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."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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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."
Tom Szaky tells Jim Fleming how his company turns candy wrappers and juice bottles into pencil cases and backpacks.
Howard Axelrod was accidentally blinded in one eye in a freak accident when he was in college. Disoriented and depressed, he retreated to an off-the-grid cabin in the Vermont wilderness. He stayed there, alone, for 2 years. Now he's published a memoir about his period of renunciation, "The Point of Vanishing."
Steven Connor says there's much more to ventriloquism than exchanging quips with a wooden dummy. He tells Anne Strainchamps that a lot of this history has to do with the disembodied voice.
Russell Foster tells Jim Fleming how the body uses light to tell time; why night shift workers have more accidents; and why it can matter when you take your medicine.
Sonu Shamdasani is a historian of psychology at University College, London, and editor of Carl Jung's "Red Book."
Susan Hirschmann is a legendary children's book editor and founder of Greenwillow Books.
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