Best-selling writer Elizabeth Gilbert brings an intrepid 19th century woman botanist to life in her latest novel, "The Signature of All Things." In this conversation, she introduces us to the wonder of moss, Darwin's correspondance with "lady scientists" and the 16th century mystic, Jacob Boehme.
How do you make music from plants? Here's a recent article about the artist Mileece.
Saira Shah tells Jim Fleming how her father used stories to give her a sense of her ethnic cultural birthright and how those stories helped her when she worked in Afghanistan.
The protest at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation has caught fire. Its camp is now larger than most small towns in North Dakota. The protest is not just about an oil pipeline from North Dakota to Illinois. It's about water. Journalist John Fleck, who's spent decades writing about water disputes in the West, tells Anne Strainchamps how the Standing Rock protest figures into this history.
Nina Simone's powerful voice and turbulent life are the subjects of an Oscar-nominated documentary, a new biography and a forthcoming Hollywood biopic. But it's her politics that speaks most forcefully to a new generation of African American activists. Biographer Alan Light talks about the incandescent soul singer and Black Power icon.
Sherman Alexie is one of America’s most acclaimed young writers with strong opinions about what it means to be a “real” Indian.
A film from the point-of-view of the perpetrators, not the victims, of the 1965 killing of over 1,000,000 suspected Communists in Indonesia.
Jedediah Berry imagines a future where science can unlock buried thoughts.
Sarah Winchester (born 1840) was the heiress to the Winchester Estate with a 50% holding of the Winchester Repeating Rifle Company. She used her vast fortune to construct a mansion for 38 consecutive years.
Popular legend held that she was cursed by all those who were killed by Winchester rifles. The only way to alleviate her suffering was to continue to add on to her mansion, filling it with strange sealed rooms and staircases and corridors leading nowhere. Pamela Haag tells her tale and gives it some meaning beyond a mere ghost story.
