Simon Winchester talks with Jim Fleming about the short-sightedness of placing cities where the planet doesn't think they should be.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
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.
Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.
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.
Filmmaker Werner Herzog is obsessive about many things, including walking. Listen to find out why Werner walks.
Many recent conversations about the Wisconsin Idea have focused on the politics and controversies around it, but all the negative attention ignores the fact that at its core, it's an aspirational vision commited to truth and public education. Wisconsin poet laureate Kimberly Blaeser joined Anne Strainchamps to talk about the beauty behind the Wisconsin Idea, and how it reflects the natural world.
Steven Johnson talks with Steve Paulson about new research in neuroscience that helps us understand human personality and how the brain shapes it.
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