These days beauty’s got a complicated reputation. One professor of literature and aesthetics at Harvard is giving beauty a makeover.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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“I learned virtually nothing about mortality when I was in medical school,” Dr. Atul Gawande says. “I was terrible at knowing how to have a successful conversation with people facing terminal illness.” Gawande, author of the bestselling “Being Mortal,” is now trying to get people talking about better ways to live out the final chapter.
Eric Kandel has spent a lifetime studying the science of memory and picked up a Nobel Prize while he was at it.
Bill Welden, an expert on Tolkien’s Elvish languages, talks about Elvish derivations and vocabulary and remembers his visit to the set of the “The Lord of the Rings” movie.
Mary Pauline Lowry has been obsessed with fire since she was a child. And she's pursued this obsession throughout her life -- by working as a member of a hotshot crew fighting wildland fires and writing a novel called "Wildfire" based on her experience.
Carl Klaus is the author of "Letters to Kate." It's a collection of the letters he wrote to his wife in the first year after her death.
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman is fascinated by the way memory shapes our sense of self. In this EXTENDED interview, he says our memories can be quite different from what we actually experience.
Charles Monroe-Kane tells a story from his car-racing background.
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