By now, it's almost commonplace to worry that the amount of time you spend on the Internet is actually rewiring your brain. But the first person to really put the issue on the cultural map was the writer Nicholas Carr -- in a book that's become a contemporary classic: "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Some of us think of dance as something best left to the professionals, people with years of training and technique. But when Sally Gross started dancing, she realized that she'd never master ballet or modern dance. So she made a whole new kind of dance...
Sherman Alexie is a one-man culture industry. He's also pretty much a rock star guest. Steve Paulson and Veronica Rueckert look back on his first interview with TTBOOK.
Chilean-born artist Alfredo Jaar has spent much of his career regarding the pain of others. He delves into issues like war or globalization with giant installations and photos. But his work does not take use a grand scale, instead, he drills down to one individual. His most famous work is 6-year project on the Rwandan Genocide called “The Rwanda Project.”
Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" was the rare book that changed how we think. On its 50th anniversary, historian of science Tom Broman talks about Kuhn's legacy and we hear excerpts from Kuhn's book.
Scott Westerfeld writes wildly popular post-apocalyptic and dystopian science fiction for teenagers. He's the author of the "Peeps" series about parasite-positive vampires, as well as "Uglies" and "Pretties," who live in a world where plastic surgery is compulsory.
There's an entire sector of the economy run by people who are working diligently to get inside your head and harvest your attention? Does that creep you out? They're called the Attention Merchants. And their business model consists of attracting your attention and then reselling it for profit. They're ad-based TV channels, clickbait producers and the big social media producers. Law professor Tim Wu is the author of "The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads."
We hear from Artificial Intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, physicist Roger Penrose, philosopher Daniel Dennett, New Age guru Deepak Chopra, and many more.
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