For others, football is sacred. In fact, William Dean says the game is part of "American spiritual culture." He talks with Jim Fleming about the way religious beliefs crop up in American popular culture.
For others, football is sacred. In fact, William Dean says the game is part of "American spiritual culture." He talks with Jim Fleming about the way religious beliefs crop up in American popular culture.
Simon Critchley is the author of "The Book of Dead Philosophers," a quirky account of how various philosophers thought about death and died themselves.
Charle Monroe Kane talks with Japanese-American rapper Tom Shimura, a.k.a. Lyrics Born, who’s the founder of Quannum Records.
Americans are still fighting over the legacy of the Vietnam War, but one perspective is missing: the Vietnamese experience. Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen provides a Vietnamese perspective.
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.
Zadie Smith portrays London as it really is with people from many races and cultures living together and spillinng over into each other’s lives.
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette spent a year confronting her math phobia straight on. She taught herself calculus. It helped her win at Vegas, get a good mortgage, and might just save her from a zombie apocalypse.
In the late 1970s, the men's liberation movement split into two camps. A pro-feminist faction, and the anti-feminist Men’s Rights Movement, which sees men as an oppressed group. Critics have accused them of creating a breeding ground for misogyny, internet trolling and violence against women. The father of the Men’s Rights Movement is Warren Farrell, author of the core text of the movement, “The Myth of Male Power.”