With the Carolina Panthers facing off against the Denver Broncos in Superbowl 50, football is on our minds this week. And for many of the millions of fans who tune in every Sunday to watch their favorite teams compete, football is little more than a weekly ritual. For English professor Mark Edmundson, the football field is a staging ground for some of life's most important lessons. In his book "Why Football Matters," Edmundson looks back to his own high school years playing the sport and reflects on how it taught him courage, resilience, determination, and other values he'd draw on as an adult.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Writer Kim Hiss discovered her own symbiotic relationship with animals in winter. She was working as an editor for Field and Stream Magazine and it was her first hunt.
Paul Koudounaris has spent the past decade traveling around the world, climbing into church crypts and bone chambers and taking photos at over 250 burial sites in 30 countries. He's discovered chapels decorared with skeletons and underground caves filled with skulls—among other things. In this interview, he tells us how he began his obsession with displays of death.
Caltech physicist Sean Carroll thinks big...really big. And not just about quantum physics, the multiverse and the other weird ideas in his field. He also loves philosophy and wonders whether there's any underlying meaning to our lives. In this wide-ranging conversation, Carroll talks with Steve Paulson about science, the universe and what he calls "poetic naturalism."
Electronic music pioneer Suzanne Ciani talks about her electronic music and sound work.
Simon Winchester talks with Jim Fleming about the short-sightedness of placing cities where the planet doesn't think they should be.
Three members of The Actors' Gang, a theater group in Los Angeles, perform a scene from George Orwell's "1984" which the group recently staged, set in our own time.
three of Aldo Leopold’s children talk about what it was like to grow up as part of a pioneering experiment in prairie restoration. They had no idea what they were doing, but they loved it!
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