Historian James Tobin is the author of “To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight.” He says that the Wrights started with gliders and were competing with the Smithsonian to build the first motorized flying machine.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Ira Glass is the host of the public radio program This American Life. He tells Steve Paulson what makes a story work on the radio and plays several examples.
Writer (and gardener) Jamaica Kincaid tells Steve Paulson how she got into gardening, why she’s driven to collect certain species, and why she loves so many British plants.
Britain’s best-selling mystery writer, Ian Rankin, talks about his character, Inspector John Rebus. He explains what Edinburgh is really like, and how Scotland has been affected by world events like the air crash at Lockerbie.
Renowned choreographer Bill T. Jones stopped dancing in his 50s - and recently, did something radical. He created a dance based on John Cage's ideas about chance and randomness. He felt compelled to reinvent his career at this stage of his life.
Alfred Wallace was the co-discover, with Charles Darwin, of the theory of natural selection. Wallace was also a great 19th century naturalist who spent years collecting speciments in the Amazon River Basin and later in the Malay Archipelago. Unlike the aristocratic Darwin, Wallace always had...
Going blind in one eye would unnerve anyone. And for a photographer, it’s especially upsetting. But Teju Cole found that his Big Blind Spot Syndrome taught him a new way to look at the world — and actually changed his photography.
In a small town in northern Wales you'll find a playground where it's normal for kids to play with rusty tools or build fires. It's called the Land, and it's an example of an adventure playground — where kids are free to take risks. The Land's manager, Claire Griffiths, gives us an insider's view of an adventure playground.
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