Legendary showman P.T. Barnum once owned a slave named Joice Heth. Barnum claimed she was 161 years old and a former nanny to George Washington. Benjamin Reiss tells the story in his book "The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Media critic Susan Douglas tells Steve Paulson that the American new media is doing less foreign news since 9/11, concentrating on health issues and “news you can use.”
Solar engineer Martha Lenio was the first woman to command a mission on the HI-SEAS — the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's a project co-sponsored by NASA and the Univeristy of Hawaii that simulates what it would be like to live on Mars for eight months. To survive in such extremes, they were sequestered into a 1,000 square foot dome, and when they went outside they had to wear space suits. When Lenio got there, she said it didn't feel much like Mars, but she changed her mind after 8 months without the sun and wind on her skin. She spoke with Anne Strainchamps about missing her family — and missing YouTube cat videos.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
Zorba Paster tells Jim Fleming that many of the practices outlined in his book “The Longevity Code” grow out of his Buddhist practice and belief.
Novelist Michelle Wildgen shares a conversation about food, art, and the creative imagination with chef and food activist Alice Waters, founder of the legendary Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse.
Ruth Reichl draws on her career as a high-profile food writer and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine in her first novel -- "Delicious". It's the story of a magazine writer with a superhuman sense of taste, who discovers a secret cache of letters from the legendary chef and cookbook writer James Beard.
The Canadian surrealist sketch comedy trio, The Vestibules, with their brilliant commercial parody, "Laurence Olivier for Diet Coke."
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