While some people hate spending time alone, for others it's a desired state of being. Writer Anneli Rufus considers herself among these happy loners.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Not all architecture in the Arab world glitters like a golden dome. Some are being shelled to dust by war. Such is the horrifying story of Homs, Syria. Once a cosmopolitan and tolerant city of more than one million, Homs has hosted clashes between rebel groups and President Bashar Assad’s forces since 2011. Those clashes have mortared and shelled the city into an oblivion. Thousands of residents have been killed. Most of the remaining have fled. But not all.
Marwa al-Sabouni and her family have stayed. Marwa al-Sabouni has her PhD. in Islamic architecture and wrote a compelling memoir about architecture and destruction in Homs called “The Battle for Home.”
Marwa al-Sabouni spoke with Anne Strainchamps via Skype from her apartment in Homs, Syria.
Former Vice President Al Gore helped bring global warming into public consciousness. Despite the dire projections of rising temperatures, he says he's still an optimist.
Poet Anna Rabinowitz found a shoe box full of old letters and photos of family and friends killed in the Holocaust. She wrote the poem "Darkling" to feature their voices. We also hear excerpts from the opera "Darkling."
Allen Long is a former dope-smuggler and the subject of Robert Sabbag’s book “Loaded: A Misadventure on the Marijuana Trail.” Anne Strainchamps interviewed them a week apart.
Fairy tales are part of all our lives, whether it's Snow White or Cinderella of Little Red Riding Hood.
Screenwriter and novelist Andrew Davies talks about why Jane Austen is hot again, what he had to do to the “Bridget Jones’s Diary” script, and how he felt when someone else adapted and filmed one of his novels
Writer and critic Alberto Manguel has assembled a personal library of some thirty thousand volumes which he houses in an old converted stone barn in a village in France.
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