Russell Simmons has been called the godfather of hip hop. He tells Steve Paulson he got his start selling street drugs as a teenager.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Larry Brilliant is a doctor, co-founder of the digital social network the Well, and he was the first executive director of Google.org. But back in the Sixties, he was a hippie doctor who joined Wavy Gravy's traveling bus caravan and then landed in an Indian ashram in the Himalayas, where his guru told him his destiny was to help cure smallpox. Miraculously, his U.N. team of doctors eradicated the world's remaining cases of this terrible disease. He tells Steve Paulson about a remarkable moment in history when anything seemed possible.
The Interrupters tells the moving and surprising stories of three "violence interrupters" who try to protect their Chicago communities from the violence they once doled out. They believe that violence spreads like an infectious diseases, so the treatment should be similar: stop the infection at its source.
Anne Strainchamps talks with two teenagers who were finalists in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.
Are there – should there be – limits to the kind of sins that can be redeemed? What about mass murder?
You've heard the saying, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Journalist David Rieff thinks that's rubbish, and he says if you want peace, it's sometimes better to forget historical crimes than try to get justice.
A forest is an amazing repository of both knowledge and wisdom. Ecologist Suzanne Simard takes Anne Strainchamps on a walking tour of a forest to point out the remarkable web of life both above and below the ground.
Summer festivals are a huge part of the American music scene -- and of the music marketplace. Why do millions of people risk sunburn and dehydration when they could hear the same music better with earbuds? Music critic Maura Johnston unpacks the economics and the atavistic lure of the summer music festival.
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