it "The city of broad shoulders" a gritty...More

Glitched woman

Siri Hustvedt on developing voices on new platforms, all while coping with old-fashioned sexism. More

Roxane on Twitter

Writer Roxane Gay talks about tackling her trolls and “writing to the point of uncomfortability.”More

Books

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

Computer code

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

Gabriel Barletta

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

Asumaya

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

Goldsmith's Instagram experiment

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

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Around 2 million years ago, it’s believed our hominin ancestors settled down and adopted a more communal style of living centered around...More

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