Television is rife with shows about female spies, whether it's Nikita, Covert Affairs, the Americans, or Homeland. It really seems like spy girls are having a moment on TV, but how true to life are these popular depictions? We turned to former CIA operations officer Valerie Plame Wilson to find out.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Essayist Susan Ehrlich is a practicing pediatrian who remembers what it was like treating her father during his final hours.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
In her book, "Do Metaphors Dream of Literal Sleep?: A Science-Fictional Theory of Representation," Seo-Young Chu argues that science fiction is a kind of "high-intensity realism." She spoke with Jim Fleming.
When Samuel Clemens took on the pen name “Mark Twain,” he was doing more cleverly appropriating a measure of depth. He was also tapping into one of the most well-known sounds along the river: sounding calls. Owen Selles tells about these calls in this piece, adapted from an essay he originally wrote for the online magazine Edge Effects.
Youngstown, Ohio is the center of the Rust Belt. During steel's heyday, Youngstown was a city of nearly 200,000. Now, it’s under 70,000. The steel mills closed in the 1980’s, people left, and no one replaced them. Steve Paulson sat down with urban planner Justin Hollander talk about what to do next - what Hollander calls "smart decline."
Tim Friend has written a book about Archaea - a kind of microbe that doesn't fit into any of the traditional categories of life.
Nick Bantock talks about his book, "The Trickster's Hat: A Mischievous Apprenticeship in Creativity."
Pages
