When Samuel Clemens took on the pen name “Mark Twain,” he was doing more cleverly appropriating a measure of depth. He was also tapping into one of the most well-known sounds along the river: sounding calls. Owen Selles tells about these calls in this piece, adapted from an essay he originally wrote for the online magazine Edge Effects.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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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.
Susan Krieger not completely blind, but her vision is bad enough to make her legally blind. She recently got a guide dog, Teela, who is now her constant companion.
Sophy Burnham tells one of the stories from her "Book of Angels." This one's about two "businessmen" who appear just in time to stop a runaway wheelchair.
Nick Bantock talks about his book, "The Trickster's Hat: A Mischievous Apprenticeship in Creativity."
Ross Terrill talks with Steve Paulson about the internal politics of China and says the Communist Party is becoming irrelevant to Chinese life.
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.
There's a great urbanization afoot in China. The government plans to move more than 100 million people into cities by 2020. But there's an old divide between rural and urban citizens. What happens when they become neighbors?
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