The average American voter is NOT smarter than a 5th grader, doesn't understand basic political facts and should probably not be allowed to vote. Philosopher Jason Brennan makes the case for an epistocracy: the rule of the knowledgeable.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Breaking Bad actor Bob Odenkirk talks about the differences between writing comedy and performing it, his favorite moment as a writer, and comedy as an act of destruction.
In 2006, Barack Obama was the new darling of the Democratic Party and was considering a Presidential run in 2008.
Anthropologist Alia Gurtov was one of the first people to crawl into the Dinaledi Chamber to see the Homo naledi fossils. She describes the harrowing climb into the cave, where she had to crawl through tiny passages to retrieve the bones.
Amanda Lindhout was kidnapped in Somalia and held for 460 days. She believes the key to her survival and healing is learning to forgive her kidnappers.
Angie da Silva is a historian of black cultural life in the United States, going back to the Civil War. She collects stories, both through oral history and archival research. But she's not merely a writer. She brings these stories to life through historical reenactment, often as a slave character she's created named Lila. She says that the stories she hears and tells are too often left out of our history books.
In this interview, she talks about her work and tells the story of Mary Meachum, a free black abolitionist who worked on the Mississippi in St. Louis.
Cathy N. Davidson is the author of "Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn." She tells Anne Strainchamps why "attention blindness" matters.
Why has America stopped inventing? Americans invent less than half of what we did a century ago. Half. Why? Are we less creative then we were 100 years ago?
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