Novelist T. Coraghessan Boyle talks with Jim Fleming about his latest. “Drop City” is set in a California commune in the 1970s, and concerns the activities at one of America’s many private little Utopias.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Scott Weidensaul talks with Jim Fleming about several animals that have turned up after their species was thought to be extinct.
Are political beliefs predetermined at birth? Encoded in our genes? Political scientist John Hibbing does fMRI studies of liberal and conserative brains and says there are significant biological differences. His message: stop yelling at the other party. They can't help what they think.
Journalist and editor Tom Shroder tells Jim Fleming about the remarkable cases he's investigated of children who insist they belong to a family other than the one they were born into.
Simon Montefiore is the author of “Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar.” He says Stalin was more complex than we thought, but still a monster.
According to self-described "space dork" Andy Weir, he was just sitting around at home one day imagining a manned Mars mission — not with any goal in mind, but just as a thought experiment. Soon, he realized this would be a pretty good premise for a story. And boy was he right. His novel "The Martian" started as a series of blog posts and has become a blockbuster motion picture. In this interview, he reads excerpts from the novel and discusses the balance between pure fantasty and scientific accuracy in science fiction.
Steven Biel talks about Grant Woods' iconic American painting: who the models were; how the painting's been received and why it's so often parodied.
TTBOOK producer Charles Monroe-Kane is a great storyteller who's led an adventurous life. Here's a wild story from his memoir "Lithium Jesus" about smuggling mob money when he lived in Prague in the '90s.
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