David Hajdu recently wrote a controversial article for The New Republic about the legacy of Alan Lomax. Lomax and his father made field recordings of thousands of folk and blues songs including work by Leadbelly and Muddy Waters.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Diana Athill was the editor of some of the most celebrated writers of our time, including John Updike, Simone de Beauvoir, and V.S. Naipaul.
“I learned virtually nothing about mortality when I was in medical school,” Dr. Atul Gawande says. “I was terrible at knowing how to have a successful conversation with people facing terminal illness.” Gawande, author of the bestselling “Being Mortal,” is now trying to get people talking about better ways to live out the final chapter.
These days beauty’s got a complicated reputation. One professor of literature and aesthetics at Harvard is giving beauty a makeover.
Journalist Naomi Klein is in Paris covering the Climate Summit. She says if we're serious about climate change, we need to confront capitalism itself.
Eric Kandel has spent a lifetime studying the science of memory and picked up a Nobel Prize while he was at it.
Bill Welden, an expert on Tolkien’s Elvish languages, talks about Elvish derivations and vocabulary and remembers his visit to the set of the “The Lord of the Rings” movie.
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