With the Carolina Panthers facing off against the Denver Broncos in Superbowl 50, football is on our minds this week. And for many of the millions of fans who tune in every Sunday to watch their favorite teams compete, football is little more than a weekly ritual. For English professor Mark Edmundson, the football field is a staging ground for some of life's most important lessons. In his book "Why Football Matters," Edmundson looks back to his own high school years playing the sport and reflects on how it taught him courage, resilience, determination, and other values he'd draw on as an adult.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani talks about her electronic music and sound work.
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.
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.
Steve Paulson reports on the new genre of Scandinavian crime fiction and we hear a reading from Karin Fossum's "He Who Fears the Wolf."
Seduction seems like a dirty word these days. In our era of frankness, hook-ups and FWBs, why bother seducing someone?
Betsy Prioleau says charm is an endangered, misunderstood and useful art.
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.
Patrick Hennessey tells Jim Fleming about his war service in Iraq and Afghanistan and the role that books played in his life as a soldier.
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