Before there was iTunes, Spotify, or Pandora, there was the mixtape. Jason Bittner is nostalgic for those days, when sweethearts would spend days crafting the perfect playlist. He's the editor of a book and former website called "Cassette From My Ex". He shares some songs from his collection, and explains why the mixtape is such a powerful medium.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Alex Stone is a magician with a degree in physics. He performs a magic trick over the radio and explains how it works.
To hear one of Alex Stone's favorite bar tricks, listen here.
Annie Murphy Paul talks with Jim Fleming about her research into the field of fetal development. As if pregnancy wasn’t scary enough!
When evangelical Christians say they talk to God, what do they mean? Anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wanted to find out, so she spent two years as a participant observer in a Charismatic church, talking to the congregation and even praying herself. She says prayer involves cultivating the imagination. Luhrmann also describes her cross-cultural study of schizophrenics who hear voices.
Ahmed Rashid worked as an advisor to Richard Holbrooke, Obama's special envoy to the Pakistani region and says the U.S. was never really interested in the Afghanistan's real problems when we rush in.
The celebrated poet Edward Hirsch says the history of poetry is the history of poetic forms. And to prove it he wrote a 700-page compendium about all things poetry.
Alison Bechdel calls her comic book memoir Are You My Mother? “a comic drama.” The New York Times Book Review calls it “as complicated, brainy, inventive and satisfying as the finest prose memoirs.” Here’s Steve Paulson’s NEW and UNCUT interview with Bechdel.
Alistair McGrath teaches Historical Theology at Oxford University and he’s the author of “In the Beginning: The Story of the King James Bible, and How It Changed a Nation, a Language and a Culture.”
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