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.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Jill Fredston has rowed more than 20,000 miles of Arctic water, along the coastlines of Alaska and Greenland and alongside whales and polar bears.
"I can't remember a time when I wasn't drawing," says Molly Crabapple. "I can't not draw. It's how I relate to the world." And Crabapple's art - her drawings, paintings and posters - have ignited various political causes, from the Occupy Movement to protests against the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo. She tells Anne Strainchamps how art can be a political tool.
Americans are still fighting over the legacy of the Vietnam War, but one perspective is missing: the Vietnamese experience. Novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen provides a Vietnamese perspective.
Samuel R. Delany has been described as "American science fiction's most consistently brilliant and inventive writer." Delany's non-fiction includes the essay collection, "The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction." He talked to Steve Paulson about his love of language.
In Siberia, for centuries, people have lived in cooperation with reindeer. Anthropologist Piers Vitebsky tells some tales of the Reindeer People.
Paul Koudounaris has spent the past decade traveling around the world, climbing into church crypts and bone chambers and taking photos at over 250 burial sites in 30 countries. He's discovered chapels decorared with skeletons and underground caves filled with skulls—among other things. In this interview, he tells us how he began his obsession with displays of death.
Science writer Jennifer Ouellette spent a year confronting her math phobia straight on. She taught herself calculus. It helped her win at Vegas, get a good mortgage, and might just save her from a zombie apocalypse.
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