Paul Stoller is an anthropologist who studied sorcery with the Songhay people in Niger. Years later he developed lymphoma and only then did he understand some of what his teacher had been trying to teach him.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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John Polkinghorne is a former physicist at Cambridge University who now devotes himself to reconciling science and religion.
Today we celebrate the 40th anniversary of Punk. For 40 years, punk has influenced not just music, but fashion, film, art… not to mention hairstyles. So what makes punk… punk? Music journalist Legs McNeil is the guy who named it. And chronicled it. Along with Gillian McCain wrote THEE book on the history of punk. It’s an oral history called “Please Kill Me.”
If you think the American middle class has it bad, consider life in debt-ridden Italy or Greece. Best-selling financial writer Michael Lewis portrays the downfall of several European countries with his usual verve, in Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World.
This is a poem by Susan Avishai about a single elderly woman who lived next door for more than 25 years.She wrote it just a few months before her neighbor passed away.
When he was 9, Neil deGrasse Tyson fell in love with astrophysics during his first visit to a planetarium. He was, literally, star-struck, and now runs the Hayden Planetarium.
Cosmology is on our minds, with the remarkable new discovery confirming the Big Bang. To get a better sense of what it all means – and how creation stories like the Big Bang have shaped our sense of ourselves – Steve Paulson turned to Adam Frank, an astrophysicist who writes for NPR’s science blog 13.7. He’s the author of the book “About Time: Cosmology and Culture at the Twilight of the Big Bang.”
Many things can evoke a memory. Like a smell. Or a touch. When Mamek Khadem wanted to evoke the memory of her native Iran during the Islamic revolution in 1979, she did it with music.
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