Historian Sean Wilentz tells Jim Fleming the birth of Dylan’s music is deeply bound up in the politics of the time.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
One hundred years ago, Fritz Haber invented the first chemical weapon and convinced the German army to use it. His wife Clara, also a chemist, fiercely opposed her husband's project. When she couldn't stop it, she committed suicide. Judith Claire Mitchell tells the story in her tragic and yet funny novel "A Reunion of Ghosts."
The Oxford English Dictionary was created in 1857, and was expected to be finished within ten years. The first edition was finally completed 71 years later.
Howard Axelrod was accidentally blinded in one eye in a freak accident when he was in college. Disoriented and depressed, he retreated to an off-the-grid cabin in the Vermont wilderness. He stayed there, alone, for 2 years. Now he's published a memoir about his period of renunciation, "The Point of Vanishing."
Harvard University historian John Stauffer talks with Steve Paulson about whether or not Lincoln was a racist.
Steven Connor says there's much more to ventriloquism than exchanging quips with a wooden dummy. He tells Anne Strainchamps that a lot of this history has to do with the disembodied voice.
How come many of the latest pop songs sound as if they could have been released decades ago? Music journalist Simon Reynolds tells Steve Paulson that our obsession with our immediate past could get in the way of future creativity.
Todd Robbins, “The Coney Island Wonder Worker,” talks with Anne Strainchamps about how he learned how to safely swallow swords and walk on hot coals.
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