J.R. Thornton was once a serious tennis player on the junior circuit. Then he moved to China and spent a year training with the Beijing National Team, where he discovered just how different the life of an aspiring champion could be. His novel "Beautiful Country" reveals the incredibly difficult demands on young athletes in China.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Several grammy-winning folk musicians have written songs based on the stories in a book called "Wilderness Plots" by Scott Russell Sanders.
You may not know Shepard Fairey but, you probably know his work. In 2008 he created the now-iconic Obama HOPE poster.
Steven Pinker tells Steve Paulson that parents don’t really have much to do with shaping their children’s personalities.
Sarah Lewis talks about her book, "The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery."
For our 2008 hour on plagiarism and intellectual propriety, we remixed our interview on sampling and remixes with DJ Spooky.
Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad just won the 2016 National Book Award.
Steve Paulson spoke with him about this powerful, sweeping epic.
There's a short story about a guy who's so afraid of other people reading his mind that he wears a tin foil hat to protect his thoughts. The tin foil part is crazy, but protecting your mind is maybe not such a bad idea. Academic psychologist Rob Brotherton says there are certain psychological traits that predispose people to believe in conspiracy theories. For example, there's an experiment done by a group of psychologists in Amsterdam. It involves a group of subjects and a messy desk.
FIND OUT HOW LIKELY YOU ARE TO BELIEVE IN CONSPIRACY THEORIES BY TAKING ROB'S QUIZ.
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