The 1980s were a golden age for witches. Women everywhere started covens. Among them, the girls field hockey team at Danvers High School in Massachusetts. At least, that’s how Quan Barry imagines it in her recent novel, “We Ride Upon Sticks.”More
The 1980s were a golden age for witches. Women everywhere started covens. Among them, the girls field hockey team at Danvers High School in Massachusetts. At least, that’s how Quan Barry imagines it in her recent novel, “We Ride Upon Sticks.”More
In 17th century Germany, the mother of famed astronomer Johannes Kepler, Katharina Kepler, was accused of being a witch. Centuries later, author Rivka Galchen has taken her story and spun it into fiction in her book "Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch."More
Annabel Abbs-Streets found a way to creatively and spiritually embrace her sleepless hours. She writes about what she discovered in a book called “Sleepless: Unleashing the Subversive Power of the Night Self.”More
Psychologist Kelly Bulkeley has been researching our night thoughts for many years, and keeps a dream journal himself. He talked with Steve Paulson about the spiritual wonder of dreams.More
Dreams are funny, confusing and surprising in the world of cartoonist Roz Chast. And they are occasionally disturbing and maybe necessary to process both our everyday and most bizarre thoughts, she tells Shannon Henry Kleiber.More
Psychologist Rubin Naiman says we’re not only sleep deprived, we are — perhaps more importantly — dream deprived. He tells us why we should get back to our dream states and stop living in such a wake-centric world.More
Four hundred years ago, London was full of magicians, but they weren’t like the wizards of Harry Potter. These were practitioners of “service magic.” Historian Tabitha Stanmore uncovers this surprising story in her book “Cunning Folk.” More
Deborah Harkness is the author of the bestselling novel “A Discovery of Witches” and also a professor of European history, so she knows all about the lore of witches and vampires. She tells Anne Strainchamps about the real history of magical belief.More
Polls suggest that most Icelanders believe in elves and magical creatures. And that fascinates writer Nancy Marie Brown, who’s been to Iceland dozens of times. So she did her own investigation of elf stories and the nature of belief.More
When you look online, you might think the most important pursuit in life is self-creation — optimizing, curating, branding yourself. Social critic Tara Isabella Burton says our current obsession with personal identity has deeply religious roots, which then got co-opted by advertisers and the self-help movement.More
Social critic Alissa Quart says the American ideal of the self-made, rugged individual is built on a lie. In her book "Bootstrapped," she argues that even the people who preached the gospel of self-reliance, like Laura Ingalls Wilder and Henry David Thoreau, didn’t live up to it themselves. More
When producer Angelo Bautista was growing up, he dreamed of being in the internet. Not on the internet, but inside of it. Now, he's torn about social media. He's still addicted to scrolling, but posting about his own life — that's another story. But if nobody sees you on the internet, do you exist? More
Kaia Sand is a journalist whose day job is executive director of the community newspaper Street Roots in Portland, Oregon. She’s also a poet and she uses both lenses – journalism and poetry – to write about the people she knows and things she sees firsthand in her city. More
We asked Arab-American poet Philip Metres to write an original poem in the style he’s known for — documentary poetry — a genre that blends techniques from journalism and poetry to offer a fresh way of hearing today’s news.More
As a documentary poet, Camille Dungy writes not just about headline-making news, but about news on a more intimate scale — about motherhood, marriage, and her garden. It’s an approach she says was very much inspired by the "godmother" of documentary poetry, Muriel Rukeyeser. More
Uzbekistani electronic musician Andrew Pekler is fascinated by "phantom islands" — islands that 15th and 16th century explorers made up to please wealthy patrons of their expeditions. So, he built an digital map of them, and added a soundtrack.More
Nathaniel Mary Quinn was abandoned as a child. Today, he’s a celebrated painter, exhibiting around the world. He tells Charles his remarkable story about talent and perseverance in the face of enormous odds.More
Alma Mahler inspired symphonies, poems and paintings. She was lover and muse to some of the most celebrated artists of the early 20th century. Novelist Mary Sharratt thinks she would have been a great artist in her own right – if she hadn’t been born a woman. More