American by birth, Vijay Iyer is trying to create a new kind of music, a synthesis of Western jazz and Indian music.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Historian William Dalrymple tells Steve Paulson that the British weren't the masters of India when they first arrived. The Mughals were.
Americans are still fighting over the legacy of the Vietnam War, but one perspective is missing: the Vietnamese experience. Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen provides a Vietnamese perspective.
One of the many utopian groups that started during the late 19th century and early 20th century was the House of David—perhaps the first cult to become a pop culture sensation. Their compound in Benton Harbon, Michigan had an amusement park and a zoo; they had a baseball team that once played an exhibition game against Babe Ruth and the Yankees, and they had bands—highly regarded, touring bands. Here's Henry Sapoznik—the director of the Mayrent Institute for Yiddish Culture here at the University of Wisconsin—on the mythology and music of the House of David.
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette spent a year confronting her math phobia straight on. She taught herself calculus. It helped her win at Vegas, get a good mortgage, and might just save her from a zombie apocalypse.
Here is our Executive Producer Steve Paulson's list of books that have blown his mind recently, with hopes that some of them will expand yours in 2015, if they haven't already.
Composer Freddy Knop creates a soundscape to help illustrate Nathan Englander's experience of the muse descending.
Susan Friedman maintains an e-mail correspondence with a colleague in Iraq whose messages describe the hardships and terror of life in Iraq...
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