Piers Vitebsky studies the Eveny or Reindeer People of Siberia. They keep herds of reindeer for meat, but also have personal, consecrated reindeer animal doubles, which they believe will die for them.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Lydia Millet tells Steve Paulson that she lives in the middle of a national park outside Tucson, Arizona, and is always mindful that she is encroaching on the space of the wild creatures when she drives her car.
Jonathan Kaplan is a surgeon who specializes in emergency field treatment. “Groups like “Doctors without Borders” send him to war zones all over the world. His memoir is called “The Dressing Station: A Surgeon’s Chronicle of War and Medicine.”
Mark Helprin reads from his new book, “The Pacific and Other Stories,” and talks with Jim Fleming about what really matters in life: courage, integrity, compassion.
If traditional religion has lost its luster, where do you find sacred experiences? Anthropologist Erik Davis goes looking around the edges of contemporary culture - from Burning Man and trance music to psychedelics.
Paul Feig is the author of "Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin."
No matter how much we learn about the brain, Sacks says we may never understand how the mind works. In this interview, he marvels at how the human brain is fine-tuned to respond to music.
Joe Nick Patoski has been writing about his friend Willie Nelson for thirty five years. He talks about Nelson's first claim to fame in Nashville was as a songwriter.
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