Richard Davidson is a neuro-psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a longtime friend of the Dalai Lama. He tells Steve Paulson about observing contemplatives with a brain scanner.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Michele Norris, former co-host of NPR's All Things Considered, talks with Anne Strainchamps about her family's hidden racial past.
Author and playwright Michael Frayn talks with Steve Paulson about his play “Copenhagen” and the dramatic meeting between physicists Neils Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. At issue is the degree to which Heisenberg was spying for the Nazis and his role in the development of a German atom bomb.
Muffy Mead-Ferro recalls her one and only experience of scrap-booking. She is the author of “Confessions of a Slacker Mom.”
Harriet Tubman will soon be gracing our twenty dollar bill. Most of us know only one image of her. It's an iconic image taken later in her life in which her hair's covered in a dark cloth and she has a stern expression. But there are other images of Harriet Tubman as well, including a wood cut of her carrying a musket.
Law professor Nicholas Johnson says the image of Harriet Tubman carrying a rifle doesn’t fit with how most Americans view abolitionists and civil rights leaders. After all, weren’t they supposed to be peaceful? But as Johnson tells Steve Paulson, there's a rich tradition of Black Americans owning guns for self-defense.
Marian Salzman is director of strategic content for J. Walter Thompson, America's largest advertising firm. She comments on the rising economic importance of China and India.
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.
Pages
