Zia Hassan had a life-changing conversation with a 9-year old boy in a Washington backyard. A conversation that 2.5 million people around the world have watched on YouTube. Zia tells us about the boy he calls "The Philosopher."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Computer paswords are on on our minds this week. "The New York Times" reporter Ian Urbina talks about his feature story, "The Secret Life of Passwords."
Literary critic William Gass talks with Steve Paulson about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and explicates a poem of Rilke’s about a bowl of roses.
Tom Wolfe talks with Steve Paulson, and explains why he's so fascinated by the connection between sex and social status.
The "connectome" is one of the most audacious science projects ever conceived: a detailed map of the human brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. In this EXTENDED interview, MIT computational neuroscientist Sebastian Seung explains what we can learn.
Solar engineer Martha Lenio was the first woman to command a mission on the HI-SEAS — the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's a project co-sponsored by NASA and the Univeristy of Hawaii that simulates what it would be like to live on Mars for eight months. To survive in such extremes, they were sequestered into a 1,000 square foot dome, and when they went outside they had to wear space suits. When Lenio got there, she said it didn't feel much like Mars, but she changed her mind after 8 months without the sun and wind on her skin. She spoke with Anne Strainchamps about missing her family — and missing YouTube cat videos.
Steven Johnson tells Anne Strainchamps how television storytelling has become more sophisticated with mutiple plots lines extending over several episodes.
"I had never known that beauty and death could go together." Joanna Ebenstein runs Brooklyn's Museum of Morbid Anatomy, which celebrates the memento mori that were part of daily life in the past. From art sculpted out of a dead person's hair, to death masks molded from a corpse's face, she give us a tour.
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