Poet Molly Peacock's biography of the 18th century paper artist, Mary Delaney.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Jean Edward Smith is the author of "FDR," and tells Jim Fleming about Franklin Roosevelt's Supreme Court-packing scandal of 1937.
John McWhorter teaches linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of “Doing Our Own Thing: The Degradation of Language and Music and Why We Should, Like, Care.”
Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom offers a cautionary take on artificial intelligence in his new book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. In it, he imagines what could happen if computers were to ever become smarter than humans. He tells Steve Paulson that it could have catastrophic effects, unless we start thinking about it now.
The evidence is mounting... "we" are mostly who we think we are. Our identities are mental constructs, cobbled together from memory and stories. Jonathan Adler gives us a crash course in narrative identity and mental health.
Ed Boyden, a researcher at MIT, is at the forefront of a new science that aims to map and even heal the brain with light. It’s called optogenetics, and the journal Science has called it one of the great insights of the 21st century. It’s in its early days, but the goal is to one day be able to take a disease like depression, PTSD, or epilepsy and, using bursts of light, just turn it off -- the same way you’d fix a software glitch in a computer.
Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor nearly died from a massive stroke at the age of 37. The experience taught her life lessons on how the mind perceives the world.
Novelist Jane Hamilton reads her favorite novel endings.
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