If there’s one writer who’s identified with the Mississippi River, it’s Mark Twain. He grew up in Hannibal, Missouri — on the river’s edge — and as a young man, he worked as a steamboat pilot. And then he wrote the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” the novel that turned the Mississippi into myth. But it also created one of the most enduring controversies in American literary history: how to depict race relations in America's past. In this interview, Andrew Levy says that "Huckleberry Finn" is actually anti-racist — and when it was first published, the big controversy was about Twain’s depiction of wild children.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Jim Fleming reports how a new generation of American Buddhist teachers are adapting the Buddha's two thousand year old message for 21st century American audiences.
Henrietta Lacks was a poor, African American woman who died of cervical cancer at the age of 31...
Historian Michael Kammen tells Anne Strainchamps that the social distinctions between high-brow and low-brow culture are not as important as they once were.
The World Cup is on our minds this week so we revisit Steve Paulson's conversation with Franklin Foer re. his book, "How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization."
Richard Hand describes several of the programs that made that period the Golden Age of radio.
Alan Turing was only 41 when he committed suicide. Filmmaker Patrick Sammon's film, Codebreaker, tells the story of Turing's brilliant life and of his persecution by British authorities for the crime of being homosexual. When he spoke to Anne Strainchamps a few years ago, he said Turing was a victim of the prejudice and paranoia of the time.
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