Interviews By Topic

Practice dummy, Cryonics UK standby team training | Tim’s house, Sheffield, UK 2010

The Prospect of Immortality: Photographs by Murray Ballard

Photographer Murray Ballard says he expected a cryonics facility to look like something out of a sci-fi movie scene. But in visiting one, Ballard says he was intrigued by the contrast between such an ambitious endeavor and the somewhat unremarkable architecture and equipment.More

Days with My Father: Photographs by Phil Toledano

When photographer Phil Toledano's mother died in 2006...More

Social gathering and sharing a meal during Russian Easter honoring the dead, Spring Valley, New Jersey, 1997

Death in America: Photographs by Bastienne Schmidt & Philippe Cheng

Between 1996 and 1998, Bastienne Schmidt and her husband Philippe Cheng traveled throughout the United States photographing the diverse services and ceremonies Americans use to mark the death of family members and friends. According to Cheng, one of the goals was to "show some of the poetry of death and dying in America."More

Old People & Patients and People with AIDS: Photographs by Nicholas Nixon

Nicholas Nixon has devoted a significant amount of his long career — which stretches back to the 1970s — to taking portraits of people who are sick and dying. He continues to work with people coming to the end of their lives, including those in palliative care and hospice.More

Never Write In The Language of the Colonizer

Ngugi wa Thiong’o — the renowned Kenyan author — believes African writers should write in their native language, not the colonial language of English or French. He says the best way to decolonize the mind is to reclaim native languages.More

Half brothers Robert Lafayette Gee (right) and Henderson Gee (left)

How Do You Know Ruben Gee?

Rev. Alex Gee is fascinated by genealogy. So he took a DNA test and discovered one of his ancestors was a white slave owner. Then he went down to New Orleans to meet his white relatives — and that meeting sparked a slew of complicated emotions.More

Searching for America's Racial History in a Graveyard

Steve Paulson was surprised to discover that a son of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemings, is buried in a local cemetery. With the help of Erin Hoag of the Wisconsin Veterans Museum, he searches for the grave of Eston Hemings Jefferson.More

Consciousness Is Just a Feeling

With help from Freud, neuropsychologist Mark Solms locates consciousness in choice.More

Malcolm Gladwell on 'When Police Kill'

Journalist Malcolm Gladwell is famous for mining behavioral science for his work, and when it comes to better understanding the intersection of crime, violence, and policing, he turns over and over to criminologist Frank Zimring.More

Rediscovering the Indigenous City of Addis Ababa

Dagmawi Woubshet and Julie Mehretu were both born in Addis Ababa and then moved to America. They wonder what the city's explosive growth will mean for its unique character — one rooted in Ethiopia's history as the only African nation never colonized.More

Why Camus' 'The Stranger' Is Still a Dangerous Novel

Albert Camus’s first novel, "The Stranger," speaks strongly to the search for meaning. It’s the story of an alienated man who commits a senseless murder. Literary critic Alice Kaplan calls it "the perfect Black Lives Matter book."More

"Poison Squad" Volunteers taking in a dinner with a side of Borax.

The Borax Dinner Party That Kickstarted The FDA

Science writer Deborah Blum on the government scientists who made the case for food regulation by "eating dangerously."More

'You Smell Death': Being A Mortician In A Community Ravaged By COVID-19

Tyrone Muhammad, also known as "Muhammad the Mortician," is the funeral director at Newark’s Peace and Glory Home for Funerals. He spent decades trying to stop the epidemic of gun violence in the black community he serves, but nothing prepared him for a pandemic.More