How do modern societies compare to hunter gatherer cultures? In "The World Until Yesterday," Jared Diamond, explores our radically different values - on everything from childrearing to what we think about strangers. Here's Steve's EXTENDED interview with Diamond.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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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.
Maryanne Wolf thinks the dyslexia brain ought to be considered a gift that characterized some of history's leading figures.
Mark Kurlansky tells Steve Paulson that salt made food a tradable commodity and that it inspired revolutions from India to France. Because people have to have salt, governments want to control and tax it.
Ricardo Lagos, economist and former President of Chile, wants the world to know that democracy thrived in his country for more than a hundred years before Augusto Pinochet overthrew the government. In this NEW and UNCUT interview with Jim Fleming, he says it's also thriving now that Pinochet is gone.
Michael Thelwell was a life-long friend of Stokely Carmichael and collaborated with him on his autobiography, “Ready for Revolution.”
Today, thanks to Black History Month, legendary jazz saxophonist and composer Charlie "Bird" Parker is on our minds.
Ballet is performed all over the world, but in Russia ballet is the route to stardom.
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