Anne here. My conversation with Turkish writer Elif Şafak back in April still sticks with me as the year comes to a close. In many parts of the world, 2016 was the year of the populist leader—especially in Turkey, where Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan launched a crackdown on free speech and all forms of opposition. 120 journalists have been jailed, more than 2,000 academics have been dismissed from universities, and more than 100,000 public workers have been fired. How did Turkey—once a model of new democratic nations—become such a different place? Not only did Şafak see this coming, she warned that the West should not consider itself immune.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Writer Barbara Fischer tells us the story of how starting a garden saved her life.
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.
Filmmaker and hypnotist Albert Nerenberg explains how we can simulate the effects of drugs through hypnosis.
Christopher Moore talks with Steve Paulson about the world’s most untranslatable words.
Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard recommends a chilling read: "The Flame Alphabet" by Ben Marcus.
Colin Thubron tells Jim Fleming why Siberians are drawn to the old Orthodox religion, and recalls his visit with an old man who may be Siberia's last remaining shaman.
From the tiniest microscopic particles to some of the biggest structures on earth, the new science of astrobiology is leading the way to the discovery of life elsewhere in the universe. Dimitar Sasselov explains why the creation of the world's first artificial cells will revolutionize lifeon our planet.
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