Shakespeare expert Stephen Greenblatt says Shakespeare believed all rulers suffered from insomnia.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Steve Paulson reports on the state of Chinese literature today. He talks with Annie Wang, Nobel Prize Laureate Gao Xingjian and National Book Award winner Ha Jin.
There's an entire sector of the economy run by people who are working diligently to get inside your head and harvest your attention? Does that creep you out? They're called the Attention Merchants. And their business model consists of attracting your attention and then reselling it for profit. They're ad-based TV channels, clickbait producers and the big social media producers. Law professor Tim Wu is the author of "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads."
When is government surveillance appropriate? Shane Harris talks about the rise of American surveillance, cyber warfare and privacy.
Humorist Roy Blount Junior believes New Orleans is the cradle of American culture.
One hundred years ago, Fritz Haber invented the first chemical weapon and convinced the German army to use it. His wife Clara, also a chemist, fiercely opposed her husband's project. When she couldn't stop it, she committed suicide. Judith Claire Mitchell tells the story in her tragic and yet funny novel "A Reunion of Ghosts."
Sandy Tolan tells Jim Fleming that he became a fan of Hank Aaron’s as a boy in Milwaukee, and was thrilled when “The Hammer” threatened to eclipse Babe Ruth’s home run record.
Historian Sean Wilentz tells Jim Fleming the birth of Dylan’s music is deeply bound up in the politics of the time.
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