What's it like to hang out with the U.S. president? Journalist Michael Lewis found out when he shadowed Barack Obama for 8 months, even playing in one of Obama's pick-up basketball games.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses his six-volume autobiographical novel, "My Struggle."
You could also listen to an extended interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Mike Tidwell is a freelance journalist who thinks he’s found the biggest environmental catastrophe in America. In this pre-Katrina interview, Tidwell talks about the time he spent with shrimpers in the bayou country and what they taught him about the devastating price we’re paying for the way we control floods on the Mississippi River.
Joan Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, helped shape a highly personal brand of nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. Her early essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979) influenced generations of writers. Her later memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," chronicled the deaths of her husband and daughter. In 2011 Didion talked with Steve Paulson about illness and growing old in the wake of the death of her daughter, Quintana.
Kenneth Helphand tells Jim Fleming how a photo of a French soldier tending a rose bush in a trench during WWI resulted in his book.
NY Times film critic Manohla Dargis selects her favorite film of the year: Richard Linklater's "Boyhood," filmed over the course of 12 years.
Celtic historian John Matthews tells Steve Paulson that Merlin probably was a real person and that wizards are related to our ancient shamans.
Mead McCormick is one of 100 finalists for the Mars One program, a private venture that hopes to start a colony on Mars by 2027. She talks to Anne Strainchamps about what attracted her to the project, what she imagines it will look like, and her fears about the blackness of space.
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