Everyone thinks The Arabian Nights is a collection of stories and folktales from the Middle East. In fact, some of the most famous were written by Europeans, who fell in love with the tradition and wanted more.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Legendary showman P.T. Barnum once owned a slave named Joice Heth. Barnum claimed she was 161 years old and a former nanny to George Washington. Benjamin Reiss tells the story in his book "The Showman and the Slave: Race, Death, and Memory in Barnum's America."
Solar engineer Martha Lenio was the first woman to command a mission on the HI-SEAS — the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's a project co-sponsored by NASA and the Univeristy of Hawaii that simulates what it would be like to live on Mars for eight months. To survive in such extremes, they were sequestered into a 1,000 square foot dome, and when they went outside they had to wear space suits. When Lenio got there, she said it didn't feel much like Mars, but she changed her mind after 8 months without the sun and wind on her skin. She spoke with Anne Strainchamps about missing her family — and missing YouTube cat videos.
Historian Tariq Ali tells Steve Paulson that the current Indian government is dominated by Hindu fundamentalists.
Steven Johnson tells Anne Strainchamps how television storytelling has become more sophisticated with mutiple plots lines extending over several episodes.
Stephen Thompson is an editor at The Onion newspaper, and editor of “The Onion A.V. Club: The Tenacity of the Cockroach.”
A typical commute turns interesting in David Tigner's story about autonomous cars.
Tim Flannery tells Steve Paulson about the asteroid crashes and vanished fauna in our continent’s past.
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