Historian Harold Schechter tells Anne Strainchamps that violence has always been an important part of popular entertainment and our ancestors enjoyed truly grisly spectacles.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
David Abram is an ecologist, anthropologist and philosopher, and author of "Becoming Animal."
This six minute short film sets a typical frat house scene with heightened visual intensity: beer pong, drunk girls, guys with their shirts off doing shots, hazing rituals, fights. The twist is that the guy at the center of the film is clearly attracted to one of his frat brothers.
As the Books Editor of Paste Magazine, Charles McNair cares deeply about what we read. But McNair is concerned that we're only reading a handful of the artists available to us, thanks to what he calls a kind of geographic hegemony of taste-making. In other words - we're all reading the same books because a handful of respected critics on the East and West coasts tell us to.
Information, information everywhere... where's knowledge? David Weinberger from the Berkman Center for Internet and Society says knowledge lies in the links between data and info.
Billy Collins has stepped down as America’s Poet Laureate, but he hasn’t stopped trying to make poetry more accessible and more widely read.
The invention of mechanical clocks created a kind of artificial time which permits greater efficiency, but cuts human beings off from the rest of nature.
Pages
