Linguist John McWhorter says all six thousand contemporary languages evolved from a single source and that there’s no such thing as a pure language.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Richard Dawkins, a prominent biologist and outspoken atheist, talks with Steve Paulson. Dawkins is the author of "The God Delusion" and a frequent foil for the intelligent design movement.
Acclaimed novelist Colson Whitehead got the magazine assignment of a lifetime: a week in Vegas, playing in the World Series of Poker. He tells Doug Gordon about high stakes poker and his own "anhedonia," his difficulty experiencing pleasure.
Animal behaviorist Patricia McConnell is the author of "For the Love of a Dog" and the host of the public radio program "Calling All Pets."
Have you been to the High Line yet? It’s a new park in Manhattan, full of sunbathers, lush plantings and strolling locals. It’s also about 30 feet above the ground, built on the bed of an old elevated train line. Writer Annik La Farge talks about the park, five years into its reinvention.
Rob Walker talks with Steve Paulson about the Subservient-Chicken-dot-com web site and why it’s a new kind of advertising.
Jeff Bursey is a Canadian author and reviewer whose new book is called "Verbatim: A Novel."
Economist E. Glen Weyl has invented a market-driven voting system that he believes is much fairer and more democratic than one-vote-per-person majority rule. It's called Quadratic Voting and it starts with giving everyone a bunch of tokens, or chips, along with a simple mathematical formula for voting.
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