What's it like to hang out with the U.S. president? Journalist Michael Lewis found out when he shadowed Barack Obama for 8 months, even playing in one of Obama's pick-up basketball games.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
We present two takes on the question of whether or not the world's supply of oil is drying up. Princeton's Ken Deffeyes says production has peaked. Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg says that's just crying wolf.
Jan Harold Brunvand reviews some of his favorite urban legends for Steve Paulson and explains that they always happened to a friend of a friend.
Robert Ellis Orrall is a musician who lives in Nashville, on the same street where Al Gore bought a house. So he wrote a song about it!
We meet Pete Daly, an engineer with recurrent melanoma who talks about living with cancer.
Richard Marcinko is CEO of a private security firm which trains mercenaries and he candidly tells Steve Paulson about waging war and interrogating prisoners from a mercenary's point of view.
Mike Tidwell is a freelance journalist who thinks he’s found the biggest environmental catastrophe in America. In this pre-Katrina interview, Tidwell talks about the time he spent with shrimpers in the bayou country and what they taught him about the devastating price we’re paying for the way we control floods on the Mississippi River.
Joan Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, helped shape a highly personal brand of nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. Her early essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979) influenced generations of writers. Her later memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," chronicled the deaths of her husband and daughter. In 2011 Didion talked with Steve Paulson about illness and growing old in the wake of the death of her daughter, Quintana.
Pages
