Journalist Malcolm Gladwell talks to Steve Paulson about how the words from one of his stories for "The New Yorker" ended up on Broadway and how this made him change his attitude about plagiarism.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Your name is a set of sounds used to set you apart. But what if your sounds are too hard for some people to say? Parth Shah shares the first episode of "Hyphen," a podcast about people who live in two different worlds simultaneously. In this episode, Parth explores what it's like to grow up in America with a name that some people think doesn't "sound American".
Nevada Barr has written 15 mystery novels featuring Park Ranger Anna Pigeon.
Karen Joy Fowler won the PEN/Faulkner Award for best fiction for her novel "We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves." Based on a true story, it’s the remarkable tale of two girls raised as sisters, until one is removed from the family. The twist is that one sister is a chimpanzee.
If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.
Princeton historian Robert Darnton says that people in 18th century Paris spread the news by making up topical songs to familiar melodies, and that the police kept records on everybody.
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.
Marjorie Garber is one of the world's premier Shakespeare scholars and teaches at Harvard. Her latest book is "On Shakespeare and Modern Culture."
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