Walter Kirn bookmarks "The Dog of the South" by Charles Portis.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Literary theorist Terry Eagleton's Dangerous Idea? The humanities are dying.
Bob Varsha is the play-by-play announcer for Formula One racing on the SPEED Channel. He tells Anne Strainchamps that top teams spend hundreds of millions of dollars on their cars...
What happens in your brain when you dance? Frank Browning talks with scientists and choreographers in France and the U.S. about the "dancing brain."
Christopher Buckley talks with Steve Paulson about his novel "Boomsday," which posits a piece of runaway legislation providing tax incentives for Boomers who choose to commit suicide...sort of an updated "Modest Proposal."
Donald Kraybill tells Steve Paulson that Amish attitudes towards technology are nuanced and complex. He says they prefer to think through the implications of new technology before they adopt it.
The power of big data—why so many corporations and government agencies and political pollsters and baseball teams are after it—is that it can reveal things we might otherwise not see. But statistics alone can't do that. We need to transform those statistics into stories. One artist doing that is Brian Foo, aka the Data Driven DJ. He takes large data sets and turns them into music. His first song, "Two Trains," amplifies a dire but often ignored truth about our country: income inequality.
Coleman Barks has made it his life's work to translate the poetry of 13th century mystic and poet Rumi.
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