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To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Italian journalist Riccardo Orizio been interviewing disgraced exiled dictators for years. He put them together in a book called “Talk of the Devil.”

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

If you like novels about computers and the history of technology, then you must know Neal Stephenson's work.  The author of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle talks with us about his new novel -- a fast-paced thriller about the world of hyper-gaming.  It's called "Reamde."

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Paleontologist Peter Ward tells Steve Paulson that big carnivores are unlikely to survive outside zoos but creatures that can survive around humans - like rats and coyotes - will thrive in the future.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Cosmology is on our minds, with the remarkable new discovery confirming the Big Bang. To get a better sense of what it all means – and how creation stories like the Big Bang have shaped our sense of ourselves – Steve Paulson turned to Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who writes for NPR’s science blog 13.7.   He’s the author of the book “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.”

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Punk.   For 40 years, punk has influenced not just music, but fashion, film,  art… not to mention hairstyles.  So what makes punk… punk?  Music journalist Legs McNeil is the guy who named it.  And chronicled it.  Along with Gillian McCain wrote THEE book on the history of punk. It’s an oral history called “Please Kill Me.”

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

How do you set poetry to music?  Grammy Award-winning jazz composer Maria Schneider did it with Ted Kooser's poems, sung by Dawn Upshaw.  She tells Anne Strainchamps how she finds beauty in her art.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

 

Can science finally answer the age-old mystery, how something can come out of nothing?  Physicist Lawrence Krauss says yes, and in the process he’s set off an intellectual brawl with theologians and philosophers.

To The Best Of Our Knowledge

Najla Said is many things: actress, playwright, author. She’s also a Palestinian-Lebanese-Christian-Arab-American who grew up on New York’s Jewish Upper West Side. And she’s the daughter of the late Edward Said –the famous Palestinian intellectual and activist.   

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