Tom Lutz tells Jim Fleming that human beings are great crybabies. Lutz is the author of “Crying: The Natural & Cultural History of Tears.”
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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This dusty 4,000 year old clay tablet written in an ancient script called cuneiform turns out to be a recipe for building an Ark.
Thomas Glave is a young, Black, gay writer who’s lived in New York and Jamaica. Glave tells Jim Fleming that he tries to understand and identify with all of his characters.
Scott Turow has made a career writing hugely successful legal thrillers, but then he turned to a World War II novel.
American by birth, Vijay Iyer is trying to create a new kind of music, a synthesis of Western jazz and Indian music.
Simon Critchley is the author of "The Book of Dead Philosophers," a quirky account of how various philosophers thought about death and died themselves.
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.
In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
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