Anne here. My conversation with Turkish writer Elif Şafak back in April still sticks with me as the year comes to a close. In many parts of the world, 2016 was the year of the populist leader—especially in Turkey, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a crackdown on free speech and all forms of opposition. 120 journalists have been jailed, more than 2,000 academics have been dismissed from universities, and more than 100,000 public workers have been fired. How did Turkey—once a model of new democratic nations—become such a different place? Not only did Şafak see this coming, she warned that the West should not consider itself immune.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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The power of big data—why so many corporations and government agencies and political pollsters and baseball teams are after it—is that it can reveal things we might otherwise not see. But statistics alone can't do that. We need to transform those statistics into stories. One artist doing that is Brian Foo, aka the Data Driven DJ. He takes large data sets and turns them into music. His first song, "Two Trains," amplifies a dire but often ignored truth about our country: income inequality.
Debra Dickerson tells Steve Paulson she knows first hand that systemic racism still exists in America.
Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard recommends a chilling read: "The Flame Alphabet" by Ben Marcus.
Filmmaker and hypnotist Albert Nerenberg explains how we can simulate the effects of drugs through hypnosis.
Celia Brooks Brown is an American who lives in the U.K. and is making a reputation as a high-brow vegetarian chef. Her books include “Party Food for Vegetarians.”
New York Times reporter Chris Hedges was a war correspondent for 15 years. He talks about why war is addictive and describes the sort of scenes that left him with post traumatic stress disorder.
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