A lot of pro football players cross-train. They practice the plays and the running, the throws and the tackles. We've even heard stories of pro athletes taking ballet lessons to lighten their footwork. But for NFL MVP Shaun Alexander, training also included chess.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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One of the most horrific episodes in American history occurred on December 29, 1890. The U.S. Cavalry surrounded an encampment of Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and massacred some 300 people. The details of the carnage of the Wounded Knee Massacre are almost unbearable. As Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man who witnessed the massacre, put it, “Something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died." This tragedy is the bleak backdrop for Jonis Agee's new novel, "The Bones of Paradise." Set 10 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, all the characters in her novel - from white cattle ranchers to the Lakota - are wrestling with the ghosts of the massacre. Agee tells Steve Paulson about the origins of her novel.
Tom Wolfe reads the opening to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and explains why it's his favorite.
Tariq Ali about Al-Andalus, the largely forgotten Muslim society on the peninsula that's now Spain and Portugal where Christians, Jews and Muslims once lived together in relative harmony.
In a small town in northern Wales you'll find a playground where it's normal for kids to play with rusty tools or build fires. It's called the Land, and it's an example of an adventure playground — where kids are free to take risks. The Land's manager, Claire Griffiths, gives us an insider's view of an adventure playground.
Senator Russ Feingold is a Democrat from Wisconsin who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote a history of beauty. A few years later, he followed it up with a study of ugliness. Here’s what he found
It’s hard to wrap your head around climate change. How do you really take in the concept of planetary change over decades or even centuries? Visual artist Kambui Olujimi explores different ideas about time in his one-man show “Zulu Time.”
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