Why do certain foods fall out of favor? Aaron Bobrow-Strain tracked the rise and fall of white bread for a book on the subject. He believes our anxieties about food often reflect larger social questions.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Bennett Alan Weinberg walks Anne Strainchamps through the science of caffeine. Sure it’s an addictive drug, but it has its good points!
Cheryl Jarvis talks about “The Marriage Sabbatical”: it’s a time one spouse can pursue an individual dream, while maintaining a commitment to the marriage.
David Ferris is the director of the Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project. He tells Anne Strainchamps the project began as a conceptual art project that provided gainful employment to the animals put out of work by the collapse of Thailand's timber industry.
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.
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.
Christopher Moore talks with Steve Paulson about the world’s most untranslatable words.
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