David Stockman. Stockman? Uhm, Stockman? Oh yeah, President Reagan’s budget director. One of the architects of supply-side economics. Well, he’s back in the limelight all these years later with his best-selling book “The Great Deformation”.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Biologist Cindy Engel tells Steve Paulson that wild animals self-medicate in a number of ways and that there is really no difference for animals between nutrition and medicine.
Carel Van Schaik tells Steve Paulson that orangutans, those great red apes, use tools and pass learning down from one generation to the next.
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.
We hate mosquitoes.
But why? I mean, yes --- West Nile, dengue, malaria, Zika…not to mention ruined picnics, sleepless nights, and bites you scratch until they bleed … Those are logical reasons to dislike mosquitoes. But admit it – they also just creep you out.
Jeffrey Lockwood gets at the psychology in his book “The Infested Mind.” He’s an entomologist who once had a truly horrific encounter with a swarm of grasshoppers. He was left traumatized. Afterwards he wondered why we all fear and loathe insects so much.
Lockwood told Rehman Tungekar the answer is deep deep in our psyches.
Diana Butler Bass says we're now living in a post-religious age. What's surprising is how many people are abandoning organized religion, but not God.
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.
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