In 2005, New York Times journalist Eric Lichtblau wrote a series of articles about the surveillance – without warrants – of some Americans’ international phone calls and e-mails. The Times won a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting. In 2008, Steve asked Lichtblau about covering the NSA’s warrantless wire-tapping program.
Roald Hoffmann won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry, but he’s also a poet. He thinks the two disciplines have a lot in common, and reads a couple of poems.
Ed Boyden, a researcher at MIT, is at the forefront of a new science that aims to map and even heal the brain with light. It’s called optogenetics, and the journal Science has called it one of the great insights of the 21st century. It’s in its early days, but the goal is to one day be able to take a disease like depression, PTSD, or epilepsy and, using bursts of light, just turn it off -- the same way you’d fix a software glitch in a computer.
Pierre Ferrari is one of the founders of TeamX, a clothing company with a social conscience. He tells Jim Fleming that the company limits executive salaries to eight times the salary of the lowest paid worker.
Robert Weinberg wrote “The Computers of Star Trek” with co-author Lois Gresh. Weinberg says that Star Trek was ambivalent about computers, and wildly inconsistent about how they worked.
Singer and pianist Marcia Ball talks about the various kinds of Blues and how they differ from what she usually plays.
What happens when you discover racial fear in yourself? Rachel Shadoan recently reached an uncomfortable conclusion: she was afraid of black men. Rachel was appalled and decided to do something about it. She tells her story in an article titled, "I am racist and so are you."
