National security, civil liberties, terrorism...those issues obsessed Romans 2,000 years ago just as they obsess us today. Renowned classicist Mary Beard says we have lots to learn from Ancient Rome, including insights into how empires rise and fall.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Dan Chaon's short story collection, "Stay Awake," is set in post-recession America, where dreamers, losers and troubled souls feel like ghosts in their own lives.
Not all architecture in the Arab world glitters like a golden dome. Some are being shelled to dust by war. Such is the horrifying story of Homs, Syria. Once a cosmopolitan and tolerant city of more than one million, Homs has hosted clashes between rebel groups and President Bashar Assad’s forces since 2011. Those clashes have mortared and shelled the city into an oblivion. Thousands of residents have been killed. Most of the remaining have fled. But not all.
Marwa al-Sabouni and her family have stayed. Marwa al-Sabouni has her PhD. in Islamic architecture and wrote a compelling memoir about architecture and destruction in Homs called “The Battle for Home.”
Marwa al-Sabouni spoke with Anne Strainchamps via Skype from her apartment in Homs, Syria.
Poet Anna Rabinowitz found a shoe box full of old letters and photos of family and friends killed in the Holocaust. She wrote the poem "Darkling" to feature their voices. We also hear excerpts from the opera "Darkling."
Alain de Botton tells Steve Paulson how modern readers can derive comfort from philosophy, and sees no conflict between talking about serious ideas and entertaining the reader.
Zen Buddhist Abbot Joan Halifax has been sitting with dying people since 1970. She says the experience has been a profound gift. She says that she has no idea what happens after we die, and that she's comfortable with that mystery.
Allen Long is a former dope-smuggler and the subject of Robert Sabbag’s book “Loaded: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail.” Anne Strainchamps interviewed them a week apart.
Screenwriter and novelist Andrew Davies talks about why Jane Austen is hot again, what he had to do to the “Bridget Jones’s Diary” script, and how he felt when someone else adapted and filmed one of his novels
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