From The Sopranos and Friday Night Lights to The Wire and Breaking Bad, we're living through a TV revolution. TV critic Alan Sepinwall gives the backstory of this explosion of great shows.
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Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Award-winning novelist Jane Hamilton's new novel has a setting that's close to home. "The Excellent Lombards" is a story of generational tension set on a family apple farm. Steve Paulson talks about writing, farming and apples with Jane while walking through her own family orchard.
The "connectome" is one of the most audacious science projects ever conceived: a detailed map of the human brain, neuron by neuron, synapse by synapse. In this EXTENDED interview, MIT computational neuroscientist Sebastian Seung explains what we can learn.
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.
Essayist Susan Ehrlich is a practicing pediatrian who remembers what it was like treating her father during his final hours.
How do you best portray a strong female character, either in TV or in film? That’s a question culture critic Tasha Robinson has been asking herself for a long time now, first during her 13 years as an editor for the A.V. Club and most recently as the senior editor of the movie commentary site, The Dissolve. She tells Charles Monroe Kane that it's relatability — not toughness — that defines a strong woman on screen.
Sophy Burnham tells one of the stories from her "Book of Angels." This one's about two "businessmen" who appear just in time to stop a runaway wheelchair.
Russell Simmons has been called the godfather of hip hop. He tells Steve Paulson he got his start selling street drugs as a teenager.
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