As the daughter of a child psychologist, writer Jessica Lamb-Shapiro grew weary of the simple solutions offered by popular self-help books. So maybe it was only natural that she wanted to understand why people liked them so much. To find out, she read hundreds of books and articles, journeyed to conferences headed by self-improvement icons, and even conquered her fear of flying along the way.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Tad Pierson runs a tour business called “American Dream Safari.” He takes his clients on tours of Memphis and into Mississippi in his 1955 Cadillac named Mansfield.
Historian Simon Schama tells Steve Paulson that Rembrandt thought art should tell the truth and that he was an enormously innovative painter.
Tom Wolfe reads the opening to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and explains why it's his favorite.
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.
Zach Helm wrote the screenplay for "Stranger than Fiction," in which Will Ferrell hears the voice of Emma Thompson apparently narrating his life.
In a small town in northern Wales you'll find a playground where it's normal for kids to play with rusty tools or build fires. It's called the Land, and it's an example of an adventure playground — where kids are free to take risks. The Land's manager, Claire Griffiths, gives us an insider's view of an adventure playground.
Jules Pretty spent a year circumnavigating England's southeastern coast on foot. He discovered tidal paths, secret roads, and beaches covered in tiny fragments of 18th century human bones.
Pages
