One hundred years ago, Fritz Haber invented the first chemical weapon and convinced the German army to use it. His wife Clara, also a chemist, fiercely opposed her husband's project. When she couldn't stop it, she committed suicide. Judith Claire Mitchell tells the story in her tragic and yet funny novel "A Reunion of Ghosts."
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Historian Ron Numbers talks with Steve Paulson. Numbers was once an ardent creationist and is the author of "The Creationists," the definitive history of the anti-evolutionist movement.
Howard Axelrod was accidentally blinded in one eye in a freak accident when he was in college. Disoriented and depressed, he retreated to an off-the-grid cabin in the Vermont wilderness. He stayed there, alone, for 2 years. Now he's published a memoir about his period of renunciation, "The Point of Vanishing."
For Robert Farris Thompson, the most beautiful, intimate and passionate of dances is Argentine tango.
For the Aboriginal people of Australia, the concept of "The Dreaming" means an existence with no linear time.
Steve Paulson reports on the state of Chinese literature today. He talks with Annie Wang, Nobel Prize Laureate Gao Xingjian and National Book Award winner Ha Jin.
Philosopher Gregory Sadler has a fascinating take on the famous line from French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s 1944 play, “No Exit.”
Ron Sadoff, who teaches film studies at New York University, takes Anne Strainchamps on a tour of the best sci-fi music.
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