When blogger Jenny Lawson recently tweeted about an awkward exchange she had with a cashier at an airport, she couldn't have imagined the flood of responses she'd get from fans recounting their own mortifying moments. The tweet went viral and within a few days she'd received thousands of messages from fans recounting their own awkward stories. The whole affair was proof of something Jenny had long suspected -- that awkwardness can help bring people together.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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One of the founders of queer theory says his childhood in the Pentecostal church laid the ground for his evolution as a gay man and literary scholar. Michael Warner grew up around faith healing and speaking in tongues. He says it was an education in thinking beyond "normal".
Steven Okazaki is a third generation Japanese-American and an Academy Award winning film-maker. He tells Jim Fleming that Japanese-Americans face racism both at home and in Japan.
Stacy Peralta was one of the original Z-boys who transformed the sport of skateboarding. Peralta tells Steve Paulson that the Z boys were all wild surfers from a rough neighborhood in west Los Angeles.
Susana Chavez-Silverman tells Steve Paulson why she fell in love with Spanglish, a form of code-switching.
Novelist and journalist William Vollmann has written a seven volume study of the moral calculus of violence. Vollmann talks with Steve Paulson about when violence is justified and when it isn’t.
Ron Mallett is a theoretical physicist at the University of Connecticut who wrote a memoir about his personal quest to travel back in time.
Steve Paulson talks with some leading Darwin experts and goes to see Darwin's letters at Cambridge University in England to try to get at Darwin's views on God.
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