Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis talks about "On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Would you like to sharpen your memory? Science writer Joshua Foer tells you how to build an elaborate memory palace.
Mamak Khadem came to America from Iran to finish high school. She began to sing Persian music to stay connected to her homeland.
Joan Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, helped shape a highly personal brand of nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. Her early essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979) influenced generations of writers. Her later memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," chronicled the deaths of her husband and daughter. In 2011 Didion talked with Steve Paulson about illness and growing old in the wake of the death of her daughter, Quintana.
Mark Jacobson and his wife took their three children on a 90-day trip around the world. They've written a book called "12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe."
Kenneth Helphand tells Jim Fleming how a photo of a French soldier tending a rose bush in a trench during WWI resulted in his book.
Celtic historian John Matthews tells Steve Paulson that Merlin probably was a real person and that wizards are related to our ancient shamans.
As a child, Michael Ondaatje took a long ocean voyage from Sri Lanka to England. This is the seed of his novel "The Cat's Table." He talks with Jim Fleming about the fine line between fiction and memoir.
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