When we’re talking about data, we’re really talking about code—the languages that structure every aspect of our digital lives. But can code itself be interesting? Or even beautiful? Vikram Chandra grew up in India and always wanted to be a novelist, but when he came to the United States, he discovered computers—going from a weekend tinkerer to a consultant who paid his way through grad school. He spoke with Steve Paulson on what makes good writing, and what makes good code.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Andrea di Robilant is an Italian journalist from an old Venetian family who's made a novel out of the story contained in some letters from his family's attic.
Anne Strainchamps talks with Anne Fadiman about her book “Rereadings: Seventeen Writers Revisit Books They Love.”
The Thousand and One Nights have been told and re-told for centuries, censored and banned in the Middle East, and made into cheesy Disney movies for kids. But have you ever read them? Here's the backstory with Steve Paulson.
Adam Frank is an atheist with a spiritual bent. As an astrophysicist, his yearning for the sacred is rooted in science. It's an impulse going back to his childhood.
In 1992, Alexander Blakeley graduated from college and headed for the newly capitalist Siberia. He tells Anne Strainchamps he found a wilderness of greed, theft and exploitation.
Amitav Ghosh tells Jim Fleming that English has been a global language for 200 years and cites some of the many Asian words that have long been in the Oxford English Dictionary.
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