There's a nagging question at major sporting events: Are the athletes cheating? Steroids, human growth hormones and blood doping techniques are extending the outer limits of performance, and athletes can use them if they want -- unless they're professionals or Olympic athletes. But is doping really a problem? Australian philosopher and bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a simple litmus test: What contribution is coming from the technology and what is coming from the athlete?
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
For Jeannette Walls, one of the things she struggled with most was keeping her past a secret from just about everyone.
In this UNCUT conversation, Jonathan Lethem talks about "Dissident Gardens" and the many faces of a novelist.
Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin is obsessed with lost masterpieces of early cinema. He tells Steve Paulson he feels haunted - by the ghosts of early film history, and by the ghosts of his own family's past.
You can also hear our extended interview with Maddin.
Julian Barnes talks about “England, England.” It’s his latest novel, in which all the tourist attractions of England (Stonehenge, the Tower of London, the Royal Family) are recreated in one theme park.
Dan Fagin just won a Pulitzer Prize for his book, “Toms River.” It’s a remarkable nonfiction tale of industrial pollution and its health impacts for people in a small New Jersey town.
Historian Rebecca Spang tells Judith Strasser that "restaurant" originally meant a cup of broth and explains how it evolved into the culinary paradise we know today.
Max Boot tells Jim Fleming that the United States is the most powerful state that’s ever existed, and that sometimes it’s a good and necessary thing to take unilateral action against tyrants.
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