Simon Critchley is the author of "The Book of Dead Philosophers," a quirky account of how various philosophers thought about death and died themselves.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
For others, football is sacred. In fact, William Dean says the game is part of "American spiritual culture." He talks with Jim Fleming about the way religious beliefs crop up in American popular culture.
"Autism: The Musical." It's about a group of autistic children who decide to put on their own show.
Writer Kim Hiss discovered her own symbiotic relationship with animals in winter. She was working as an editor for Field and Stream Magazine and it was her first hunt.
In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
The Reduced Shakespeare Company bring their latest production into our studio. They provide a whirlwind tour of the great books of literature.
Plenty of men are obsessed with body image, too. Eric Chaline traces the cult of the male body beautiful back to ancient Greece, in "The Temple of Perfection" -- his new history of the gym.
People who like baseball call it "the thinking person’s game," but for the first 100 years, baseball was governed by a surprisingly limited range of critical thinking. Decisions were made by insiders, the current and former players who spent a lifetime around the diamond, and did things mostly one way: the way they've always been done. But in the last 3 or 4 years, that storehouse of common knowledge—much of which was kept guarded in a true "old boy's club"—has been cracked wide open. Now the game isn't driven by intuition, it's driven by data. And the math nerds who rode the bench in Little League—if they played at all—are now telling pro ballplayers what to do. Journalist Travis Sawchik tells Steve Paulson the story.
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