Persi Diaconis is a former stage magician who uses card shuffling and coin tossing to illustrate complex mathematical formulae.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
In 1975, Dr. Raymond Moody coined the term "near death experience" and published the first definitive account of patients who described dying and coming back to life. He tells Steve Paulson what he's come to believe after listening to thousands of reports.
You know that the first settlers called Manhattan "New Amsterdam"? But the Dutch didn't just bring their sailing prowess and placenames with them. Russell Shorto thinks that liberal Dutch ideas about politics and society came too, and shaped the New World.
Laney Salisbury talks about the 1925 dogsled relay that brought diphtheria anti-serum to ice-bound Nome, Alaska which was facing an epidemic in the dead of winter. Dogsleds were the only way in and the whole nation followed their perilous journey by telegraph.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are the celebrated husband and wife team who've translated many of the great Russian writers. They've just come out with a new version of Tolstoy's "War and Peace."
Martin Norden tells Anne Strainchamps that the disabled have been in films from the beginning, but only as stereotypes: bad disabled people get killed off, while good disabled people get cured.
Robert Glasper's new album Black Radio is a reference to the black box of recordings that survives a plane crash.
NBA superstar LeBron James is coming home to Cleveland. So what does it mean for his fans in this blighted rust belt area? Charles Monroe-Kane talks with his fellow Northeast Ohio comrade, journalist David Giffels.
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