As the daughter of a child psychologist, writer Jessica Lamb-Shapiro grew weary of the simple solutions offered by popular self-help books. So maybe it was only natural that she wanted to understand why people liked them so much. To find out, she read hundreds of books and articles, journeyed to conferences headed by self-improvement icons, and even conquered her fear of flying along the way.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Historian Simon Schama tells Steve Paulson that Rembrandt thought art should tell the truth and that he was an enormously innovative painter.
Restaurants serve food and feelings in this story by Nathan Witkin.
Legendary showman P.T. Barnum once owned a slave named Joice Heth. Barnum claimed she was 161 years old and a former nanny to George Washington. Benjamin Reiss tells the story in his book "The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America."
Historian Tariq Ali tells Steve Paulson that the current Indian government is dominated by Hindu fundamentalists.
Steven Johnson tells Anne Strainchamps how television storytelling has become more sophisticated with mutiple plots lines extending over several episodes.
"I had never known that beauty and death could go together." Joanna Ebenstein runs Brooklyn's Museum of Morbid Anatomy, which celebrates the memento mori that were part of daily life in the past. From art sculpted out of a dead person's hair, to death masks molded from a corpse's face, she give us a tour.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
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