Yann Mantel won the Booker Prize for his novel “Life of Pi.” It’s the story of a young Indian boy, Pi, trapped at sea with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Pi believes in and practices three major religions.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Steve Paulson reports on the state of Chinese literature today. He talks with Annie Wang, Nobel Prize Laureate Gao Xingjian and National Book Award winner Ha Jin.
When is government surveillance appropriate? Shane Harris talks about the rise of American surveillance, cyber warfare and privacy.
Perhaps no other person was a greater advocate for film and film criticism than Roger Ebert. With a career spanning more than 50 years, Ebert was the source America turned to for advice on what to watch week after week. A few years before his death, Roger Ebert sat down with Steve Paulson and reflected on his legendary and prolific career as a film critic.
One hundred years ago, Fritz Haber invented the first chemical weapon and convinced the German army to use it. His wife Clara, also a chemist, fiercely opposed her husband's project. When she couldn't stop it, she committed suicide. Judith Claire Mitchell tells the story in her tragic and yet funny novel "A Reunion of Ghosts."
What is water? When Anne Strainchamps asked Wisconsin's Poet Laureate, Kimberly Blaeser called up the story and myth of the Anishinaabe. Blaeser says growing up on the White Earth Reservation, surrounded by lakes, made her who she is today.
Psychologist and philosopher Thomas Moore talks with Anne Strainchamps about the connections between springtime and death, and how flowers reflect this.
Howard Axelrod was accidentally blinded in one eye in a freak accident when he was in college. Disoriented and depressed, he retreated to an off-the-grid cabin in the Vermont wilderness. He stayed there, alone, for 2 years. Now he's published a memoir about his period of renunciation, "The Point of Vanishing."
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