How do you best portray a strong female character, either in TV or in film? That’s a question culture critic Tasha Robinson has been asking herself for a long time now, first during her 13 years as an editor for the A.V. Club and most recently as the senior editor of the movie commentary site, The Dissolve. She tells Charles Monroe Kane that it's relatability — not toughness — that defines a strong woman on screen.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Film director Rodney Ascher recommends Paul Schrader's 1988 movie, "Patty Hearst."
Susan Blackmore is a British psychologist who's written books on consciousness, memes and parapsychology. She's also fascinated by what Zen Buddhism can tell us about the mind. In this EXTENDED interview, she says her daily practice of meditation has revealed truths that have eluded the scientific study of consciousness.
Anne Strainchamps talks with two teenagers who were finalists in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology.
One of the most horrific episodes in American history occurred on December 29, 1890. The U.S. Cavalry surrounded an encampment of Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and massacred some 300 people. The details of the carnage of the Wounded Knee Massacre are almost unbearable. As Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man who witnessed the massacre, put it, “Something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died." This tragedy is the bleak backdrop for Jonis Agee's new novel, "The Bones of Paradise." Set 10 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, all the characters in her novel - from white cattle ranchers to the Lakota - are wrestling with the ghosts of the massacre. Agee tells Steve Paulson about the origins of her novel.
Tom Wolfe reads the opening to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and explains why it's his favorite.
Tariq Ali about Al-Andalus, the largely forgotten Muslim society on the peninsula that's now Spain and Portugal where Christians, Jews and Muslims once lived together in relative harmony.
Philosopher and novelist Umberto Eco wrote a history of beauty. A few years later, he followed it up with a study of ugliness. Here’s what he found
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