Walter Kirn bookmarks "The Dog of the South" by Charles Portis.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
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.
Azhar Usman is a comedian who's appearing on the "Allah Made Me Funny! Official Muslim Comedy Tour."
E. Fuller Torrey is a research psychiatrist who believes there has been a five fold increase in the incidence of insanity in the last 250 years, and that some infectious agent is to blame.
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.
Christopher Moore talks with Steve Paulson about the world’s most untranslatable words.
Francesco Sbano tells Steve Paulson about the culture of Calabria in Southern Italy and the importance of respect and honor.
Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard recommends a chilling read: "The Flame Alphabet" by Ben Marcus.
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