Mitch Horowitz tells Anne Strainchamps that belief in the occult is as old as the colonies and that spiritualism was America's first great religious export.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Cosmologist Janna Levin tells Steve Paulson that the universe may be shaped like a soccer ball, but it must be finite. On the other hand, there could be many universes.
Paul Theroux lived and taught in Africa throughout much of the 1960s. He returned recently and describes the journey in his book “Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town.”
Robert Bly has re-translated some of the work of a fifteenth century poet-saint from India named Kabir.
Jennifer Egan tells Steve Paulson all about her polyphonic narrative "A Visit from the Goon Squad."
What's the best piece of reporting you encountered this year? TTBOOK listeners recommend these stories. We'll add new suggestions as they come in.
The clay tablets found at the Greek palace of Knossos had one of the strangest languages ever discovered. Margalit Fox tells the story of Linear B - and the obsessed, tragic lives of the two people who devoted their lives to cracking the code.
Laurell Hamilton has written a series of novels featuring a character called Anita Blake. Anita is a vampire executioner whose day job is raising the dead. Hamilton talks about Anita’s world
Pages
