Journalist Thomas Ricks talks with Jim Fleming about how close the U.S. came to losing the war in Iraq on November 19, 2004 in a town called Haditha, 150 miles north of Baghdad.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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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.
Wally Williams is Chief Executive Officer of Tequila Mockingbird and Sound Design in Austin, Texas, a successful commercial production facility.
British novelist Tony Parsons tells Steve Paulson why “Man and Boy” has been such a huge hit and remembers how difficult it was for his own father to express emotion.
William Irwin tells Steve Paulson how philosophical questions echo throughout popular culture with several examples from Seinfeld and The Simpsons.
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.
How should we decide when to stop life-prolonging treatments for people with severe brain damage and terminal illness? Are live organ donors always out of the question? As medicine makes it possible for us to prolong life, when should we just let - or help - someone die?
Patricia Lockwood is a rising star on the poetry scene. She's been dubbed the "poet laureate of Twitter,” and her latest collection, “Motherland, Fatherland, Homelandsexuals" is making waves. This also includes a bonus reading of Lockwood's poem, "Revealing Nature Photographs."
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