Kathleen Morris talks about her experience with the mental habit monastics used to describe a kind of frantic escapism and aversion to other people. It's similar, but not identical, to the modern disease of depression.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Do you think the French ban on smoking in all public places is an encroachment on personal liberty that threatens French culture? Richard Klein sure thinks so.
Joshua Ferris talks about his novel, "To Rise Again at a Decent Hour," which made the longlist for The Man Booker Prize.
In 1975, Dr. Raymond Moody coined the term "near death experience" and published the first definitive account of patients who described dying and coming back to life. He tells Steve Paulson what he's come to believe after listening to thousands of reports.
John Vaillant's book, "The Tiger", is about a rare Amur tiger who starts killing people in a remote corner of Siberia where there is a huge trade in tiger poaching because of demand in nearby China.
Here's our extended conversation with Kim Stanley Robinson on science fiction and imagining the future.
Anthropoligst Anne Allison talks about our love affair with Japanese pop culture.
You know that the first settlers called Manhattan "New Amsterdam"? But the Dutch didn't just bring their sailing prowess and placenames with them. Russell Shorto thinks that liberal Dutch ideas about politics and society came too, and shaped the New World.
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