Daniel Tammet has memorized the number pi into the tens of thousands of digits. He's learned new languages in a few weeks. He describes the gift - and the burden - of being an autistic savant.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Ever wonder why certain foods fall out of favor? In his book “The Gluten Lie” Alan Levinovitz argues that food has become akin to a modern religion for a lot of us, complete with its own set of rules, prohibitions and guiding beliefs.
David Ferris is the director of the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project. He tells Anne Strainchamps the project began as a conceptual art project that provided gainful employment to the animals put out of work by the collapse of Thailand's timber industry.
The power of big data—why so many corporations and government agencies and political pollsters and baseball teams are after it—is that it can reveal things we might otherwise not see. But statistics alone can't do that. We need to transform those statistics into stories. One artist doing that is Brian Foo, aka the Data Driven DJ. He takes large data sets and turns them into music. His first song, "Two Trains," amplifies a dire but often ignored truth about our country: income inequality.
David Rieff has written a sobering account of his mother's last days. It's called "Swimming in a Sea of Death," and tells how he tried to do the right thing by his mother - Susan Sontag - while also being true to himself.
In March of 2000, the conceptual artist Mark Lombardi was found hanged in his studio. In the art world, speculation swirled about whether his death was suicide or murder? Why would anyone want to murder Lombardi? Maybe because his intricate drawings revealed connections between George W. Bush and the bin Laden family, as well as other connections between banking, organized crime and intelligence agencies. Patricia Goldstone is the author of "Interlock: Art, Conspiracy, and the Shadow Worlds of Mark Lombardi." She talks about Lombardi's work and the mystery behind his death.
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