Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Guy Consolmagno is an American planetary researcher and a Jesuit priest. He's the curator of one of the world's great collections of meteorites, at the Vatican Observatory. He gets a lot of questions about how he can be both a priest and a scientist. Luckily, he has a sense of humor about it -- witness a recent appearance on the Colbert Report -- and believes science and religion can work together.
The kind of people who live in places like Jackson, Kentucky often get characterized as poor, white and angry. And worse, as redneck and racist – hillbilly white trash. J.D. Vance knows them well. They’re his people. He grew up in Kentucky coal country and the Ohio rust belt - places he left behind when he went to Yale Law School. Today he practices in Silicon Valley, but he’s just written a book called “Hillbilly Elegy," which should be required reading for this election year. Welcome to Jackson, Kentucky.
Historian and author Graham Robb tells Steve Paulson that there was a great deal of tolerance for homosexuals in the 19th century, as long as they were discreet.
Political scientist and linguist George Lakoff thinks that Conservatives have devoted a lot of thought, care and money to developing a rhetoric that advances their social agenda.
In the early 20th century, as visual artists started experimenting with abstraction and surrealism, musicians were experimenting too. But why, nearly 100 years later, are the works of Modern visual artists more popular than Avant Garde music?
Gerald Clarke tells Steve Paulson that Judy’s mother introduced her to drugs; that she was exploited by the studio system; and that she had an amazing ability to pull herself together.
What's it like to grow up with a mom who's a Freudian therapist? Commentator Erin Clune has a few personal observations.
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