People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Philosopher Susan Brison faced a personal and professional crisis after she was attacked and raped in France. She tells Anne Strainchamps how traditional philosophy failed to comfort her.
In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
Paul Koudounaris has spent the past decade traveling around the world, climbing into church crypts and bone chambers and taking photos at over 250 burial sites in 30 countries. He's discovered chapels decorared with skeletons and underground caves filled with skulls—among other things. In this interview, he tells us how he began his obsession with displays of death.
Sara Nelson tells Anne Strainchamps what publishers can do to make a book a best-seller and why the actual number of copies sold is a state secret.
Stephen Prothero tells Jim Fleming that Jesus has become an American icon like Mickey Mouse and that the commercial proliferation of Jesus kitsch indirectly spreads a religious message.
It’s too bad trees can’t talk to us, but storytellers can and Wayne Pauly has a good story about a young woman, a young man, and a tree.
Standup, prat falls, punch lines. Performing comedy's one thing, writing it's another.
Ian Frazier has been writing comedy for the New Yorker for decades. Catch him talking about the rewards of writing humor, and telling jokes in Russian.
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