"Autism: The Musical." It's about a group of autistic children who decide to put on their own show.
"Autism: The Musical." It's about a group of autistic children who decide to put on their own show.
People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
Paul Koudounaris has spent the past decade traveling around the world, climbing into church crypts and bone chambers and taking photos at over 250 burial sites in 30 countries. He's discovered chapels decorared with skeletons and underground caves filled with skulls—among other things. In this interview, he tells us how he began his obsession with displays of death.
Simon Winchester talks with Jim Fleming about the short-sightedness of placing cities where the planet doesn't think they should be.
Ted Chiang talks about his short-story collection, "Stories of Your Life and Others."
Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.
Three members of The Actors' Gang, a theater group in Los Angeles, perform a scene from George Orwell's "1984" which the group recently staged, set in our own time.
Sy Montgomery tells Steve Paulson about swimming with the pink dolphins of the Amazon. She says they inspire lots of folklore, and are really a species of toothed whale.