What does it mean to be free? And what does it mean to live a personally authentic, honest life with ourselves and with others? These are the questions that Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their existential friends wrestled with in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Sarah Bakewell makes the case that their late-night conversations are especially relevant today. She's the author of "At the Existentialist Cafe: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Dave Soldier is a neurologist with an unusual hobby. He teaches elephants to play musical instruments.
Nalini Nadkarni has been called “the queen of canopy research,” in part because of her personal philosophy to bring together two groups - the trees and the general public. She does this by collaborating with dancers, rappers, artists, and prisoners, just to name only a few. She created the Big Canopy Database to help researchers around the world to store the rich trove of data she and others are uncovering.
Charles Matthewes tells Steve Paulson that while some acts deserve to be condemned, we should be careful not to exclude the perpetrators from the human race.
Chris Wren was a bureau chief for the New York Times in Cairo, Moscow, Beijing, Ottawa and Johannesburg. The family cat, Henrietta, accompanied his family to may of those postings.
For as closely linked as the voice is to our body and sense of identity, there are also a lot of external forces affecting our voices, both social and technological. In fact, when we're talking about mediated voices—voices we hear in music, film, and of course, on the radio—we're actually not talking about "voices" any more. We're talking about signal processing. And, as media historian Jonathan Sterne tells Craig Eley, signal processing shapes the sound of all vocal media, from your telephone calls to the music of T-Pain.
Claude Coleman was the drummer for cult rock group WEEN when he was involved in a car crash that left him with multiple broken bones, paralyzed on his left side, and brain- damaged.
Corby Kummer is the food writer for The Atlantic Monthly. He talks with Anne Strainchamps about Flur de Sel, a gourmet sea salt imported from France.
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